As Catholic Christians, we hold pretty big and bold ideas and names for Mary. She is the Mother of God, of course, and the Blessed Mother. She is Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, Help of Christians and Undoer of Knots. She was, we believe, immaculately conceived and, later, assumed into heaven.
And, yet, as singer-songwriter Pierce Pettis reminds us in this song from his 1996 album, “Making Light of It,” for a little while each year, she is Miriam, a teenage girl who says yes to the most difficult and seemingly impossible of requests. Although a virgin, although still a child herself in many ways, “the laws of nature were suspended,” and she becomes the bearer of the Incarnate Word of God into the world.
This song welcomes me into the season of Advent and prepares me for the down-to-earth reality of the Nativity. No banners unfurled. For while this is the night that will change the trajectory of humanity and our lives as believers, it is also the story of a teenage pregnancy. This story we hear, at least one night a year, is a deeply human and earthbound one.
Consider the setting and characters of our story, for they are as simple and humble as the cast of a parish school’s winter play. There’s a tiny town on the outskirts of Jerusalem, as swollen with people as is the young girl about to give birth in a dirty, starlit, animal-filled barn. There’s a straw-lined feeding trough for a makeshift cradle that prefigures the cross-stitched world into which the child is born. There’s a quietly scared father figure wondering what it all means and still discerning his place in the story.
And then there’s Miriam, and perhaps she is the real miracle. Time, theology and medieval art will add the halo she wears like a crown and give us the cherubim with golden curls, but the story we hold so dear and tell so fervently this time of year begins with Miriam.
As Pettis explained in a recent email: “We tend to forget that she was, after all, just a little girl with a huge faith.”
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