A Twenty-Year Old Hail Mary

(Workshop of Andrej Rublëv, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Note: I first published this post twenty years ago today. While obviously I was not able to attend today's Divine Liturgy for the Feast of the Annunciation in person (and only managed about twenty minutes of an online service this morning before life forced me to deal with more mundane matters), I couldn't help but think of this old post since I'm actually trying to observe Lent for the first time in many years. My faith has changed during these two decades. Reading this now, there is still the faint whiff of the new convert five years after leaving Evangelicalism for Byzantine-rite Catholicism. I would write this differently today. But only slightly so. 

It feels odd not to be fasting on Great and Holy Friday. But, it's one of those once in a lifetime occurrences when the Feast of the Annunciation falls on this somber day. And in the Eastern Church, we don't move dates. So, tonight we commemorated both the beginning of God's finite form and its end with the only Divine Liturgy served on Holy Friday since 1931 as well as the traditional vespers service complete with procession and burial of Christ's icon shroud. The combined liturgies lasted for three hours. Ample time to contrast the joy of God becoming Immanuel -- God with us -- and the suffering such empathy entailed.

The Feast of the Annunciation is an important feast day that always breaks the fasting of Lent, and even though Holy Friday is usually one of few days of strict fasting in the Church calendar, we broke it to celebrate the wonderful news that Mary would carry the Son of God. For our particular parish, it's an even more special feast for it was on this feast day five years ago we first celebrated Divine Liturgy in our new church.

Growing up Evangelical Protestant, the idea that a feast day honoring Mary would be considered important enough to celebrate while commemorating the death of Christ was unimaginable. Mary was simply a footnote at Christmas. Someone forgotten about after the manger scene has been packed away along with the Santa ornaments.

Looking back, I can't help but feel it reflects a bit of misogyny. I do appreciate the argument that no one should take away the focus from Christ. Yet, no one seemed to be disturbed about using men from St. Paul to born again NFL players to demonstrate the glory of Christ.

And not that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches don't have histories of misogyny either where Mary becomes the prototype for women being "saved through motherhood" as St. Paul suggests (or at least interpreted/translated as suggesting). But, it was radically different for me to have a woman held in such high esteem. A woman about whom whole liturgies are written and chanted, like the Akathist hymn chanted during Lent with its remarkable metaphors. Mary becomes the palace of God. The ark of the new covenant. The mercy seat. The heavenly bridge. The one carrying the earth's foundation. The living paradise in which is planted the Tree of Life. The Bride of God who carried the healer of the human race. The birthgiver of the world's salvation.

Indeed, men are left out of the process in which God becomes flesh. There is Mary, who does not become pregnant through a man, but is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, traditionally the feminine form of God. The only male involved is the fetal Christ.

Mary is the first Christian. The first to believe in Jesus, as we see in the wedding at Qana where she asks him to change water to wine. And from that miracle we learn, as my godfather often quotes his old Maronite priest, if you want to get Jesus to do something, get his mom to ask.

My Evangelical friends and relatives still adjusting to my Catholicism often ask me why we pray to Mary. I explain by first asking them a question: why do you ask someone to pray for you? At some point, St. James' admonition that the prayers of a righteous man availeth much comes up and I then ask why not ask someone close to Christ? And who closer than his mother?

And she's not just his mother. On this day, as he hung on the cross, Jesus looked down and saw his mother and said to John, "behold your mother." And to Mary he said, "woman, behold your son." He gave us Mary and gave Mary us. As I thought about this tonight while we sang "the spotless Virgin wept with maternal tenderness," I started to tear up. The same thing that happens whenever I sing the last line of the Paraklesis service  -- "oh unexplainable wonder, how do you nurse the Master?" Mary becomes the nurturing mother who comforts us at her breast. Who bothers her Son on our behalf, just as she did for the wedding host in Qana all those years ago.

Yes, such boldness suggests that she was not a meek, passive woman. While she was willing to be used by God -- "behold the handmaid of the Lord; may it be to me as you have said" -- she must have had nerves of steel to allow herself to be impregnated without a husband. To withstand all the gossip. Maybe even trouble with the religious authorities. Or to raise the Son of God. I mean, what do you say when your son disappears for a couple of days and when you find him, he simply seems to shrug and say "well, don't you know I'd be in my father's house?" And certainly she doesn't mince words in the Magnificat about the relationship between the powerful and the poor that the one in her womb would seek to overturn. "He has shown might with is arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty."

