Mary: A Higher Power

I received email recently from one of my high school classmates. While we haven’t seen each other since high school, we reconnected last year through Facebook. She’s been in a 12-step program for many years and commented about the importance of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as her higher power.

Mary’s an interesting figure in the Christian tradition. Because Roman Catholics have bestowed on Mary something like a “god-like” status (some social-anthropologists have suggested that Mary serves the role of the feminine face of the deity), many Protestants seem to not take Mary seriously at all. Controversy about Mary’s place in Christianity is almost as old as Christianity itself. In the same era when the decisions were made as to what writings would be included in the Bible, debate came to a head as to whether Mary should be understood as simply the mother of Jesus (in Greek, “Christotokos”) or as the mother of God (“Theotokos.”) At the Council of Ephesus in the year 431, the decision was that while Mary surely is the mother of Jesus, she is also the mother of God (or the bearer of God, to translate Theotokos literally). This understanding of Mary is very significant within Christian spirituality.

First and foremost in Christian spirituality is the understanding that we, as human beings, are the image and likeness of God. There is something Divine in us. Based on this understanding, the purpose in life in Christian spirituality is to transform our life into that Divine image. This transformation was described by early Christian mystics as divinization – the process of becoming divine.

As the God-bearer, that’s exactly what Mary does. The Divine spark within her becomes so real that she literally gives birth to an incarnate form of the Deity. Mary does what our spiritual path is meant to enable us to do: make the Divine presence real in our lives and tangible in our world.

With that in mind, what could be a higher power than to give birth to the Divine in our lives? It’s a transformative process which not only enables us to be all that we were created to be but also supports that transformation of the world.

My high school friend shared that she has several friends who understand Mary as their higher power. How wonderful! How could I not support them in giving birth to the Divine presence in their lives? As Rhineland mystic, Meister Eckart, wrote in the 14th Century:

What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago and I do not also give birth to the son of God in my time and in my culture?