Mary, Mother of God

Dear Amelia,

Hello there. It's interesting that you should leave such a question/comment on my tagboard. I'm not sure if you'd really like the answer or if you are simply trying to make a statement. But nevertheless, I will address your thought in case anyone else out there was wondering the same thing. =)

Q: Why would anyone pray to a mere mortal, such as Mary? Mary was hardly spoken of in the Bible other than being the vessel that bore the Son of God. "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me".

My Response:
Before giving you a reply to your question, I must first touch on your latter comments. No one ever claimed that Mary was divine (a goddess) - not Jesus or even Mary herself. The First Commandment as included in your comment is true. We should not have other gods before the Lord. She was mortal, yes. She was human, created just as you and I were, but with one exception: Mary was conceived without sin. God was preparing His vessel to be pure and holy so that He who is pure and holy could be born through her.

The New Testament covenant fulfilled was JESUS, not Mary. So only what is necessary is mentioned in Scripture. We see her present at important key events during the life of Christ:

• the Annuciation (Luke 1:26-38)
• the Visitation (Luke 1:39-45, incl. the Magnificat in Luke 1:46-56 )
• the Birth of our Lord (Luke 2:4-7)
• the Presentation/prophecy of Simeon (Luke 2:34-35)
• the Flight to Egypt (Matthew 2:14-15)
• the Finding in the Temple (Luke 2:40-52)
• Jesus Expands His Following (Mark 3:31-35)
• the Wedding at Cana - 1st miracle of Christ (John 2:1-10)
• at the Foot of the Cross w/John (John 19:26-27)
• at Pentecost - the coming of the Holy Spirit and birth of the Christian Church (Acts of the Apostles 1:12-14, 2:1-4)

Just because she does not appear as much as Her Son in the written Word, this does not mean she did not participate with Him in His life on earth nor does it diminish her significance in the plan of God. And now looking at the above references where Mary is directly mentioned, I would hesitate to say that she is hardly spoken of.

I must add that there are a number of biblical passages that prefigure Mary in the Old Testament, meaning that a story or character is a prelude or symbol for an event or character in the New Testament.

(see the following)

• When God speaks to the serpent after the Fall of Adam and Eve, we learn in Genesis 3:15 of the promise of a Redeemer from the woman, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers, He will crush your head, while you strike at his heel." Eve herself, "the mother of all the living [Genesis 3:20]" prefigures Mary.
• The Matriarchs of the Old Testament also foreshadow Mary and Elizabeth in the New Testament, as Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah, and Hannah and Peninnah. Hagar the Egyptian maid had Ishmael [Genesis 16:15] by Abram, and Sarah had Isaac [Genesis 21:2] when he was called Abraham, after God established his Covenant with him, making him a father of a host of nations. Rachel and Leah were the daughters of Laban, and Leah had six of Jacob's twelve sons, but it was Rachel who had his eleventh son Joseph [Genesis 30:24]. Peninnah had many children for Elkanah, but it was the barren Hannah who bore Samuel [1Samuel 1:20]. The hymn of Hannah in the First Book of Samuel 2:1-10 is clearly a source for the Magnificat of Mary.
• The books of Esther and Judith portray two heroines of Israel. Each of these women, with their sense of survivability and indestructible spiritual strength, personify Israel itself. In fact, woman and Israel become interchangeable in the Book of Hosea, where the marriage of Hosea to his unfaithful wife is symbolic of God's Covenant of love with the unfaithful people of Israel [Hosea 11:1-9]. The rich background in the Old Testament predisposes one to understand the whole history of Israel looks to its fulfillment in the Messiah.
• Mary, the young Jewish virgin, becomes a symbol for Israel herself, the one that bore Jesus, the Messiah. Pope John Paul II in Redemptoris Mater confirms Mary as "daughter Zion" [Isaiah 54:1-10, Zephaniah 3:14, Zechariah 2:10] in the New Testament.

She is also included in Isaiah's prophecy regarding the coming of the Messiah.

• "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel" (which means, God with us) [Isaiah 7:14].

There is a woman in the Book of Revelation who is none other than Mary, the Mother of our Lord. She is the New Ark of the Covenant, the New Eve, the Mother through whom new life came to the world.

• "Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant could be seen in the temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, and peals of thunder, an earthquake, and a violent hailstorm. A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth. Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems. Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth. She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod. Her child was caught up to God and his throne. The woman herself fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God, that there she might be taken care of for twelve hundred and sixty days." (Revelation 11:19-12:1-6)

Now to answer your question, I will post the following reflection by Thomas Merton. Perhaps you can gain some insight from it...

