May has traditionally been called the Marian month in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Above all, it is a month to honour Mary as the Mother of God, with connections that can be made to the time of the ancient Greeks where the May was dedicated to the god of fecundity or fertility. In different eras, like the medieval and the baroque periods, there had been different ways of giving Mary the honour she deserves as both the sinless one, and the Mother of Jesus who is the second person of the Holy Trinity made man. It is no coincidence that Mother’s day always falls in the month of May.
Here in Singapore, May has always been the month where special home rosaries are organized where parishioners meet at one another’s homes to pray the rosary and to show their love to our Blessed Mother. Behind all Marian devotions is the doctrine that Mary, being the mother of Jesus is also then the mother of God. And because Jesus from the Cross gave her over to John to behold her as his mother, gave her to all of us as well. As our Blessed Mother, she is eternally caring for her beloved children with not just a maternal love, but a maternal love that is heavenly, and as our earthly mothers care for us in ways big and small, so too does our Heavenly Mother.
Ronald Rolheiser once made a reflection on Mary where he made an interesting distinction between the Mary of Devotion and the Mary of Scripture. The Mary of Devotion is held fondly in the hearts of Catholics, and she is the one who we show love to in the recitation of the rosary, in the installation of her statues in our churches, homes and in the different types of novena devotions that are extant. She is the one who prays with us while we are still ‘mourning and weeping in the valley of tears’, a phrase many of us are familiar with when we pray the Hail Holy Queen prayer. It is always interesting to see how every time there is a Marian apparition, it is always to those who are meek, humble, lowly and nobodies in society. Mary has never appeared to a bigwig investment banker, a captain of industry or a leader of a country. She has never been documented to have appeared before a Hollywood A-lister or anyone remotely famous. Her choice has always been for children, many of whom were uneducated (at least theologically), and those who had trouble in conveying her messages to the authorities. Indeed, her predilection is for the poor, and she is indeed a mother of the poor and the humble.
But the Mary of Devotion cannot be just reduced to pure sentiment and romance. If so, we Catholics can end up being very theologically sloppy in the way we hold Mary in such high regard. Devotion to Mary has strong theological foundations that we must never abandon and forget, in preference to the way we show her our fond devotion. Pure sentimentality runs the risk of being reduced to superstition that is feeling or fear-based, and can end up making Catholicism more cultish than a religion that is reasonable and rational.
It is to the Mary of Scripture that we need to seek to always get our grounding right. The writers of the gospels give us good reason to maintain our healthy Marian devotion and she helps us to become true and proper disciples of Jesus, and show us that she is indeed the model disciple. But we have to be very attentive to how her character reveals her ideal discipleship qualities in the gospels, as these are subtle. For example, this is revealed when Jesus says that those who listen to God’s word and obey it are his mother, brother and sister. Mary never took umbrage at these words, which any earthly mother easily would. Marian theologians have always called her the second Eve whose pure and unconditional ‘yes’ contrasts so clearly against the ‘yes’ of the first Eve when she chose to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The first Eve didn’t want to live in mystery, whilst the second Eve welcomed mystery and showed a readiness to live in an unknowing.
Mary’s model discipleship is shown by her willingness to carry her cross with great love all her life. And the way she carried her cross mirrors the way her Son carried his. Neither of them was bitter about it, and neither of them sent anyone the bill for it either. Mary’s stance at the foot of the cross exemplifies humility where we don’t see her shaking her fist to heaven and screaming out for vengeance for her innocent son’s death. Her agony at Calvary mirrors her son’s. Her son’s agony opened heaven’s gate for us, and I see this agony as her labour pains, akin to a mother’s pains when she undergoes the incredible pain of childbirth. Calvary needs to be seen as humanity’s labour ward, where the result of the pain resulted in her being the mother of all humanity.
It is this Mary that May’s devotions honours, and it is this Mary who is crowned the Queen of Heaven and Earth. How blessed we are to be able to call her Mother.
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