praying to Mary is saving my faith

a disorientation observed

Near the cross of Jesus stood his Mother

John 19:25

“It’s funny”, I remarked to Josh over a half eaten breakfast burrito in Islington, “well, it’s not really”.

“I haven’t been able to pray, not to God anyway”

Josh is a wild and unique character who can take shit like this. He’s the sort of guy who’s stocky and broad shouldered but has an affectation for cardigans and tight haircuts. At once comfortable with the academy professors and with the lapsed God-haunted hipsters of Archway. More in the church when he’s in a sweaty bar in Camden. He has a warm, gentle, and strange voice, probably the product of his peripatetic Pakistani/British upbringing. A baptiser in the wilderness, deeply tender, who suffers fools very gladly. Thank God.

The first time I bumped into him was at a summer festival called Davids Tent in the English countryside, massive tattoo of St. Francis of Assisi splashed across his forearm. St Francis is my boy, so I ran up to him - he had just led a set Main Stage- and congratulated him his devotion to the Seraphic Father. We both connected on big Frank more when we first properly met, when he was speccing out the houseshare I was living in in North London at the time.

I shared with him that for a time, I had been seriously thinking about becoming a Franciscan Friar, but had decided, for a bunch of reasons, that I would rather pursue what I loved about Francis, his wildness and utter connection to the incarnate humility of God, as a married man instead someday. Do some poetry, love some God, make some kids. That felt (and still feels) like the good life.

‘Yes’, Josh declared.

‘you shall be a priest in the wild’.

I felt christened when he said that.

See most well meaning church people that I talk to have a loving but distortedly misplaced tendency to rush into ones doubt and despair with an easy answer, and in this tend to do more harm than grace to the griever. There are no easy answers, and easy answers are easily replaced.

I remember on one occasion, when a dear friend of mine, my age or so, had lost her husband to cancer, she was unfortunate enough to run into a great deal of bad bandage theology. Perhaps he had died because ‘we didn’t pray hard enough’, ‘maybe you didn’t have faith’, and probably most disgracefully of all, ‘it was clearly Gods will for him to go home’.

I’m not quite an open theist (yet), but I have a particular distaste for slapping the will of a benevolent and loving God on utter tragedy as a nice thought cancelling sticker. It’s a very awful blasphemy indeed.

I’m a well travelled companion to the mind bending and doctrine-defying devastation that grief can bring. When bad things happen, to you, to good and holy people that you love, and ‘the wicked prosper’, there’s a palpable sense of Gods utter absence. The absence of his love, his care for you, yes, but a moral absence. An injustice. Something that says ‘God is not here, he cannot be’.

The invitation then, to trust and surrender to the very God who has refused to intervene on your behalf feels like salt in the wound. God, I have discovered, can be very untrustworthy indeed. I don’t believe, as Nick Caves sings, in an interventionist God.

I couldn’t bear praying to Jesus. I couldn’t be ‘in the word’. Praying in tongues, worship music, all of it, I had an allergy to it all of a sudden, like it made my soul come out in a rash. All the promises contained in the bible gave me hives, and reading lamentations just made me sad. Reading phrases like “which of you, when your child asks for bread, would give him a stone … how much more does the Father give good gifts to those who ask” would make me slam the big leathery tome shut and swear.

It is, in many ways, a high stakes game to believe in a loving God. If you believe in a loving God, you are therefore bound believe that he will act in a loving way towards you. You are bound to believe that ‘all things work together for good for those that love him’ and so forth. This is a particularly fraught enterprise when you do see God acting in dramatic and supernatural ways on behalf of others, when say, you are a charismatic, who has received the baptism of the spirit and such, and has seen broken bones and blind eyes getting healed and so forth. It raises the threshold on what you are well aware God can do. It would be easier if we knew that God was not an interventionist, and in fact, never performed miracles. There would be a wonderful existential comfort in being a cessationist for example, but I have been disbarred from that escape. I have seen too much. Andy Squyres says that to be a charismatic christian is to belong to ‘the people of perpetual disappointment’.