WHY CATHOLICS PRAY TO MARY

This is often forgotten by Catholics themselves, and therefore it is not surprising that those who are not Catholic often have a completely wrong conception of Catholic devotion to the Mother of God. They imagine, and sometimes we can understand their reasons for doing so, that Catholics treat the Blessed Virgin as an almost divine being in her own right, as if she had some glory, some power, some majesty of her own that placed her on a level with Christ Himself. They regard the Assumption of Mary into heaven as a kind of apotheosis placed in the Redemption would seem to be equal to that of her Son. But this is all completely contrary to the true mind of the Catholic Church. It forgets that Mary's chief glory is in her nothingness, in the fact of being the "Handmaid of the Lord," as one who in becoming the Mother of God acted simply in loving submission to His command, in the pure obedience of faith. She is blessed not because of some mythical pseudo-divine prerogative, but in all her human and womanly limitations as one who has believed. It is the faith and the fidelity of this humble handmaid, "full of grace" that enables her to be the perfect instrument of God, and nothing else but His instrument. The work that was done in her purely the work of God. "He that is mighty hath done great things in me." The glory of Mary is purely and simply the glory of God in her. and she, like anyone else, can say that she has nothing that she has not received from Him through Christ.

As a matter of fact, this is precisely her greatest glory: that having nothing of her own, retaining nothing of a "self" that could glory in anything for her own sake, she placed no obstacle to the mercy of God and in no way resisted His love and His will. Hence she received more from Him than any other saint. He was able to accomplish His will perfectly in her, and His liberty was in no way hindered or turned from its purpose by the presence of an egotistical self in Mary. She was and is in the highest sense a person precisely because, being "immaculate," she was free from every taint of selfishness that might obscure God's light in her being. She was then a freedom that obeyed Him perfectly and in this obedience found the fulfillment of perfect love.

The genuine significance of Catholic devotion to Mary is to be seen in the light of the Incarnation itself. The Church cannot separate the Son and the Mother. Because the Church conceived of the Incarnation as God's descent into flesh and into time, and His great gift of Himself to His creatures, she also believes that the one who was closest to Him in this great mystery was the one who participated most perfectly in the gift. When a room is heated by an open flame, surely there is nothing strange in the fact that those who stand closest to the fireplace are the ones who are warmest. And when God comes into the world through the instrumentality of one of His servants, then there is nothing surprising about the fact that His chosen instrument should have the greatest and most intimate share in the divine gift.

Mary, who was empty of all egotism, free from all sin, was as pure as the glass of a very clean window that has no other function than to admit the light of the sun (Son). If we rejoice in that light, we implicitly praise the cleanness of the window. And of course it might be argued that in such a case we might well forget the window altogether. This is true. And yet the Son of God, in emptying Himself of His majestic power, having become a child, abandoning Himself in complete dependence to the loving care of a human Mother, in a certain sense draws our attention once again to her. The Light has wished to remind us of the window, because He is grateful to her and because He has an infinitely tender love, it is certainly a great grace and a privilege, and one of the most important aspects of this privilege is that it enables us to some extent to appreciate the mystery of God's great love and respect for His creatures.

That God should assume Mary into heaven is not just a glorification of a "Mother Goddess." Quite the contrary, it is the expression of the divine love for humanity, and a very special manifestation of God's respect for His creatures, His desire to do honor to the beings He has made in His own image, and most particularly His respect for the body which was destined to be the temple of His glory. If Mary is believed to be assumed into heaven, it is because we too are one day, by the grace of God, to dwell where she is. If human nature is glorified in her, it is because God desires it to be glorified in us too, and it is for this reason that His Son, taking flesh, came into the world.

In all the great mystery of Mary, then, one thing remains most clear: that of herself she is nothing, and that God has for our sakes delighted to manifest His glory and His love in her.

It is because she is, of all the saints, the most perfectly poor and the most perfectly hidden, the one who has absolutely nothing whatever that she attempts to possess as her own, that she can most fully communicate to the rest of us the grace of the infinitely selfless God. And we will most truly possess Him when we have emptied ourselves and become poor and hidden as she is, resembling Him by resembling her.

And all our sanctity depends on her maternal love. The ones she desires to share the joy of her own poverty and simplicity, the ones whom she wills to be hidden as she is hidden, are the ones who share her closeness to God.

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So, Sister Amelia, I will say that I pray to Mary because I need help becoming like Jesus. I know she can help me because she knows Him best. It is through her prayers that I learn to forget myself as she did...to surrender myself to the will of the Father...and to adore our God with a heart very much in love with Him.

It is my prayer that someday you, too, will experience her love and the grace that accompanies her intercession.

I would also like to thank you so much for posing your question because I really needed that reminder of who she is for me. In your curiosity, you have taken me back to the reason why I'm here and what He asks me to do each day in service to Him.

God bless you...