The Theotokos is not normal

The Theotokos is not normal.

Natural, yes, and even supernatural.

But not normal.

"Normal" is usually taken to mean whatever goes for whatever population under 68% of the bell-shaped curve. That 68% is framed by one standard deviation both ways from the mean.

Thus, for example, normal people score between 85 and 115 on a valid intelligence test -- that is, all things being equal. 100 is the mean. 15 is the standard deviation. In fact, if you do a test and get odd results like 115 coming out as your mean, and you have a standard deviation of 30, then maybe you want to rethink your test.

Maybe, too, you want to rethink "normalcy."

"Normal" simply indicates an observation that is valid for the central tendency of a population.

So no, the Theotokos is not normal.

Even in her day, her behavior went beyond the standard deviation. She was a real outlier, perhaps 2 or even 3 sd's beyond regular. Growing up in the Temple precincts from childhood. Praying at all hours from youth. Demonstrating virtues like meekness, mercy, peacemaking, humility, hunger for righteousness from the start.

All in all, her sinlessness is itself offensive enough to shoot Mary far out of the bell-shaped curve.

In the first installment of this meandering essay,  I suggested that the reason why most people do not like the idea of the Ever-Virginity of Mary was because they found the concept of virginity and sinlessness intimidating. And, because of the stark challenge that is implicit in Ever-Virginity, it is a far easier thing to deny the doctrine than to try to live up to it.

Let's think of that challenge. The virginity of Mary (and, to generalize, her sinlessness) was no passive gift. God is present in all goodness, to be sure, but I am considering in particular Mary's free work of goodness -- a work that succeeded to the abnormality of ever-virginity and sinlessness.

It would be a far easier thing to accept were it otherwise: that Mary were simply "turned into" perfection.

But that is not the case in the narrative of Holy Tradition. Mary renounced the logmismoi (i.e., evil insinuation). She denied the communion of her thoughts to temptation. She struggled valiantly against the initial appearance of passions (which is the "appearance of evil" in 1 Thessalonians 5.22). She practiced every virtue that filled the places where passion and sin normally occupy.

In a word, Mary's Ever-Virginity was active. It was also concrete.

That is, while Mary's life was abnormal, it was also known familiarly in the history of the community. And according to its perfection, it impressed an indelible forming image on that community's subsequent life.

This sort of thing always happens in every culture: in fact, it is one of the properties of culture that enable it to persist from one generation to the next. A parent will impress herself or himself on the lives of the chldren, and they will model themselves after the parental example with which they communed in contemporaneity and memory.

This is also true for so-called "great" characters of history. Their various narratives perpetuate -- honestly or dishonestly -- facets of their personalities.

Above and beyond the cliches of conventional historiography (that is drawn tritely and gravitationally to the heavy-handedness of violence and power), the Apostles and the Saints certainly bequeath a subtler (but oddly, more substantial) personal formation to the development of the Body of Christ. They speak to the mind of the Church. They inform its vision from their experience of communion. Their own histories vividly affect their contemporaries, and grow in force through the aggregating echo and symphony of Holy Tradition.

And this is truest of the Theotokos. She is the singular saint who really can be credited for the model of Christian prayer and communion. And in that, she is the living proof that Christian faith exceeds the two-dimensional outlines of propositional belief. It is for this reason that we seek her assistance in interceeding for us, in our need for Grace in moments of psychic weakness, and midnight fear of the abyss.

Whether we want to or not, let us consider that terror of the abyss, because it is crucial for appreciating the ministry of the Ever-Virgin Theotokos:

Some writers call that "midnight fear" the horror rerum. William James wrote poignantly of this experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience. One day at twilight he went into his dressing room

when suddently there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence ... the universe was changed for me altogether.

Some of you have experienced crisis events like that of Dr. James. Others have sensed it leaking from the edges of daylight reverie (as in the creeping novel of Dr. James' brother, The Turn of the Screw).

I suspect that this horror rerum is for everyone an anticipation of the awful moment of the separation of the soul from the body, about which we should pray: At the hour of death, be with me to embrace my poor soul, and to keep away the dreadful sight of Satan (from the Prayer of Paul the Cenobite).

This moment of death is the source of all human anxiety and fear. I think that every frisson, every nightmare, every psychic breakdown is set into motion by this haunting. It might be strange to say, but it is nonetheless true, that the moment of our own death is an image about which we cannot help prophesy.

It is at this same moment, and in all its harbinger shadows, that we look for friends. Friendship is coded deeply in human nature, and friendship is what we need at the approach of death. 

Here is where I want to approach a troubling issue with some hesitation. In anxiety, I cry for Christ and the comfort of His Spirit -- He is sweet and His Personal Communion is my only salvation. He is my Friend, and I am His lost lamb. But He is my God, and He surrounds me, at the hour of my need, with familiar friends.

It is not for me or any of us to be familiar with Christ. We cannot "image" Him as our Coach, our Co-Pilot, our Magical Buddy, our repository of irritations and mutterings (i.e., as in "O Christ" and other expletives), or the Long-Lost Relative Who Hugs Us in Heaven. He is God and Terrible, and His love is healing, but it is frightening and royal, high and lifted up. Children are drawn to Him in the Gospels -- but they are the only ones who are depicted in affection.

