Mary the wild rose

​This is the irrational season
when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child.

— Madeline L’Engle

I am not one of those women who loved being pregnant. Personally, I think the pregnant rosy “glow” is made up by men to gaslight us, as I always seemed to glow green, and I do not mean with fertility.

If we are being honest, for most women pregnancy is difficult physically, emotionally and mentally. The weight gain, vomiting, hemorrhoids, insomnia, pelvic pain and swollen ankles (just to name a few physical things) plus preparing to care for and raise another person to adulthood once it is outside of your body, is a daunting task.

Then there is the actual delivery. If women knew exactly how contractions, episiotomies and vaginal tears feel upfront, it is unlikely we would sign up for this — yet somehow, we do. Not to mention C-sections. And we are worried about our babies, will they cry immediately alerting us to their healthy lungs? Will they need extra care or procedures? What could go wrong? It is very uncertain, when giving birth, that every mother and child will live.

“The idea that the mother of God did not experience pain when giving birth is preposterous.”

The idea that the mother of God did not experience pain when giving birth is preposterous. She is human, after all, as is her incarnate son, Jesus. Furthermore, the life of her son, the words of her son, tell us otherwise. Jesus compares his own pain to the pain of childbirth as recorded in Scripture.

Jesus, the Word incarnate speaks to his disciples in his final days: “Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

His hour had come. Yet the people who followed him, his disciples and his family, his mother, Mary, would see him again.

Jesus helps us see how we defy rational thought and become mothers as bearers of great pain, anticipating the joy of new life.

The prayer beads of a rosary come from oral traditions that began to shape the practice of prayer of common people in the Medieval period, say Clark Strand and Perdita Finn from the Way of the Rose. Most people adopting these practices of praying with a rosary did not read or write. The people listened to the recitations of prayers said in Latin by the priests and made their own patterns of prayer that began with “Hail Mary.”

All these prayers were held in memory from much repetition, passed from person to person. Most likely many of the ordinary people seeking the path to the Spirit were women, as often oral tradition is female, sharing the story of the prayers they said with their rosary beads. The authors of The Way of the Rose point out the rosary tells the story of Jesus from a different lens than the priests and bishops and male apostolic succession of the patriarchal church. The rosary is a feminine voice that developed outside of the walls of the male dominated church.

As a pastor to children, it concerned me that the Bible stories children heard at church were not being told as a part of one cohesive story, as God’s story of love. My solution was to begin with very young children telling a simple story from Genesis to Revelation with an altar for children to place items or symbols to help tell the story. Eventually the children took over telling the story themselves as they placed the items on the altar every week.

“In the beginning God created,” and one child placed a small clay earth on the altar and so forth. Now as the children grew up in knowledge and wisdom at church, I could place individual Scripture into the arc of God’s story, which they already knew very well. This was especially effective as children understood the basics of creation, incarnation, resurrection, and Pentecost and were familiar with language such as “following the way of Jesus” and forgiveness, the Lord’s Supper and baptism.

Remarkably, the rosary does the very thing I sought to do with the children in contrast to Scripture in some regards. Since the practice of the rosary was developed less formally, there are truly no rules on how to pray with the rosary, only guides. The Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary tells us Mary’s story of love and is one such guide.

Mary’s story of love begins with the annunciation, a surprising visit from an angel. We follow Mary to visit Elizabeth, to the Nativity, to the presentation of Jesus at the temple, and we watch as Mary loses her now 12-year-old son in Jerusalem. These are the joyful mysteries.

Mary’s journey continues as she watches her son in agony in the garden, being scourged and flogged, crowned with thorns, Jesus stumbles under the weight of the Cross and an onlooker is forced to carry it for him. As she continues to be with him Jesus is crucified, and once dead he is lowered into Mary’s arms: these are the sorrowful mysteries.

Mary the Magdalene watches over the tomb and sees the resurrected Jesus, but the male disciples refuse to believe her testimony. Jesus appears to many and returns to the sky, completing the cyclical pattern of life, death and rebirth.

The disciples and Mary were praying together, and the Holy Spirit came down among them. Mary falls asleep and is taken up into heaven, and finally she is crowned queen of heaven and earth. This is her rebirth and where her journey begins again: these are the glorious mysteries.

Since the rosary is a circle, a necklace, it is repeated over and over again, cyclical. Mary’s story of love is sealed upon the hearts of those who pray with the rosary. Again, like my practice with the children, it becomes a collective part of the lives of those who embrace the spiritual practices of the rose. The wild rose grew where it could.

“What they wanted from the church was a teaching that confirmed their understanding of what it meant to be alive,” Clark and Strand write. “And with the rosary they got that teaching whether the church intended for them to have it or not. … The rosary confirmed in its devotees the wisdom they had already learned from life, grounding them in it and giving them the confidence to live with courage and love. Life was beautiful, and life was sad.”

