Under the Laurel Tree: On Marian Birthgiving
Mother Animal, Chapter 6 (Part One)
"Hail, for thus my soul now sees:
You ready and so ripe.
You, Lady, are the great, high door
that soon shall open wide.
You, most beloved ear to my song
Now I feel: my word is lost
in you as in a wood.
So I came and I fulfilled
A thousand and one dreams
God looked at me; bedazzled me…
But Thou
Thou art the Tree."
- from "Annunciation: The Angel Speaks," by Rainer Maria Rilke , translation © by Grace Andreacchi
To go anywhere near the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy and the birth of Jesus is to walk myself right out into very deep waters.
For one thing, there is so much to get “wrong” from a theological perspective. One step into the debate-grounds of the last 2,000 years about Mary’s virginity— its reality, its significance, its dogma— and I find I can’t breathe. People have been arguing about this for millennia. Violently, ferociously, mercilessly. Grappling with such scriptural specificity and fervor, as well as the theological minutia of many centuries, by turns enrages, offends and downright bamboozles me. I need paintings, I need folk stories, I need hymns. It all starts to make more sense to me then.
For another thing— the waters that Mary and Jesus point toward are living and they are profound. I don’t understand much of this with my mind. But, increasingly, I find myself at the shore of these waters in my heart and in my soul And I believe in these waters—living, amniotic, cosmic, unending, comprised of a shattering love, the kind that turns the heart of stone to a heart of flesh, the kind that opens the heart’s eyes.
So, I humbly offer this piece to you— this storytelling, this weaving of poetic imagining, interpretation and musing— as a contemplative upwelling. As an opening. This is not your go-to essay for theological unpicking or biblical specificity.1 I’m terribly intimidated by such things; maybe it’s an ancestral exhaustion from my Puritan motherline. But I am devoted to the bones of the stories here; to their essences, and to what I feel in my heart.
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