The Mary Shrine at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, Christmas 2022.
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The love of a parent for their child is so monumentally important that it can chart the course of a person’s entire life. When a child does not receive secure emotional attachment from a parent, they are haunted for the rest of their life. They are changed – and often gravely diminished – until their dying day.
The term “secure attachment” itself sounds tinny and clinical, not fit to do the profound duty to which it has been assigned: to describe the grand and grave responsibility a parent has to love their child with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their might – with their whole being.
And if you wonder where you’ve heard that before (“you shall love with all your heart, soul, and might”), it is from God’s most important commandment. God commands that we love God this way, while God in turn loves us beyond all human imagination. The love between parent and child is the essence of our faith, the center of all we know, feel, and do when we speak of God, and when we speak of everything that matters most to us, everything that tells us who we are.
And so, on this night, we marvel at – we are staggered with joy to behold – the majestic and perfect and mighty love of Mary for her child, far more than a feeling: her love is nothing less than the mighty devotion of her heart, mind, and whole being to her child. Our Roman Catholic siblings in the faith revere Mary’s “immaculate” heart, which means that her heart is entirely pure, clear as a diamond even as it is fractured by the sword of grief, fully alive and supremely fit to love her son Jesus Christ with her whole being, and through her son, to love both God and all humanity with that same fullness of being.
Now, I readily concede that Marian devotion is problematic, and sometimes harmful, even misogynistic. The elevation of one woman to the status of near-divine perfection can easily become a way to harm – and ultimately do violence to – actual women. We want no part of that, particularly in this time of pronounced violence against women in our national life. Even as we revere Mary, we consciously reject that corruption of Marian theology and spirituality, and we confess this grave sin of our tradition that has caused so much anguish in past centuries, and does so even now.
And we do not pretend that Mary did not have sex with her husband, mostly out of our common-sense understanding of how married human beings often behave, but noting as well that the siblings of Jesus are casually mentioned in scripture, and that his use of the metaphor of childbirth implies that he witnessed it, probably by helping his mother. Nor do we accept the lie that sex itself is sinful or dirty, and we strongly stand against any teaching or practice that forces anyone of any gender to choose from only three identities: virgin, parent, or whore. No.
We say no to all of that.
But there is much to say Yes to in this Good News about this parent’s love for her child. Mary’s love is our example, our pattern, our guide for loving one another, and for loving our neighbor. This love of a parent for their child is our example for how to be everything that we are. This love is how, and why, we do everything here: it is why we gather in the middle of the night in the darkest week of the year; it is why we share the deep peace of Christ before approaching this Table; it is why this Table stands here in the first place.
Mary’s love for her child is why we built this building, and why we work so hard to maintain it. Mary’s love for her child is why we care for our labyrinth garden, scrubbing out the graffiti and pulling weeds and packing out trash. Mary’s love for her child is why we support a Honey Bucket lavatory at the end of our parking lot. Mary’s love for her child is why we build relationship with those who live in tents just outside this door; it is why we visit our homebound members, and go to the hospital when one of us is ailing, and sing our most fervent prayers of lament and thanksgiving while keeping vigil with our beloved dead.
Mary’s love for her child is why we do everything here, audits to zooms.
But please note well: this is not a gauzy, twinkly-light kind of love, as much as I love twinkling lights. Mary does not bask benignly in a haze of blissful happiness. To love someone with one’s whole being – this is rough, muscular, exhausting love. This is spending yourself in labor for the life and health of another person, and teaching them to do the same. It’s not bath oils; it’s elbow grease. But speaking of bath oils, the work of bathing is one of the countless acts of love practiced by the faithful: first the parent bathes her infant child; then, decades later, the child bathes their dying parent. Washed in the baptismal waters, we wash one another in love. This is why one of our wagons of goods for our tent-dwelling neighbors is filled with toiletries and underwear: because Mary and Joseph didn’t just wrap their son tightly in bands of cloth; they changed his diapers, too.
Mary and Joseph are both models of whole-being parental love. They announce the Good News of God’s love for the whole world by loving their child with their whole being. They give themselves fully away to their child. This is a season of gift-giving, when we wrap gifts for each other in imitation of the Wise Ones who visited the Christ child bearing precious gifts; or we wrap gifts for each other at this time of year to celebrate the gift of the Christ child – innocent yet powerful, a frail infant and a mighty lord all at once – to a world in profound need of both tender innocence and potent salvation.
But maybe there’s another reason to focus on gifts this season. We are blessed with so many gifts, and these past few weeks at St. Paul’s we’ve reflected on the particular gifts of community, challenge, humility, and God’s presence in our dreams of a bright future. But tonight, the gift that preoccupies us as we draw alongside those night-shift livestock laborers who are still out of breath from their run into Bethlehem to gaze at this bright light – the gift that awes us – is not something we receive, not even the Christ child. It is the gift we give away. Tonight, we give the gift of a parent’s love away, to one another, to our neighbor, to the stranger. We love one another, and everyone we know, everyone we meet, with our whole being. We love them with our labor, with our endurance, with our faith, with our fervent passion and compassion for them, for us, for this part of the world so fraught with problems yet so pregnant with hope.
And we will wrestle with the monsters that terrify our children, and all of us, in the night. This year, our parish is supporting a family in need of lodging while their young son faces frightening cancer treatments, and that is but one of countless ways that God’s love is revealed in the love we give away, with our whole being. And like Mary, like all parents who love their children, we know that we ourselves bow and diminish as our children rise up: our love is given away, after all, not arrogated to ourselves, not directed to our own glory. Mary’s child goes on to reveal this same love, given away fully in his death on the cross.
And so, finally, I offer a poem about a parent’s self-giving love for their child, written by the poet Carrie Shipers. Her poem reveals how a parent’s heart is pierced with anxiety, yet fierce in its love for the child, against all monsters who threaten that child, yet large enough to empathize even with those same monsters, who are, after all, someone’s children, too. Gathered as we are around all the bright love of this night, I offer you her poem, titled “Mother Talks Back to the Monster”:
Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas,
kissed his forehead and tucked him in.
I turned on his night-light and looked for you
in the closet and under the bed. I told him
you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell
your breath, your musty fur. I remember
all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall,
click of your claws, the hand that hovered
just above my ankles if I left them exposed.
Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere—
unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal
two days out of date. And even worse
than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside,
trying not to let my love become so tangled
with anxiety my son thinks they're the same.
When he says he's seen your tail or heard
your heavy step, I insist that you aren't real.
Soon he'll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams.
If you get lonely after he's asleep, you can
always come downstairs. I'll be sitting
at the kitchen table with the dishes
I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up.
We can drink hot tea and talk about
the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.
***
Preached on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2022, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20