Unholy Sh+t: the woman so powerful she could send God to his room and why that matters

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of folks ask me why I still have a devotion to the rosary post-deconstruction. The truth is, when I stepped down from the priesthood, I was very angry at God. I couldn’t reconcile the idea of why They would let all this happen the way it does, the war and fear and destruction. I felt entirely abandoned by the institutional church. In a small way, I understood why Jesus asked, “My God, why have you abandoned me?”

Mary didn’t, though. She was always there, even when it seemed God had abdicated the throne. Mary believed in her son, loved him, taught him, and was present for everything while God was off being a deadbeat peopling other planets, or whatever. In the end, Jesus was forsaken by nearly everyone. Judas betrayed him, Peter denied him, and the other disciples scattered and hid, but Mary was at the foot of the cross. She never left him, even at the worst moments.

Just before Jesus died, he said to John, “Son, behold your mother.” I think he was talking to all of us at that moment. If Jesus is our divine sibling and God is our spiritual Father, then Mary is also our mother. She has helped me make sense of this process of deconstructing my faith because she, too, was just a person who got caught in the crosshairs of a God who often seems lost and confused while compensating with bravado. So, in my darkest times, even in my greatest moments of doubt and pain, I’ve always turned to my Mother. Fathers can be confusing creatures and hard to relate to. In my times of hurt, I needed the Divine Feminine to help me see the beauty, wonder, and hope that still exists in the world.

That might not make sense to everyone, but it has been an immense comfort to me. And it’s why, in spite of it all, I still keep my devotion to the rosary and the Blessed Mother.

Unholy Sh+t: An Irreverent Bible Study

Mary, Mother of God

Today’s Reading: Luke 2:16-21

Let’s begin the year with a really simple subject, shall we? What could be less complicated than the question, “Did Mary give birth to God or just the humanity of Jesus?” This debate has existed since the very early days of Christianity, but church dogma ultimately answered the question until those pesky Protestants popped up trying to relitigate everything that had already seemingly been resolved. I suppose in order to better understand the question, we need to evaluate why it matters.

Jesus was a bit of a religious anomaly, and the whole idea of him being God but also a man was confusing for folks. Throughout the evolution of religious thought, the idea that a god sired a human child was not a particularly novel concept. The principle had been around for quite a while, so in this sense, it wasn’t new thought. The Greek gods were constantly knocking up commoners, and so the whole idea of a half-god/half-man was pretty standard stuff, really. Christianity attempted to set itself apart from the other gods, so their claim was a bit unique. Unlike a demi-god, which is partly a god and partly a human, the early church fathers began to claim that Jesus was not a partial of anything but something unique: god-bear-pig.

Not everyone ascribed to this idea, and the debate centered around three significant options concerning the nature of Jesus: Docetism, Adoptionism, and the Hypostatic Union.

Docetism was an early answer to the question of the divinity of Jesus, essentially claiming that Jesus didn’t have an actual physical body. He was God only and merely had the appearance of a human form. This theory didn’t hold for very long. How could a spirit be crucified, and was his birth not a natural one? Ultimately, the idea was thrown out as a heresy because it focused exclusively on Jesus being God and not someone who experienced a genuine life and death. Adoptionism was the ying to docetism’s yang, positing that Jesus was just a human being, having a very normal human life until he was adopted by God and anointed as the Messiah. The idea was that when Jesus was baptized, the moment God said, “This is my son!” Jesus is magically joined into unity with God, who becomes his adopted father.

The early church decided to reject both of those theories because Jesus spent way too much time talking about his flesh and blood. It seemed contradictory to Eucharistic theology, so they paved a third way: the Hypostatic Union. This became the prevailing theology concerning the divinity and humanity of Christ that he contained both the fullness of god and the fullness of man within himself.

Saint Athanasius put it this way, “We believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son, is both God and human, equally. He is God from the essence of the Father, begotten before time; and he is human from the nature of his mother born in time; completely God, completely human, with a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father as regards divinity, less than the Father as regards humanity.

“Although he is God and human, Christ is not two but one. He is one, however, not by his divinity being turned into flesh but by God taking humanity into himself. He is one, certainly not by the blending of his essence but by the unity of his person. For just as one human is both rational soul and flesh, so too the one Christ is both God and human.”

