The Assumption of
the Blessed Virgin Mary
The Rev. Dr. Wayne
Hankey
Evensong at St. Mary the Virgin, Crousetown
August 16 AD 2009
Isaiah 49:1-2,8-16 Luke 1:26-55
Can a mother forget her
sucking child that she should not have compassion
on the son of her
womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.
Isaiah 49:15-16
In
the three decades since I last had the privilege of speaking to you
here on the Patronal (should we say Maternal?) Festival of St Mary
the Virgin, I have, like a figure at the beginning of the Book of
Job, been “going to and fro in the earth.” Perhaps because I am so
personally attached to this church, I have treasured my many
encounters with the Virgin Mother to which it is dedicated. To speak
of all these and of the diverse faces of the Mother of God revealed
would take years. This evening I want to think with you about her
power to gather and to care for each and all.
The first encounter which
showed Mary’s power to gather the children of God occurred in the
beautiful old town of Wolfenbüttel, Germany. There, on the main
square, stands the first church built in Germany after the
Protestant Reformation. The Great Church of the city, and of the
Lutheran diocese of Brunswick, is dedicated, in Latin, as the church
“De Beatae Mariae Virginis,”, that is, as our church, of St Mary the
Virgin. Its splendidly ornate interior is filled with images of Our
Lord, his Mother and the Apostles. When we remember that the other
great reformer, Jean Calvin, declared those who denied the perpetual
virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary to be “mad dogs,” we are
reminded that the Virgin Mother gathers Protestant, Catholic, and
Orthodox Christians under her wings.
The strength with which our
Holy Mother still draws Catholics under the care of God was brought
home to me last Good Friday in Palermo, Sicily. On that day, the
compassionate mother of my text from Isaiah, faithful to her son
being executed as a criminal outside the city wall, deserted by all
his male apostles except John, compelled reverence. On Good Friday,
seven societies based in churches of the city, carry heavy floats
through the different districts. All are covered in orchids. In each
procession, one float has an image of the crucified Christ in a
glass coffin; the other is of his faithful sorrowing mother.
Starting at three in the afternoon, for twelve hours, accompanied by
bands playing a death march and clackers reminding us of the locks
on Hell’s gate, hundreds of young men carry Christ and his Mother
through the streets as the hellish traffic rushes by. What impressed
me most was that these ordinary young men—some of whom come to the
task directly from their work—are just of the age, fifteen to
twenty-five, we almost never see in church. Yet annually they
faithfully perform this difficult devotion to the Crucified and his
Compassionate Mother. I shall not pretend that I walked the whole
twelve hours with any of the processions. Nonetheless, after
beginning with two of them, at three in the morning, I was present
at the end of one.
After the heavy floats with
Our Lord and His Mother were carried safely back into the church
from which they had set out, the young men who had borne them for
twelve hours formed a great circle with the flower decked image of
St Mary still on their shoulders. Out of the silence, a single
piccolo sounded a sweet melody; to my great surprise, the whole ball
of this mass of tough youths wrapped in a great embrace, began to
sing a lullaby. As they sang, they rocked Our Holy Mother as if to
return to her the comforting love they had received from their own
Mamas. Then off they and I went into the dark.
A month later, on a Sunday
night in Damascus, I was reminded of this. At the end of Mass, in a
church so packed I had to squeeze in the door and wedge myself
against the font, I found myself in a congregation of every age and
description, and each age was as much male as female. As I arrived,
they were singing a hymn to the Virgin Mother in Arabic, from this
they moved to a sung prayer to her. At this point the deep male
voices in the throng dominated. Once again, the Holy Mother was
gathering in her sons.
The last, and the most
impressive, evidence of this unifying power of St Mary the Virgin
was shown me at a shrine outside Damascus. The convent of Orthodox
nuns at Seidnaya treasures an ancient, jewel-like, tiny painting of
St Mary, so sacred that this shrine is the most holy outside
Jerusalem. At present for us, even more wonderful than the
miraculous power of the icon is the fact that both Moslems and
Christians come here together to ask for the help of the Virgin
Mother.
The Qur’an refers to Mary, the
Mother of Jesus, more than the Bible does. For Islam she is a virgin
mother (Qur’an 19:20) upon whom the Qur’an says “God’s word was
cast” (4:171). Angels come to tell her that she will bear the
prophesied Messiah: “God has chosen you and purified you, exalted
you above the women of all peoples” (3:42). In the Qur’an God
declares: “There was the one who kept her virginity and we breathed
of Our Spirit into her, and so we made her and her son a sign for
all the peoples” (21:19). In consequence, while I was in Seidnaya,
at least as many heavily veiled Moslem women came with gifts and
prayers to Our Lady as Christians—moreover, as I was leaving, a
group of Moslem men arrived. Probably the most notable Moslem male
pilgrims in recent years were the Syrian cosmonauts who prayed for
her protection before they circled the earth in Russia’s Mir. When
they were safely home, they returned with gifts to thank the
All-Holy Mary.
What gives this attractive
draw, this power of gathering, to St Mary the Virgin, our Patron? In
Isaiah, God compares his compassionate fidelity to that of a mother
for the child whom she has suckled and promised that his compassion
will exceed what nature inspires. God keeps his promise through
Mary. The fidelity of Mary, the sinless Mother, is boundless. She is
our last resort. Faithful to her condemned son at Golgatha, she
pleads for every sinner; she prays for us now and in the hour of our
death. She is for us the sign and the means of the endless
compassion God extends to us in her son, Jesus. She reaches over
boundaries of gender and religion to gather her children, his heirs,
under the infinite mercy of God.
The
great medieval mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, brings us to the
mothering of God by way of Jesus. In her own sufferings she
remembered his desire to gather us under his care. Jesus cried:
“Thou that killest the prophets, that stonest them that are sent
unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together,
even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but ye would
not” (Matthew 23:37). Despite our murderous waywardness and
betrayals, Jesus again and again willed to gather us to him. The
mother of Jesus fulfills his desire. She holds over us the wings of
God. Her ministry summons ours.
For each and all of us there
is someone whose need only you or I, in the singularity of the here
and now, can supply. Often we know already who this is, and too
often “ye would not”. It may be a child, your own husband or wife, a
friend or a foe. It may be the neighbour you have not yet
encountered on the road leading down from Jerusalem to Jericho (Luke
10:30). Known and refused, or unknown, there are some for whom you
or I must, as we now say, “be there”; some for whom we are called to
exercise the faithful compassion of the motherhood of God, the
mothering of Jesus. Often the mother’s love we are called to give
comes down to the assurance that with me or you there is always a
welcome, a refuge, safety, a home. No matter, whatever it be, the
need is one, you or I, and only you or I can supply. To the demand,
Mary leads us to answer, “be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke
1:38). By this response, the mothering of God became hers; by it
repeated it also shall be ours. Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.
