It dawned on me recently why the veneration of Mary is so persistently attractive. Lay aside all the later Marian dogmas about her being the queen of heaven or the mediatrix or whatever over-the-top ideas people have come up with over the centuries. Just forget those for a moment. The simple fact is that it’s easier for a great many people to imagine Mary as loving them. God the Father is too distant and abstract. Jesus is the incarnation who died for us and loves us and all that, but he is, unfortunately also kind of distant and abstract. The Holy Spirit is mysterious and his voice can sound suspiciously like that of our conscience. It can be difficult to discern between the two. When the devil whispers despair in our ears it can also sound a bit like our conscience as well. We are confused and downtrodden.
But it’s difficult to imagine Mary being angry at us. She puts a “face” on Jesus that is gentler and kinder and not at all stern. Now I know that if Jesus himself were here, he would be all those things perfectly and infinitely and that Mary, for all her virtues, was just another limited person like the rest of us. But the idea – the idea of a calm mother figure – THAT is something that can be more viscerally comforting than all of the things we’ve been taught are wrapped up in Christ.
I was feeling very discouraged one night a couple weeks ago and took a walk where I found myself talking/praying/ranting to God. I passed the statue of Mary by the nearby Roman Catholic church and it popped into my head that here was someone, seemingly the only someone on earth, who WASN’T disappointed with me. I’m incredibly disappointed with myself. I imagine God to be, even though I know that technically that is not true. But I don’t think she is. Now she’s dead of course, but I wish I could more easily see Christ as having those same qualities and same care and emotion toward me. I don’t know if it’s too much abstract theology or tainted earthly father figures or what, but the difficulty is nevertheless very real to me. It’s not accurate, and it’s probably not healthy, but sometimes, when you feel like crap, Mary seems like maybe she could be a little bit nicer than God. At least, I’m not aghast that more than a few people have thought that over the ages and to this day. The idea will likely persist to fill in the gaps of our imagination as long as our image of Christ is imperfect.