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In Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary (Westminster John Knox Press), editors Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Cynthia L. Rigby argue that other than at Christmastime many denominations have forgotten Mary theologically, liturgically, and devotionally. They write: "The time has come for Protestants to join in the blessing of Mary."

Author Kathleen Norris already has. In the foreword for Blessed One, Norris writes about how she came to encounter the Mary of the scriptures and what the mystery of Jesus' mother can show all Christians.

Norris' books include: The Virgin of Bennington, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, and three collections of poetry.

A friend who had spent a sabbatical working with refugees in Southeast Asia once sent me a homemade Christmas card that put the more colorful cards to shame; it consisted of a black-and-white snapshot of a Cambodian mother holding her infant in her arms.

What struck me most was the youth of the mother and the fact that this unposed photograph was instantly recognizable as a madonna and child. The mother beholding the child, in love and wonder. I don't think it matters what breed of Christian my friend is—he is, in fact, a Roman Catholic bishop—but what is significant is that he "got" Mary.

In silence, the photograph spoke powerfully about Mary as a presence in our world, a constant reminder that in the incarnation the omnipotent God chose to take on human vulnerability. And a vulnerability of the most extreme sort, a child born not to wealth and power but to an impoverished peasant woman and her uneasy husband in the rural backwater of a small, troubled, colonized country.

I think that many Protestants, if they think about Mary at all, get hung up on what they are supposed to believe about her. And she doesn't make it easy. It's as if her calm visage belies our seeking after labels. Is Mary a cultural artifact or a religious symbol? A literary device or a theological tool? A valuable resource for biblical exegetes or the matrix of an extrabiblical piety that we, as Protestants, must avoid at all costs?

The point about Mary is that she is all these things, and more, always more. She is poor yet gloriously rich. She is blessed among women yet condemned to witness her son's execution. She is human yet God-bearer, and the Word that she willingly bears is destined to pierce her soul. Had we a more elastic imagination, we might be less troubled by Mary's air of serene contradiction. But ours is a skeptical and divisive age. We are more comfortable with appraisal than with praise, more adept at cogent analysis than meaningful synthesis.

Mary is useful to us as a corrective to our ordinary state of mind, the epitome of "both/and" passion over "either/or" reasoning. She has a disarming way of challenging the polarities that so often bring human endeavors to impasse: the subjective and objective, the expansive and the parochial, the affective and the intellectual. Mary's designation as both virgin and mother, for example, no longer seems to be an impossible "model" for women that justifies their continued oppression within church and society.

Instead, Mary constitutes a challenge as to what is possible for me, as a married, childless, Christian woman: to what extent can I remain "virgin," one-in-myself, able to come to things with newness of heart, and in what sense must I become "mother," losing myself in the nurture and service of others and embracing life's circumstances with the ripeness of maturity? This Mary is a gender-bender; she asks the same question of any Christian man.

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December (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46