Rich Mullins, my favorite Christian music singer and an Evangelical Protestant who was in the process of becoming Catholic when he died, once talked about how evangelicals always have this problem with Catholics revering Mary, but that perhaps the problem is that we don't revere each other enough. If Holy Friday shows us anything, whether we believe Jesus to be divine or not, it is that we most certainly do not revere each other enough.

So maybe then a few Hail Marys would not a bad thing.

"Not Another Tragic Fattie"

Burningword Literary Journal: “Not Another Tragic Fattie”

In sixth grade, a boy tried to make fun of me for being fat. It did not go as he expected. Instead, he was the one who ended up being marginalized. I’ve always remembered it over the years as him being ostracized because he made fun of me. But I suspect I was mixing up correlation with causation. It’s likely he was also a dick to others. So the class decided collectively, if unconsciously, fuck that asshole.

I wanted to write about this memory to push back on the idea that being fat is always tragic. That the fat kid is always bullied and miserable. Most memoirs and novels I’ve read with fat characters focus on fatness as the result of trauma (overeating to create a larger, protected body) and/or the trigger of trauma (childhood bullying). But sometimes one is just fat. It’s not positive and beautiful. It’s not repulsive and wretched. It just is. Like being short. Or neurodivergent. Or having red hair. 

There was one other time in which someone at school made fun of me for being fat. It was seventh or eighth grade. I was walking down the hall with a sea of other students, heading to math class behind two of the popular girls. One of them yelled to someone further ahead of us to do something-or-other “or we’ll make Michelle sit on you!” They then turned around and discovered I was right there, less than a foot behind them. They reacted in that universal way of all junior high girls to the unexpected: they widened their eyes, covered their barely suppressed smirks and mouthed “oh my god!” before turning straight ahead and pretending it never happened. It was the first time it occurred to me that the other kids might be making fun of me behind my back. And yet they never did to my face. Despite my nerdiness. Despite my hyper-Evangelicalism. Despite my (relative) poverty. I was just too earnestly—though not obsequiously—nice. 

That’s not to say I didn’t grow up terribly insecure about my body (what woman isn’t?). That I didn’t desperately wish to be thin. That I didn’t diet a great deal trying to be thin. That I didn’t experience some amount of bullying about my weight from adults in my life—especially from a certain pediatrician when I was nine to twelve years old (though a neurologist when I was seventeen validated what that pediatrician insisted was “not possible”: that you can still be obese despite eating a healthy diet and exercising — hopefully more on this in a future essay). 

But as I say at the end of my Burningword piece, fat kids are not guaranteed victims. When we act as if they are, it normalizes their being bullied. It also creates the pervasive sense of fatness being abject, adding even more weight to burden those who are fat. 

Other pieces I really enjoyed in that issue of BLJ: 

• Priscilla Long's flash fiction piece "One Day in the Life of Donna DeSimone" about a deaf woman who learns something she probably wishes she hadn't. 
• Joan E. Bauer's poem "A Kat, a Mouse, a Brick" about a once popular cartoon. 
• Alina Zollefrank's cnf piece, "Identity," about eagles and nests and immigration. This one especially resonated with me as my Internet Boyfriend is not American and the forms she discusses are the forms that keep us apart. 
• Grace Lynn's poem, "My Muse is Growing Up" about an aging muse who will always be her neighborhood. 
• There are also a number of artworks throughout the issue but I don't feel like a competent art critic beyond "that looks pretty!" 

Also in publication news: the only other piece of creative writing that I have ever published (so far---just found out there's another forthcoming!) was this piece at Hippocampus Magazine. Not only was I surprised when it was among their Pushcart Prize nominees that year (it’s hard enough to just get a piece accepted by them) but I’m even more amazed (and so pleased) that it continued to resonate with them enough that they have now included it in their recently published anthology of their most memorable pieces since Hippocampus was founded fifteen years ago. You can buy a copy here and enjoy thirty pieces of great creative non-fiction.