In my Advent/Christmas devotional book, I read an interesting essay by Kathleen Norris on the Annunciation. It’s been a few days since I read it (it was the reading for November 30th) but her main point has stuck with me.
She argues that we cheapen the miracle of the Annunciation in our hasty attempt to rationalize our religion. One example she cites was a speaker at a conference who said the following:
We all know there was no Virgin Birth. Mary was just an unwed, pregnant teenager, and God told her it was okay. That’s the message that we need to give girls today, that God loves them, and forget all this nonsense about a Virgin Birth.
Norris (as well as the Russian Orthodox and Baptists she was sitting with) was shocked and angry at this woman’s comments and she traced it back to the “de-mythologizing of religion” that she experienced as a teenager that led her to feel that there was very little that religion could offer her.
I agree — we de-mythologize religion today in our attempts to give creedence to the increasingly scientific world in which we live. This cheapens those things in Christianity that are meant to show God’s power — such as the Annunciation — and takes the quiet joy out of seasons like Advent. Mary was not just some un-wed teenager and her example is not cause to tell teenage mothers that they’re OK. She was chosen by God to bear Jesus, and her submission to God’s will is something to be admired, not degraded.
As for “[us] all [knowing] that there was no Virgin Birth”, I’d counter by saying that I would have no faith if I had to know empirically that everything Biblical happened. There are some things that I’m comfortable knowing are God’s mysterious workings on earth. I mean… this person has already denied the Virgin Birth, so is Jesus’ death on the Cross next? What about the resurrection? Once you eliminate those three, you pretty much have lost what it takes to be a Christian. If the Cross didn’t happen, there was no atonement for our sins and we’re all in big trouble. I cannot fathom how people can say that “we all know that [certain event] did not happen” when our faith is so dependent on it having actually happened.
wow. i totally agree with you (and norris).
I wonder how come that this woman still believes in the resurrection… or maybe she doesn’t?
I wrote a poem about Mary in which I described her as a sexual being (and then the experience of carrying Christ in her womb) but I personally meant it more in terms of a mystical, somewhat erotic experience with God (which I suppose is a different kind of heresy to some). I described her very much as a human (one of the beginning lines is “rising and falling as any human,” which is of course in part a statement about Mary’s human nature to fall…) and I read this poem at a poetry reading a month or two ago. A well meaning Episcopalian gentleman followed me out the door and thanked me for my “demythologizing of Christianity.” I thought about this and didn’t get to talk to him about his choice of words, but I decided that I didn’t like that term at all. My purpose in describing Mary as human was not meant to de-mythologize her, but to relate to her.
I have ceased worrying about whether the Resurrection or Virgin Birth are “myths” of Christianity. Of course they are myths, but myths aren’t lies. On whatever level–whether figurative or literal or something else–the Virgin Birth is the truth, it is the truth. I have faith in the implications of the story, that God works through ordinary people, that we can give birth to God, that God understands and has compassion for what it is to be human…
I have more to say, but I haven’t been able to make it make sense, so I’ll just leave it at that.
But sweetie, what you said *did* make sense…