Michael Crosby, OFM.Cap.


Mary of the Magnificat
This Pentecost person is the one who in the power of the inspiration shared with us her canticle, the Magnificat. It is an unbelievable expression of Mary's spirituality. And it rearticulates powerfully the belief of the Hebrew community of that time.

I define spirituality as our experience of God at work in our lives, and our expression of that experience in our world. However, both the experience and the expression take place within a community setting. Back in the 1940s and 1950s with the tremendous stress on Mary, the image of Mary in many ways defined Roman Catholicism. Not the sacraments, not Vatican II or "Lumen Gentium," it was Mary that made us Catholics unique. (I remember articulating this very clearly to Jimmy Avery, the boy who lived next door. I told him he wasn't going to heaven because he was Protestant, and my clincher was that the Blessed Virgin had never appeared to a Protestant!)

When the Scripture writers reflected on the biography of Mary of Nazareth, what was her story? Just before this session another presenter, theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, was telling me how "mujerista" theology today is trying to develop out of women's reality a counter-narrative -- one that listens to the experience of those who are marginated and unheard. Well, that is exactly what the Magnificat is: a counter-narrative. In a society preoccupied with rules and regulations, the things that touch our lives are the stories.

When the early Christian community reflected on the story of Mary, they realized that it was in many ways a repeat of the story of Hannah, that great woman of their past in the Book of Samuel. In a male-defined society where women existed only to serve and reinforce the significance of the male, the birth of a highly significant male was often indicated by unbelievable circumstances for his mother: she was a virgin, or she was for many years unable to conceive, or she was very old.

Hannah could not produce a child, so she had lost her only identity in Israelite society. She went into a very deep depression. In I Samuel 1, verse 9, she went in prayer to the temple. Eli the priest was sitting by the doorpost. She was deeply distressed. She prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly. Eli watched her lips moving, but her voice was not heard. (I remember my mother would do that when she prayed. She'd be praying silently and moving her lips as she did the ironing.) Eli thought she had been "under the nip" a little bit. "How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself?" he said. "No, my Lord," she replied, "I am a woman deeply troubled," and then she poured out her story. She was childless, and it was of course all her fault. (In those days you never had her husband Elkanah suggesting he might have had a low sperm count. It was always the fault of the woman.) In an honor-shame culture, she is covered with shame. But then the good news comes that she is to have a child.

Samuel is born, and Hannah then goes up to the temple and starts to pray:
"My heart exults in the Lord my God ... My mouth derides my enemies ... The bows of the mighty are broken, and the feeble gird on strength ... Those who were full hire themselves out for bread, but those that were hungry are fat with wealth ...

It almost sounds like the Magnificat! The author of I Samuel writes the story of Hannah, but when this became part of the revelation of the community it was not just her story. It now became the theological reflection on how God wants to work in impossible situations in all our lives, when we are not productive, when we have everything going against us, when we are not honored, when we are put out. Somehow in this story we see what divine revelation is promising to all of us on the testy side of paradise, when things aren't working well.

The community of Mary reflected on the phenomenon of her life, and how she experienced God (the first part of her spirituality), and what it meant for their exiled and oppressed community for Mary to have a part in its transformation, pregnant in hope for something that would be different. Then they wrote down the Magnificat.

In the first five verses (Luke 1, 46-50), we have Mary's reflection, articulated by the writer, of how she experienced God -- how God was acting in her. In verses 51-55, we hear how Mary saw the consequences of the reign of God for the world about her, and for the principalities and powers who reigned in that world.

"My soul magnifies the Lord." Here was a woman saying she was made in the divine image. And more than that: she is actually making God better known. She is a revelation of the divine presence. She is that revelation in her feminine form that is not only revealing, but magnifying God, making God understood better. Her very being was doing this, everything that she was about.

"For you have looked with favor, O God, on your lowly servant, and from this day forward all generations will call me blessed." If I said, "All generations will call Michael Crosby blessed," everyone would say, "Who does he think he is?" But we've gotten so used to saying those words. Here is a woman, a marginated person in a society where women and children did not count, and she is saying: From now on, because of who I am and what I am going to do in this world, all generations are going to call me blessed.

How does this strike those, usually men, who have given us the image of the woman as unbelievably humble and docile, with nothing of strength and conviction and those high cheekbones that say, 'I've been around the block'? (Here Crosby pointed to the Aspell sculpture. See page 1.)

"All generations will call me blessed." Isn't that the height of pride? No, it is the essence of humility, because she immediately recognizes a Higher Power: "For the One who is mighty has done great things for me." The essence of being poor in spirit is to recognize the power of someone beyond yourself. When in the depth of your soul you know that, and experience that, you are allowing the Reign of God to take over in your life. That's what Mary did, and that's what she articulates. "And holy is that One's name."

"God's mercy is on those who fear God." That is not Michael Crosby's fear of God from the 1940s and 1950s, but an open respect, an absolute sense of reverence before the Holy One. The awe that here is Someone bigger than me. Not Someone who's out to get me, but Someone who has given life to me.

