There's Something About Mary
- Chris Maunder
- Mar 16, 2021
- 5 min read
People know that I have a strong interest in Mary, the mother of Jesus. Devotion to Mary is the area that I research: I have written and edited books about it. I also practice it, as I help to look after the Chapel of Our Lady of the Crag in Knaresborough, a shrine carved into the rock with a statue of Madonna and Child as its focus. Mary provided a common interest for Natalie and I which led to us being married. Natalie and I like to visit other shrines of Mary as pilgrims when we travel anywhere. So Mary is important for my faith, my marriage, my work, and my leisure! How did this come about?
I was brought up in a family that attended the Methodist Church. My parents had been Congregationalists as children, but they moved over to the Methodists because they had a Scout group. I, along with my brother and sister, went to Sunday school but during the 1960s my parents began to lose interest in the church. They said that the people they knew outside the church were nicer than those inside! I was old enough to realise that some very difficult characters went to that church. My parents’ Christian faith was not strong enough to survive this and so, when we moved to Germany in 1969, the family stopped going altogether. My parents said that they no longer believed in God; they just held to the moral teachings of Christianity. Both of them thought there might be ‘something else’ other than the material universe, but they weren’t sure what it was.
So I was in a spiritual vacuum. That suited me as a typically rebellious teenager. I was secretly still interested, but I enjoyed arguing with Christians and announcing that they could not prove anything. They sensed my underlying interest, and I was the attention of several efforts to evangelise me. Yet I could not be convinced. The Christians I knew as a teenager were not cool people for that age group, I have to admit. Nevertheless, I read the Bible and never wholly gave up on the belief in God.
I went to work in a children’s home in 1975, a stressful job but a turning point in my life. Some of the staff were very keen on astrological signs, and this interested me. I very quickly learned the basics and found that it did seem to work. I was something of a natural at interpreting horoscopes and Tarot readings, and this reinvigorated my belief in that ‘something else’. I joined astrological societies when I moved to London in 1978.
In my twenties, I was a keen reader of anything spiritual, from astrology to Tarot cards to mythology, but also books about the Bible. Some of these were rather sensationalist, prophesying this and that based on the Book of Revelation. I came to realise that an awful lot of rubbish was published on that topic, but that didn’t stop me retaining an interest and thinking that there might be hidden meanings to discover in the Bible.
I was also attracted to goddesses in myth: Athene, Artemis, Isis. I loved Robert Graves’ The White Goddess on Celtic myth. I also enjoyed reading the work of Carl Jung on the archetypes. It was Jung who switched me on to Mary, as he had a fascination for her and what she meant psychologically. He, like me, had been brought up in a Protestant world where everything was described in male terms: God was a father, Jesus his son, and even the Holy Spirit was described as a ‘He’. I agreed with Jung that there needed to be a greater balance in our understanding of the divine. God could be conceived as a mother as well as a father.
Pope John Paul II’s visit to Britain in 1982 was the final piece in the jigsaw. I bought a biography of the pope for a friend’s Catholic father as a 65th birthday present. Before I handed it over, I read about the pope’s strong devotion to Mary, coming as he did from Poland. And so it all fitted together: the Christianity of my childhood and the Bible; the feminine in mythology; and the belief that the universe was a stranger place than the two rigid systems of Protestantism and materialist science seemed to allow. Catholicism seemed a friendlier place for the person who retained an interest in astrology and myth, more in touch with that other world. So I went to my first Mass on the 30th of January 1983 and was confirmed on the 29th of June 1983, at St Mary’s, Croydon. This led to my desire to study theology, which I took up at Leeds University in 1984.
However, I was never comfortable with the male priesthood of Catholicism and so I have been an uneasy member of the Church. By the 1980s, I was a convinced feminist and for me Mary was in some way an image of God just as Jesus was. I joined the Catholic women’s ordination movement. I get very mad when I read popes or Catholic theologians describing Mary as ‘subordinate’ or ‘inferior’ to Jesus – and they do, you know! Sounds to me like their ideal of gender relations are being projected into heaven.
So I have been out of kilter with both Catholic church structure and doctrine. Despite this, I have continued to identify as a Catholic. When I married Natalie, who was born a Catholic, we got married in a Catholic Church with a nuptial Mass.
As a liberal and radical, I have been an unlikely but frequent visitor to shrines of Mary. Marian devotion tends to attract the more conservative members of the Church. Generally, I kept my views to myself, but I sensed the disappointment when, on a few occasions, someone encouraged me to say more about what I believed. They really didn’t want to hear it! But, despite the mismatch, there was just something about Mary that kept me in there.
My horoscope has in it an opposition between the Sun in Capricorn in the 4th house and Uranus in Cancer in the 10th. This describes my split personality: I am a conservative and a radical all rolled into one! Astrology can be very useful in uncovering those hidden contradictions within oneself. The conservative – the man who loves Mary and Marian shrines, and retains a strong Christian faith – and the radical – the man with an interest in astrology, and who thinks that Mary is an incarnation of God just as much as Jesus is – both exist within me, and the opposition is irreconcilable. I just have to live with it. People like to pigeon hole you – am I a Catholic or not? Am I a Christian or not? But many of you will agree with me when I say that it is quite natural for human beings to believe in different things at once. We are not simple creatures. It is an interesting and creative task to try and make sense of a world in which opposing forces exert their influence on you at the same time.
Mary remains indispensable to my faith, to my view of the universe, and to my daily life. Christianity is a wonderfully liberating message: God became human and so we are raised to the dignity of the divine, each of us, especially those who are most overlooked in human society. It makes sense to me that God becoming human would have occurred in the female as well as the male, Mary and Jesus, new Eve and new Adam, even if those who wrote the New Testament didn’t seem to recognise the fact. However, I can read it between the lines. I’m afraid I can’t read it any other way.
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