Mary's Birthday

Birthday of Mary

“Those he justified, he also glorified.” Romans 8.30

There are only two saints whose birthdays we celebrate: John the Baptist and Mary. For most others we remember them in their death; and so Mary is also remembered at her Assumption.

The Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary has been kept in the Church in various ways since at least the 6th century. (In fact today our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters at Walsingham are keeping the Feast by remembering England as Mary’s Dowry.)

September the 8th was chosen as the Octave of the Byzantine New Year on September 1st. (And December 8th was then nominated as the Conception of our Lady, nine calendar months previously.)

Nothing, of course, is known of Mary’s birth at all. But the theology of Mary the God Bearer, meant that her conception and birth portayed the preparation of the human Temple that would receive the Incarnate God.

Martin Travers draws on this tradition and the words from Revelation 12 (which we will hear at Evensong this afternoon) in his 1920s sketch for St Mary’s Bourne Street.

It depicts Our Lady Queen of Heaven (Moon beneath her feet, crown of 12 stars, with the sun behind her) cradling St Mary’s Bourne Street, another human temple, in her arms.
This image reminds us that those whom God justifies, he also glorifies. Mary is the archetypal Christian.

Mary reminds us that we all hold dual citizenship. We live here on earth, but our home country, whither we shall all return, is heaven. We are second generation immigrants, sons and daughters of Adam & Eve. But Jesus, the second Adam, our true brother, has laid open through his passion a way to our true homeland.

Mary, the faithful Eve, was received into that heavenly homeland by her Son, and as a type of the church, she has made the journey and holds us in her prayers until we too make the final journey - “in the hour of our death”.

Now there is a real tension involved in holding this dual citizenship of earth and heaven, for often we are too comfortable and content here on earth to be troubled overmuch by thoughts of heaven.

Father Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal, and says to the first man he meets, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
The man said, "I do Father."
The priest says, "Then leave this pub right now!"
He approaches a second man. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"Certainly, Father."
"Then leave this den of Satan," says the priest.
He walks up to O'Toole. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"No thank you very much Father.”
The priest looks him right in the eye, and says, "You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"
"Oh, when I die? Yes, Father! I thought you were getting a group together to go right now."

Most of us like the concept of heaven. We’re just not keen to leave right now.

All the Marian feasts, like the Martin Travers drawing, force us to contemplate heaven.

In popular culture heaven is full of clouds, harps and halos; angels peeling grapes, chubby little cherubim, so beloved by Martin Travers, (and there in the two upper corners of the picture I described, scattering flowers and petals before our lady.)

Each age has represented Heaven as the best of their own geography, cuisine and music. Although they have often done so with a little tongue in cheek.

Here’s Alan Bennett, presumably calling on childhood holiday memories in Derbyshire, in Habeas Corpus:

My life I squandered waiting,
Then let my chance go by.
One day we’ll meet in Heaven,
That Matlock in the sky.

The Koran describes heaven beautifully, albeit in very earthy terms, similar to those in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It says:

“It is the garden in which there are rivers of water, flowing springs, branching vines with all kinds of fruits. There the saints shall recline… no headache shall they feel there from wine, nor shall their wits be dimmed. They shall be served by large-eyed damsels of modest glance.”

The natural inclination of all humankind has been to suppose there is yet more.

Who has not lost a friend, a family member - perhaps someone vibrant with life, loving and much loved; or perhaps at the end, weak and frail? And is not the sense that they are still ‘present’ overwhelming and almost tangible at times?

This is how that great rationalist CS Lewis felt about the death of his friend Charles Williams:

“No event has so corroborated my belief in the next world as Williams did simply in dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death which changed.”

It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ - human life is ‘nothing but’ this - which says that because there is no scientific evidence for continuation, there is no more.

It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ which says that, because there are psychological reasons why we should fool ourselves into believing that there is continuation, that there is none.

Bishop Tom Wright of Durham, puts into words a valuable and common insight of Christian thinkers:

“A proper Christian understanding of heaven is not as a place remote from the present world, but rather as a dimension, normally kept secret, of present reality… ‘Heaven’ is God’s dimension of present reality.”

Historic Christianity has used art and music to paint a picture which emphasises the relational aspects of the world to come: a place of completion, but not dull stasis. Mary stands resplendent in heaven, but is concerned for us, here on earth. In the imagery of Martin Travers, she cradles the Church in her arms.

Heaven is the place where the object of our worship, and of Mary’s worship, her Son, can be viewed with unveiled face. Where we will gaze on the Lamb that was slain, who yet lives. Where we will no longer peer anxiously through a glass darkly, but see and know, even as we are seen and known. Where our thirst for knowledge will be satisfied by the eternal wisdom of God.

We will be the people we have always really wanted to be - the people that God intended us to be. We will be free at last from the restlessness that drives us and the whole human race towards great beauty and ingenuity, and towards madness and self-destruction.

And we will be with Mary, the saints, and the angels, and with those whom we have loved in this life, now made perfect in Christ. Heaven is a social concourse, for there can be no being, no personality in isolation from others.

But even when we have painted our pictures, Scripture reminds us that, ‘no eye has seen, nor ear has heard, no mind has conceived’ what God has in store for those who love him.’

And whenever we take the bread and the wine, at this altar where the veil is thin, the dimensions of heaven break through into our own dimensions.

The mystical Body of Christ lifted towards heaven is viewed by another innumerable company on another shore, led by Mary our Mother. And we glimpse our true homeland, and remember

"Those whom he justified, he will also glorify."