I say this not at all to deny the possibility of divine intimacy. What I suggest, instead, is that the familiarity we seek -- the yokefellowship that we need -- is something that is indicated initially by our earthly loves, but is fulfilled even moreso by our mystical friendships with the Saints. And of course, all loves point to Him Who is the Author and Finisher of all loves.

But the earthly, sentimental, familiar friendship that upends every gnostic impulse -- that is brought by the maternal presence of the Theotokos. "Behold, thy Mother" Someone said once, at a particularly crucial moment. And He established that His Saints, beginning with and surmounted by His Mother, would offer Friendship to Christians in this last generation of the world.

In Friendship she leads us in prayer. It is nothing more nor less than the best of "sweet hours of prayer," and the most poignant moments of prayer when you are convinced, for this once, of the truth of the moveability of mountains. Her soft maternal voice is like a spring brook in your heart on parched sand, in wilderness land, and "streams in the desert":

And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. -- Isaiah 35.7

This is the ministry of the Theotokos. She is the Sign of Theosis. She is not the necessary arbiter, but the familiar Mother who, with all the Saints, offers us a fellowship that does not disappoint, and never falls to disillusion. 

It takes an perfection of ascetic and charismatic holiness -- one that exceeds the contours of normality -- to leap out of the limitations of individual prayer and into the expansive possibilities of heavenly intercession. If history begins with the nous, as some are wont to say in the narrative of Holy Tradition, then the most important intercessions are psychological. "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven" takes root first in the deep rich earth of the soul.

What does this Kingdom look like, psychologically? in this rich earth?

That's easy: the Beatitudes. An outline of the personality of the Theotokos.

The Theotokos invites us into this personality and the timeless Church, wherein we commune with her Son, and enter into the uncreated Light of the Trinity. She invites us into the mind of the Church which seeks communion, and enters into the Upper Room vision of the prophets and the saints.

Here is where the Kingdoms of the World are judged. Here is where the proclamations of the prophets still echo, where civilization is judged for its treatment of the weak and the unrepresented, its neglect of them who are not proud. 

Read the Magnificat to see how the Saints, and in particular the Theotokos, are stridently political in their judgment. The proud demons are scattered in their fantasies, and so are all their human tyrannical followers. The mighty bodiless archons are pulled down from their thrones, and so are all their historical acolytes. The demigod aristocracy are exiled in the gray twilight desert of ennui, and so are their emulators in these besmirched economies. 

But they who want friends are befriended. By Christ first of all, and all His friends.

They are all revolutionary -- and the Theotokos is most revolutionary. She is radical, and opinionated. Meek, kind, compassionate, but very keen on the differences between her Son's bright Kingdom and the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death.

So the last and final reason why some people do not like the Ever-Virginity of Mary is because they'd rather shut her up in the closed-off rooms of the past. They are nervous about her contemporaneity. 

They do not like what she has to say.

It is, after all, disturbingly not normal.

Comments

[Steve Hayes]

I'm not sure that "normal" and "abnormal" hit the right not. The Theotokos, I believe, IS normal. She's just unusual, and there is a difference between normal and usual.

The bell curve thingy represents the usual, but the normal is the norm, it is what we aspire to, and in that sense the Theotokos lived what one Protestant author called "the normal Christian life."

[Fr. Jonathan]

Steve, that was my point. I took the definition of normalcy as the central tendency of the population. Your stipulation that she is "unusual" is precisely the same as my contention of "abnormality." You are proposing a different population -- i.e., I suppose, of Christians -- than the population of humanity to which I was referring. Of course, if the population is that of the Church, then the experience of the Theotokos should be normal (but even then it transcends most observed behavior). But the population about which I was concerned in the article is all of humanity: and in that bell curve, you must admit that the Theotokos is most abnormal of all.

Now, if you want to say that the Theotokos was most "natural," then we're agreed.

One of my aims in this piece was to insinuate a darker meaning to the term "normal." As a former laborer in the secular psyche industry, statistical definitions of normalcy (that always seem to slight downward) left me cold, lead and dead.

[Steve Hayes]

Perhaps it has more to do with definitions than anything else. To me "normal" has nothing to do with Bell curves. Statistics may tell you what is usual, but what is usual for fallen humanity is not "normal", in the sense of living up to a norm or standard of what the creator intended us to be. Sin is usual, but not normal. Normal means hitting the target, but human beings usually fall short. The Theotokos is an image of our humanity, not just what God wants Christians to be, but what he wnats all humanity to be. So in a sense she represents a norm.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Yes, Steve, I think we're dabbling in semantics here.

God help us toward that special norm!

[Christopher Orr]

Didn't St Symeon the New Theologian say that Adam was created natural, we live unnaturally, and Christ has opened to us the ability to live above and beyond our nature.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Yes, Christopher, he and a few other Fathers (a little litotes here) said just that. I contend in this essay that the Theotokos was able to be sinless in her own natural living: this should be offensive to the doctrine of total depravity (and I mean it to be). Of course, "naturality" cannot proceed without Grace (as no Creation can).

My other point is that culture and society fail insofar as the "normality" within that milieu diverges or degenerates from created naturality.