Kelsi Vanada

Dear Friends,

Today’s reading from Luke 1:46-55 is the beautiful Song of Mary, or the Magnificat, Latin for “my soul magnifies the Lord.” This ancient Christian hymn is used as a Canticle in Evening Prayer, and is liturgically important to a broad swath of Christianity.

When I’m reciting the Magnificat, my heart swells at the words “he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts”—but I admit that I’m still figuring out what to do with Mary.

I grew up Evangelical, raised to be very suspicious of Catholic veneration of the saints—the argument being that we didn’t need anyone to mediate between us and God. (Most in my circles didn’t believe Catholics were even Christians.)

If we did speak of Mary, it was because she provided a good example of female submission, and a prime example of purity and chastity. These qualities were admirable for women, in a culture of toxic male dominance.

Having “deconstructed” my prior faith, I’m still learning what importance to assign to Mary and how to pray to/with her. Along with Elizabeth A. Johnson, author of Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints, I’m asking: “What would be a theologically sound, ecumenically fruitful, spiritually empowering, ethically challenging, and socially liberating interpretation of Mary for the 21st century?”

Johnson writes (in 2003) that women around the world “are risking new, liberating interpretations of her meaning.” In the Magnificat, her “revolutionary prayer,” “Mary proclaims the saving power that enters history to reverse the present order of power and powerlessness…Her story embodies God’s preferential option for the poor.”

I’ve started buying those grocery store votives of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Whenever I light one, I pray, “Have mercy on us.” I’m thinking of all those who are suffering in the world—especially under patriarchy, violence, poverty, famine, war, homophobia and transphobia, and the list goes on. And I’m thinking of how I both participate in oppressive systems and also struggle under some of them myself. There’s big feeling in that brief prayer, and somehow Mary’s with me in it.

“He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.”

In Christ,

—Kelsi

Johnson, Elizabeth A. Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints. New York: Continuum, 2003.