It is probably natural that we should assign a great deal of anger to God who, in our tragedies and dark nights, is aloof, far off, far away, gone, even disinterested. Where the consolation of his love and his fulfilled promises are so far away and out of reach. Hope deferred does indeed make the heart sick, as the psalm says, and hope promised but undelivered makes the heart very sick indeed.

Maybe that’s what pushed me back into the rosary.

I picked it up and prayed it daily, multiple times, and something strange happened. My heart has been, in Wesleyan terms, strangely warmed. It was my only consolation, my only friend. I could not face God, but I could face his mother. His very tender, very non-omnipotent, very long-suffering mum, who knows what it is for a sword to pierce your side. Who knows what it is to watch that which you have loved most die. She has become for me, the light that never goes out.

Hence my confession to Josh, as the dappled light streaked through the half-roof, and the steam from my half drank pourover danced between us, not so much that I no longer believe in God, but that I have lost my ability to engage with him.

“ The moon illumines the night with the light it receives from the sun, and you enlighten our darkness with the splendor of your virtues. But you are fairer than the moon, for in you there is neither spot nor shadow.”

St Bernard of Clairvaux

I disliked praying the rosary growing up. It felt monotonous, unrewarding, and somewhat blasphemous. Perhaps I had a bit of an ‘inner protestant’ owing to my charismatic conversion. ‘If I can pray to God’, I would instinctively think ‘why pray to his Mother?’. And besides, the overall garish vibe of most Catholic Churches, with their massive and frilly madonna statues would sometimes make me shiver. Those very over the top Marian processions I saw when I was a missionary in the Philippines would give me the creeps as well. There’s something about hauling a static, asian looking lady around and singing alot of songs that does feel a bit pagan to be completely honest.

What I LOVED, especially post conversion, was the charismatic, juicy and ecstatic type prayer. Perhaps this is explainable because of my personality. I am utterly riddled with ADHD, despondently sanguine, and crave stimulation like an addict. My schoolteachers were despondent about my inability to sit still for more than 5 minutes, I never stopped biting my nails, and my poor mum was constantly picking bits of me up from all over the house.

I’m a sporadic and messy type, so maybe all the adrenal-high thrill of spontaneity that came with worship, the prophetic, and general wildcard stuff just tickled my monkey brain.

Of course, I do also just think that there is a true and real supernatural Grace on all of the above. I have definitely, and without a shadow of a doubt, encountered God in that setting, but going to mass, praying the rosary, all of it was utterly unstimulating to the point of being oppressive. When you have ADHD, being bored is rather like being waterboarded. So is being heartbroken. We are big feelers like that.

Besides, being a bit of a rebel, praying on my own terms was deeply important to me, so when my mum did gather the tribe around for family rosary, I would discover excuses to skip this court ordered act of mandated public intercession, opting for a bit of bethel and glossolalia in my room instead. These were mainly my late teen years. Pentecostalism-as-rebellion.

So the Mary statues kind of stayed in the drawer and gathered dust forevermore while I embarked on my Quixotic pentecostal venturing. I clocked and gave my due assent to all the Mariology, sure. I assented to the fact that she does indeed intercede for us, read the Brandt Pitre book and got the T-Shirt. Mediatrix of all Graces? Sure! Immaculately Conceived? Absolutely. I kept lighting a candle in front of her statue at mass, but sort of in the same way that you sing the national anthem at a football game, an act of partisan loyalty and belonging more than deep and profound spiritual connection. ‘Here, look, I am still catholic, I do the candle thing’.

But did I love Mary, or have any kind of real devotion to her? That felt a bit ridiculous. No, if I was being honest. Not really, I was saving all my devotion for the big fella.

As if she were the moon itself, It has only been in the inky dark night that I have seen her gentle light.

“may it be a light to you in dark places, when all the other lights go out”

After Galadriel gave three of her golden hairs to Gimli there remains one last gift to be given, to Frodo, the Ring-bearer. She gives to him “a small crystal phial”.