The people already knew from life and nature what was good, and the prayers and stories told by the female lens of the rosary gave them the courage to love and live with wisdom and goodness. Meanwhile, the church told them they were damned, headed for a final judgment and they were taxed by the church even as they were sick, poor and hungry.

Women especially were targeted, taught they were the “emblems of impurity, depravity or lust.” How could such foul creatures create with God? It was unthinkable, the church told the world.

The symbol of the rose is beautiful, tied with nature and Scripture and indeed the body. The rosary, which means crown of roses, associated with Mother Mary surely made the celibate male priests of the church quite uncomfortable.

Not only was the female creature the lowliest of low, their bodies the cause of every worse kind of sin, but “roses were too closely associated with the body to be aligned with Christian faith,” say Clark and Strand.

You see, the rose is associated with female genitalia.

The divine child cannot arrive without the Spirit-filled female body: the birth canal, the vagina, the vulva. The rose.

There is a Medieval legend that tells of two gates to heaven, as recounted in The Way of the Rose.

One is a front gate, and one is a back gate, a back door. We think we know this joke, right? St. Peter stands at the front gate. Remember from church history, supposedly authority has passed from Peter, feed my sheep Peter, to male priests and popes and never has been broken. So Peter in all his power and authority stands at the front gate, which is always locked, and St. Peter holds the only key. The back gate is never locked, and it belongs to Mary. The rules do not seem to apply to her.

A man who was a sacristan at the Church of St. Peter in Rome saw that the lamp for St. Mary was bound to burn out. He decided to take some oil from the lamp of St. Peter, thinking the saint would not mind, as he was too lazy and tired to remedy the situation that night. The man went home and went to sleep, and St. Peter appeared to him in a scrooge-like dream demanding to know why his oil was taken. The man tried to explain himself to the angry saint, but Peter was not hearing it.

“God’s Mother is honored in many lands … and many shrines and pilgrimages are established in her name. But this is my house, in which my body lies, the very rock upon which the church was built, and I will not suffer you to honor the Lady Mary above me in this way.”

“Mary the wild rose gave birth to the incarnate Word; the divine came through her physically and metaphorically.”

The man woke full of fear and trembling and went to the church to replace the oil in St. Peter’s lamp right away. The next night, Mother Mary appears to him in his dream. “Fear not and continue to honor me as you have done before. For although the Apostle Peter keeps the keys to the gate of heaven, I am the keeper of its window. For the door of heaven is very narrow, and Peter guards it strictly, but the window of my love is very wide.”

Mary the wild rose gave birth to the incarnate Word; the divine came through her physically and metaphorically. Both crownings are beautiful wild roses the church did not cultivate. Yet wild roses survive. These roses bloom wild and bright with abandon in caves with a cleft of sunlight, in untouched meadows, and in abandoned white chapels left for dead.

Still the wild rose survives.

The feminine voice of the rose is wild, creating, growing naturally from the margins, from deep within the earth. The wild rose of Mary awakens ordinary people like you and me, so that we may experience healing from the deep abiding spirit of the earth itself. Rebirth is a wildness that is available, is within our grasp if we have the courage to reach within and without into the mystery that is freedom and new life.

The voice and story of Mary rejects the judgment of women and the judgment of the church.

“In the 15th century, the church tried to impose its own narrative on the rosary, insisting that it end with the Final Judgment,” Clark and Strand explain. “But ordinary people rejected that idea. Not in any official way, it just didn’t take. The rosary wasn’t about instilling fear of getting people to follow the church’s rules. The story of the rosary … from the life of Mary that, on an almost subliminal level, subverted the authority of the Bible itself.”

Later, in the 17th century, the Apostles’ Creed was “installed as a lock on the gate to Our Lady’s rose garden,” say Clark and Strand. It was required for people to conform to believe in final judgment and more importantly the church.

This Baptist will not be reciting or signing any creed or statement of faith. Why on earth would I say, “I believe in the holy catholic church” when it has not believed in me?

Will I pray the rosary or some from of the rosary I concoct myself? I do not know where the Spirit may lead me on my journey with Mary. I pray I will always remain open to new pathways with my eyes peeled for wild roses along the way.

While the canon of Scripture may be fixed, it is ever enlightened. The Word himself bloomed in the garden and is fully alive, and the Spirit is among us. The back door of the rose garden is never locked. We are called to return to life, to listen to the mystery of the wild rose who mothers Jesus and who mothers us still.

There is joy coming.

 

Julia Goldie Day is an ordained minister within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and lives in Memphis, Tenn. She is a painter and proud mother to Jasper, Barak and Jillian. Learn more at her website or follow her on socials @JuliaGoldieDay.

Further resources inspired by themes from “Mary the Rosebud” will be provided by the author at juliagoldieday.comeach week. Click for poetry, prayers, music and more art to inspire you this season of Advent.

 

Previously in this series:

Mary the rosebud

Mary the rose garden

Mary the thorny rose