Advent: 12 December 2022
Greetings,
We enter a new working week with a window opening on to M…. for Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Of those we have lost in 2022, one of the most significant is Hilary Mantel. Her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell and his career under Henry VIII – Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light – are surely among the finest works of fiction ever written. She has an astonishing ability to convey 16th Century life in images appropriate to that time but feeling utterly contemporary to us. She puts words together in ways both beautiful and devastating. And so here are some reflections, in Mantel’s non-fiction and fiction, on Mary.
In her review of Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary by Miri Rubin, found in Mantel Pieces (what a wonderful title for this book of essays) she begins in typically astringent mode:
In my Catholic girlhood she was everywhere, perched up on ledges and in niches like a CCTV camera, with her painted mouth and painted eyes of policeman blue. She was, her litany stated, Mirror of Justice, Cause of Our Joy, Spiritual Vessel, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven and Morning Star. Not a woman I liked, on the whole. She was the improbability at the heart of spiritual life; a paradox, unpollinated but fruitful, above nature yet also against nature…
Neither woman nor girl, Mary hovers on the threshold of experience, rapt in a domestic interior swarming with symbols, like a house but a heavenly house; she is baffled by the angel’s message and enthralled by the glitter of gilded wings.
In The Mirror & the Light, when Jane Seymour (Henry’s third wife) is pregnant, Mantel reflects on Mary and childbirth:
As her time of delivery approaches, a woman will lay out a fortune for a thread of Mary’s girdle. In labour she will pin prayers to her smock, prayers tested by her foremothers. When the smock is bloodied, the midwife will plaster the parchment against the skin of her domed belly, or tie it to her wrist. The perspiring woman will sip water from a jug over which her friends have recited the litany of the saints. The Mother of God will help her, when the midwives cannot. Eve undid us, but Mary by her joys and sorrows helps us to salvation: the pearl without price, the rose without a thorn.
When Mary gave birth to her Saviour and ours, did she suffer as other mothers do? The divines have sundry opinions, but women think she did. They think she shared their queasy, trembling hours, even though she was a virgin when she conceived, a virgin when she carried: even a virgin when redemption burst out of her, in an unholy gush of fluids. Afterwards, Mary was sealed up again, caulked tight against man’s incursions. And yet she became the fountain from which the whole world drinks. She protects against plague, and teaches the hard-hearted how to feel, the dry-eyes to drop a tear. She pities the sailor tossed on the salt wave, and saves even thieves and fornicators from punishment. She comes to us when we have only an hour to live, to warn us to say our prayers.
As Jane Seymour’s time approaches, Mary comes again to Mantel’s mind:
Only remember she is not a goddess but human, a woman who scours pots and peels roots and brings the cattle in: surprised by the angel, she is weighed down by her gravid state, and exhausted by the journey before her, the nights with no certain shelter.
From behind the papist virgin with her silver shoes there creeps another woman, poor, her feet bare and calloused, her swarthy face plastered with the dust of the road. Her belly is heavy with salvation and the weight drags and makes her back ache. When night comes she draws warmth not from ermine or sable but from the hide and hair of farm animals, as she squats among them in the straw; she suffers the first pangs of labour on a night of cutting cold, under a sky pierced by white stars.
And finally, from her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, words not specifically about Mary but which could refer to the grace which came to Mary in the angel’s visit, and her life which followed:
I had come to my own understanding of grace, the seeping channel between persons and God: the slow, green and silted canal, between a person and the god inside them. Every sense is graceful, an agent of grace: touch, smell, taste… You can pray for grace, but it is a thing that creeps in unexpectedly, like a draught. It is a thing you can’t plan for. By not asking for it, you get it.
How we will miss Hilary Mantel and her unwritten books. But her imaginative exploration of how people believe, and how that motivates their private lives and public actions will for ever illuminate our humanity.
Here is a 15th Century image of the Virgin Mary with the infant Christ from St Helen’s Church in Ranworth, Norfolk – an English depiction of Mary which survived the Reformation.
Yours,
Donald.