“In this phial,” she said, “is caught the light of Eärendil’s star, set amid the waters of my fountain. It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”

Of course, if you’re familiar with the story you’ll know Chekov’s gun does get fired, and Frodo and Sam later use the Phial to defeat the spider Shelob, and the watchers of the tower of Cirinth Ungol.

It was only when all hope seemed lost that the light of Eärendil’s star shone. In the Dark Night of the soul, we experience the total withdrawal of the presence of God. We might be quick to rush to say that since God promises he will never abandon us, that this is not strictly true. That he is always with us, but that he sometimes permits us to enter into a purgative withdrawal of the sense of his presence. A numbness captures our spirit, and a terrible darkness can invade our circumstances. Often God gives the soul he’s looking to purify more than just that inward purgation. He permits an absolute wave of death and disaster to overtake you. John of the Cross himself had to endure 9 months of horrendous spiritual and physical abuse at the hands of his own community before he wrote his great spiritual works. And God was, yes, enduring the trauma and pain with him, but I wouldn’t blame St. John if he hadn’t wondered whether his Lorship, his sovereignty, his Grace and his promises seemed somewhat redundant.

What we discover at the foot of the cross, when we grab our rosary beads, feel a bit silly, and rattle off our Hail Mary’s, is that while God is Dead, his Mother is Alive. There are long seasons of life that are torturous Good Fridays, and there he offers us his Mother, to accompany us, and be a light that stays on in the darkest nights.

We are a disappointed people who sing and pray to a disappointing God. And that is because God makes very big and wonderful promises that sometimes do not come to pass. I have half-baked reasons as to why; human free will, the blind power of cosmic chaos, the demonic, I don’t know. It is all a mystery. I started a theology degree because I wanted to work through the problem of the god-who-disappoints and I have landed on the other end of that character arc yet more befuddled and disappointed. God has emerged yet more disappointing, yet more non-interventionist, yet more eternally within and without. He is my best friend and my worst enemy, I have wrestled him through many hazy nights emerging utterly broken and exhausted. He is my core wound, my childhood trauma, my greatest friend and my eternal mystery. I cannot escape him.

I don’t think it’s only the neurobiological comfort of praying repetitively that is soothing me so much with these traditional Marian prayers i’m re-engaging with. Nor is it the psychological consolation of re-engaging with a simpler spirituality I had as a child, before the trauma and tragedy. Though these explanations are certainly not without merit. The reality is that I have found a deep, maternal, and constant presence in this relationship with Mary. Utterly uncomplicated, and completely without the trappings of the divine that make her complicit in my pain. Someone who knows what it is to be frustrated with the non-intervention of God, finally snapping at Cana and telling her son to get on with it. Someone who shows up in the Upper Room, makes cups of tea and is willing to acknowledge that in that moment at least, God has, indeed died.

There is a strange, tender comfort to be found in the star of the sea. The woman who stayed silent. The woman who stayed. The woman who, in the utter and abandoned trauma of the cross was offered to us. “Behold your mother”, our dying God managed to say to us before he breathed his last, and turning to her “Behold your son”.

So back to that cafe in Islington, where I had confessed to my friend that no,

I had not been praying to God much lately.

“But”

the light caught my eyes, and a tremble caught my voice. Holding back tears I confessed this one precious golden thread of hope that I had been hanging onto.

“I have been praying to his mother”.

“Every day”

“Yes brother” my very evangelical and non-marian friend murmured in reply;

“and when you come down from your cross, it will be her who anoints your body, kisses your forehead, and wraps you in myrrh and aloes, for the day you will rise again”.

When you have miscarried a dream, when you have lost a friend, when a life has been cut down before its prime, when you are abandoned, kicked to the kerb, when you become very sick, and they pray for you, and nothing happens, when you lose your precious baby, your precious future babies, when your church is engulfed in scandal, when economic disaster visits you, and your future is blown apart, what is there to say, but;

To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.

To thee do we send up our sighs mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Turn then, most gracious advocate,

thine eyes of mercy toward us,

and after this our exile

show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.