"You have shown strength with your arm." Here begins the second part of Mary's spirituality. In the first we acknowledge and reflect on how God is at work in our lives. But in the second we reflect on what God wants to do through our lives to transform this world that is still pregnant. Mary's pregnancy was of that Word which created the world in the beginning when darkness covered the earth. So her pregnancy is the promise, and these words come out of pregnancy, out of promise, out of hope for what is not yet, but what might be.

When we are a community in exile, under oppression, without our identity, how can we sing a song to the Lord? Yet in such a situation Mary begins to articulate the transformation that will come. "You have shown strength with your arm. You have scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, you have brought down the powerful from their thrones and have lifted up the lowly. You have filled hungry people with good things and sent the rich away empty. You have helped your servant Israel, remembering your mercy, according to the promise you made to our ancestors, to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants forever."

Back in 1985 I got my degree in economics. I learned how economics, oikonomia, has everything to do with issues of wealth. And wealth in a world of poverty defines the reality of those who have power, vs. those with no names -- no prestige, those without even the dignity of a name. John Kenneth Galbraith says that power, possessions and prestige are the contemporary understanding of what we mean by wealth. A few years ago, I was with the La Salette community, reflecting on their charism and on what happened in that farm area outside of Grenoble, France in the apparition of the Blessed Virgin to the two children. We were reflecting on what that might mean for the contemporary world. I was sharing some thoughts about the Magnificat. All of a sudden, the Scriptures just opened up to me. I had been reading this Magnificat for years. "You have scattered the proud ... you have brought down the powerful and lifted up the lowly ... you have filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty." It suddenly became clear to me: the Magnificat was talking about a world in poverty that is pregnant with hope that everybody is going to have a life that will be reordered. Power, possessions and prestige will be transformed to benefit not those with the wealth but those in poverty. In this prayer, Mary, the Mother of the Church, the model of discipleship, was talking about what all of us must do for the transformation of our world. It was turning the whole world upside down. In the midst of oppression. she was the model of liberation. As she said these words in the midst of that which did not give life, her pregnancy was the promise: if we allow the reign of God, and if we allow our souls to magnify that God, the transformation can take place. All we need are a few people who will live together and support one another in Magnificat communities. All we need are a few communities uttering this canticle and knowing what it means for the transformation of our world.

That was the turning point for me. That was my new understanding of who Mary could be in my life, because my life was dedicated to that transformation of the world, to reorder the power relationships. Mary is more radical than I can ever be. She said the rich were going to be sent empty away. I don't want to see the rich sent empty away . I just don't want them to send anyone else empty away.

In today's Church and society, when some communities of women and men try to re-appropriate that Scripture passage, it can be very problematic. I have an example from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, one of the largest orders of men religious, and the largest in Canada. When they were writing their constitution, they drafted a passage that said: "We are members of a prophetic Church. While recognizing our need for conversion, we bear witness to God's holiness and justice. We announce the liberating presence of Jesus Christ, and the new world born in His resurrection. We will hear and make heard the clamor of the voiceless, which is a cry to God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the lowly." When they submitted their draft constitution to the Vatican, they were told: You have to take out those words! They said: But this is the Word of God. And the Congregation replied: Our word is that you take them out. They are too radical. They said: We have to leave these words in, because the Vatican Council said we should go back to the roots of our charism, and our roots are in the Magnificat. Finally the Vatican let them keep the words, but required them to add: "This prophetic mission is carried out in communion with the Church, in conformity with the directives of the hierarchy, and in dependence on our superiors."

That shows you what many of us face when we try to articulate these kinds of truths, and people are not open to the truth.

Now let me read you what that group in Los Angeles said about me and the talk you have just heard me give: "Father Michael Crosby's talk on 'Mary's Magnificat: A Mirror of Justice' proved to be an explicit put-down of Marian devotion. Crosby said the Rosary is unscriptural, and Marian devotions are immature and childish." I just said the Rosary last week, when I was on the way to bury my aunt who died of Alzheimers. How can they say that?

"He said the traditional Marian piety was a dysfunctional spirituality. He ridiculed an order called Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and even read part of their mission statement aloud, and everyone laughed at it." I just read you statements from the constitutions of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. How things get twisted.

"'The Magnificat is really a call to bring down the mighty,' he said, 'and that means to redistribute wealth.' He said Mary and Jesus would support affirmative action." Not only would Mary support it. I think she would say there is no way to be a disciple of Jesus and not work to make it happen! I met yesterday with the head of Texaco. The mighty have been brought down from their thrones, because they were not sensitive to the reality of those without access to the high places.

The community that wrote the scriptures we now know as the Gospel of Luke asked themselves what was going on that made Mary so significant. They found in the Canticle of Hannah the story of Mary. Now the Magnificat has become, not just biography, but theology -- the belief of the community about this person who we say among all of us was blessed. How can we find in our own experience of God something so powerful that we magnify God to our world, and have some effect on the underlying power relationships, property allocations, and issues of prestige -- who's in and who's out?