See? You totally get it now, right? No… okay, well, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up! What Athanasius and any of the early Christian writers began to argue is that we accept, generally, that humans are composed of a soul (energy, essence, whatever) and also a human body. The body is the physical tool we use to move about the world, but our essence, whatever it is, and however it is defined, is intrinsically linked with our body throughout our lives. You can not divide the two, or you would cease to be you, aka dead. So, if the soul is the thing that animates the body and makes up who we are, then the essence of Jesus is God, and humanity is of Mary. But the two do not separate or, again, the dead thing, and so you are 100% your soul and 100% your body at the same time, meaning, conversely, Jesus is completely God and completely man and was the whole time.

Once the hypostatic union became the official stance of the Church, it provided a unique title for the Blessed Mother known as the Theotokos, which means the God-Bearer or Mother of God. Needless to say, and I am sure this will be a shock to many of you, some men took extreme umbrage to that. Chief amongst the complainants was a man by the name of Nestorius. He was the bishop of Constantinople in the 5th century, and he did not like that Mary was referred to as the Mother of God, so he rejected the term entirely. He was not fond of the idea that a woman could carry the very nature of God because girls are icky or whatever. He was a celibate in a time when it wasn’t required, so he was at least committed to his own bullsh+t. Either way, he began to teach that Mary could not possibly be the mother of God, and so Jesus must not have actually been God at his birth. This put him at odds with most of the other bishops, and he was ultimately deposed as a heretic.

Listen, there is a lot the early Church got wrong, but what I would give for Christianity to get just a fraction of their hardcore defense of the Theotokos back. When the entire Church had a mom they loved, they got into fistfights over people disrespecting her. Imagine where we would be if we had stayed on that track.

If Jesus is fully God and fully man, then Mary gave birth to a whole person that is both at the same time, just as we are both a spirit and body. Jesus was not a reincarnation; this was his first visit as a person. Instead, he was incarnate; this idea became known as the Incarnation of Christ. What is strange about Protestant theology concerning this subject is that most mainline denominations accept the belief of the incarnation yet strip Mary of the title of Mother of God. It seems this is just too much power to give to a woman. This attribute of Mary does not suppose that she was the originator of God but that she carried and bore the human incarnation of God. Mary becomes the bridge between God and humanity by way of her motherhood.

She was not simply a surrogate or a vessel but the actual mom of Jesus. She raised, disciplined, and shaped him into the man he would one day become. When you think of her responsibility, it is somewhat awe-inspiring. Can you imagine a toddler that has the power of creation? I would imagine that would be a rather challenging task, to say the least. I’ve always suspected whenever I’ve read Jesus say, “Fear the one who can destroy both body and soul,” that this was actually a quote about Mary and is an early form of, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it!”

I am verging on heresy here, but follow for a moment; if Jesus is fully god and fully human, I would imagine that those natures warred against each other. I mean, we all war within ourselves between the selfish nature of humanity and trying to be good people. The function of our bodies tells us that we must survive, and that means we need basic human things: food, water, oxygen, etc, and we will absolutely fight a motherf+cker if our needs aren’t met. That is, sadly, human nature. In order for Jesus to be fully human, he had to struggle with those things as well, which means that he went through all of the experiences of terrible twos and puberty. He had to wrestle with his humanity like every human must. That means Mary would have had to give the talk to God, tell God to go to his room, pick God up when he scraped his knee after a fall, and console God the first time he had his heart broken. Jesus was God experiencing humanity for the first time. It is possible that until this, everything from stubbing his toe to hunger pains and becoming horny were all just theoretics. Just like any human, Jesus would have leaned on his parents to help him become a better person, and, I suppose, it's possible that also made him a better God.

All of that considered, Mary faced the unique challenge of raising not just a decent human but a good God. Like the mother of any gifted child, I am sure she would tell you it was a challenge but worth it.

Considering this, I think we all have a debt of gratitude to her, and the title of Mother of God is the least she is owed for having to put up with a teenager who could self-produce alcohol. The question is asked every holiday season, “Mary, did you know?” Well, when they ran out of wine at that wedding reception, and Mary heard about it, she immediately said, “Just take some water to Jesus; he can turn it into wine.” She seemed really, f+cking sure about that. Because this wasn’t Mary’s first rodeo, Jesus had been her son his whole life, and she knew what he was capable of. I like to imagine the Mother of God catching Jesus making some wine for all his homies when 16-year-old JC sneaks in through the window and hits him with, “You could use your power for anything, and this is what you do? I’m not mad, I am just disappointed.” and then, anytime Mary had the girls over would call Jesus in and be like, “Ladies, look what my kid can do! Jesus, do your wine trick.”

“Mom, not again!” Again, just like every gifted kid.