3. Models for today: A personal reflection
We all need images -- models that signify to us that it can be done in our contemporary life. In my life, an image and model is my own mother. My brother Pat and his wife Carol tried for a long, long time to have a baby. Finally they succeeded, and Craig, first child of my mother's oldest son, was born. I went home, and my mother said, "You know, Mike, when I heard the good news, the first words that came to my mind were, 'My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God.' Isn't God wonderful to our family ?" Just as Mary in our faith story appropriated the canticle of Hannah, so Blanche Crosby, in the firstborn of her second generation, was appropriating in her own experience the canticle of Mary.

When my mother died, we decided we would not give out old-style holy cards like we had for my father in 1963. We wanted to articulate the reality of our mother in light of the divine revelation. So we took the last picture we had of her cutting up vegetables at the house of my aunt in Sun City where she died, and we entitled it, "He has done great things for me." Then we quoted from her own writings on her memorial prayer card.

As I was getting my degree in spirituality at Berkeley, I discovered that my mother's writings reflected how she experienced God, and how she expressed it in the way she understood the world in the context of her community, the family.

Here's something of what she wrote after she became a widow. I had written her that it must be a bummer to be a widow after all these years, feeling alienated and left out -- like not getting invited to play bridge because her partner was gone. She wrote back: "Really though, I'm doing all right, and please don't be too concerned. I put myself in God's hands, and I don't think of myself as being alone. Rather I am aware of all the others who are afflicted most seriously. And I count God's many mercies to me and to mine, and I go on, a day, really an hour, at a time. Surely I make plans. I must. But there are no plans really important. And each hour, each day, brings me closer to the end for which I was truly made. And if that last day or hour were to come before too long, I would have no especial desire to postpone it."

That was the way she was open to God in her life. Remember I spoke of her moving her lips in prayer while she was ironing? Years later, she went back to Marian College to take some courses, and I happened to notice a paper she had written for her journalism class. It was entitled, "Meditations of a Housewife While at the Ironing Board." She was there reflecting on God. So when later on she climbed that mountain of God, she became more and more purified.

She also became more and more sensitive to what was going on in the world -- all the painful things concerning wealth and poverty. When she retired from schoolteaching she would drive into the inner city of MIlwaukee where I was working, and she would tutor the kids. I was on the justice and peace committee of the Milwaukee priests' senate. In 1969 I got arrested in the Pentagon in Washington for protesting the war. Since I was with Jane Hart, wife of Senator Philip Hart of Michigan, and with Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd (remember his book, "Are You Running With Me, Jesus?"), the story of our arrest went on the AP wire and showed up on the front page of the Fond du Lac, Wisconsin hometown paper. The next time my mother went to play bridge, she told me, "Michael, the girls were all a-twitter about what you had done. When I walked in, the house went silent. Finally Florence Thibadeau said, 'Well, I see Mike's at it again.'" I had never been arrested before in my life. My mother said, "Yes, Hugh and I raised the four boys to act on their conscience, and it looks like that's what he did. And besides, I agree with what he did."

Because of my role in the priests' senate, I would often be in the paper articulating justice positions on the issues: sanctuary, the B-1 bomber, the grape boycott, the Gallo boycott, and so on. Once when my mother was dying of emphysema, I called and asked how she was doing. She was more concerned about how I was doing. She had read in the paper that I had introduced a resolution on some peace/justice issue in the priests' senate and then withdrawn it. "What's the matter with you? Where's your gumption?" she said. I told her we'd withdrawn it to reword it so it would get more votes next time. She was relieved. "I was worried about you."

My mother composed her own last Christmas card to communicate her vision of faith to all of us, especially her four sons. She wrote:

"I've been thinking a lot about words, and all the emphasis on a four-letter word having to do with evil and filth." (We could never utter that word at home, but she had been a schoolteacher with playground duty. So she had heard that word many times!) "I've decided most four-letter words are words of encouragement." Her card was a design made up of four letter words: the HOLY Family in LOVE: MAMA MARY, PAPA JOSE, BABY JESU. She invited us to join them. Her Christmas wish for us was PRAY, WORK, PLAY, REST, FOOD, HOME, CARE, LOVE. To be thankful for WARM, COOL, BODY, FOLK, BOOK, HELP, ALLY, RAIN. (She had the integrity not to include "snow." Every year with the first hint of snow she would fly from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin to her sister's house in Sun City, Arizona for the rest of the winter!) How to serve with HAND, HEAD, FEET, EARS, EYES, TALK. Things to be aware of: NEED, PAIN, ACHE, VOID (They have no wine!), WANT, FEAR.

That's the legacy I got from someone who was a Magnificat person. My life now is to live that theology which was her spirituality -- to bring the mighty from their thrones and raise the lowly to high places, to make sure no person is without food, to work on that transformation, and to do it in community. Mary's theology is to be lived out in our biographies, in our spiritualities. This is what should happen if we too "store up" all these things in our hearts.