Advent 4 The Primal Scream
For the 23rd December
A text for the waiting period that is almost over. A text that we’ve come to regard as The Magnificat: Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies God, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour for the Holy One has noticed me and seen my worth. Surely, from now on, all generations will call me blessed.’ And the word here for blessed does not simply mean, revered, but truly blessed, lucky, fortunate. Here was a primal outpouring from the heart of an historic icon that has been defined and reconfigured to fit various cultures and genres over the years. The figure of Mary, screaming the joy from her heart.
The immaculate conception has been the best argument for a male God. And we ponder the question – did Mary have a choice? Did she have autonomy at all? Mary’s a very constructed figure – an expedient construction of subservience. But there are some threads that can be seen from another perspective. Another construction that is no less valid than that which has been handed down.
Robin Mann, a Uniting Church musician and songwriter offers, by way of explanation for one of our favourite songs: The poster for the 1998 Adelaide Festival of Arts caused quite a storm. It depicted Mary holding, not the baby Jesus, but a piano accordion, and the poster was in the style of an Orthodox Christian icon. It was condemned by church leaders, some individuals tore posters down and many letters were written to the newspaper. I thought it was a pity that the Christian community responded so negatively. Even if the festival organizers meant to offend.
Another primal scream, this time from the heart of religious community. But at least this portrayed Mary more autonomously than many other depictions.
Art is such a subjective medium. We now have an art gallery here at CERES, in the old tram. I’m not generally a great one for understanding the complexities and sophistications of art. My daughter once said, “Sculpture is what Mum backs into when she’s looking at a painting.” But there was one work that did make an impression.
The Scream (Norwegian: Skrik) is the popular name given to each of four versions of a composition, created as both paintings and pastels, by the Expressionist artist Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1910. Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature) is the title Munch gave to these works, depicting a silent scream from the interior of the individual.
Munch’s diary entry reads: One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream.
A little while ago, we were sitting around sharing a few jokes for the festive season. One woman with a few extra kilos around her middle, mused, ‘inside me is a skinny woman screaming to get out. It’s ok, I can usually shut her up ice-cream and plum pudding!’ What should we make of the voice from within, good or bad, that screams to get out? What shapes it, and what does it reveal about the individual? The primal scream, the outpouring that comes from the heart. The part of us that is not owned by external structures.
Last Christmas I saw a sign on a shop window – open seven days and weekends. I did a bit of a double take because I knew that it was not quite right. But then, making sense of Christmas is sometimes a challenge on a few scores. In our largely secular communities I wonder what it is that people make of the season. And so this recorded outburst of Mary is not without its ambiguities and points of puzzlement. It is a kind of scream that comes from within, made even more potent and credible, for its resonance with that of Elizabeth, who, according to Luke’s gospel exclaims with a loud cry, ‘blessed are you among women’, and then describes the sensation of the baby leaping within her, at the sight of Mary’s approach.
Măgnĭfĭkăt [Latin – magnifies], song of Mary, the mother of Christ beginning “Magnificat anima mea Dominum” [my soul magnifies God]. It has been daily a vesper hymn of the Roman Catholic Church and is usually sung at evening prayer in the Anglican Church. Regarding the notions of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love particularly in spaces where these seem to have eluded us, I thought that this may apply to Mary’s child, and the comment made much later in the life of Jesus; Nathaniel’s rhetorical question recorded in John’s gospel, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ What is it that screams from the heart of Nazareth? Clearly Mary herself is overawed by the role she was to play, and this was sparked by the fact of her awareness that she was not a known person from the society’s upper echelons; she was not even from a ‘good’ area. To all intense and purposes, she was a nobody from nowhere. So wherever the attention was focussed for the coming Messiah, if this was still an imminent issue to the Hebrew community, it wasn’t on Nazareth, and it wasn’t on this young woman. The Magnificat, as recorded in Luke, is a spontaneous cry of amazement and peace and joy and hope, from the inner woman.
Sally Cunneen, in her reflections on the Magnificat notes that Mary did not compose this prayer in a spontaneous burst of inspiration, as I used to assume. Luke pieced together a mosaic of phrases from the Hebrew Scriptures that he must have considered, words the real mother of Jesus might have prayed. Or he just might have had access to accounts as told by the real Mary. In his story, Luke particularly stresses the antecedent of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sang a similar hymn of thanksgiving for a long-desired child. Luke also adds echoes of Judith, and the language of the Exodus Sinai covenant. Mary did what the prophet Miriam did; uttered a song of praise and thanksgiving. But this was more pointedly the outpouring of her true spirit. And the genre is in keeping with much of the material in Luke’s gospel, bringing down the mighty from their thrones, and elevating the lowly. In Luke’s gospel the nobodies come to life as real people. Luke is always filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich empty away.
But the passage has a feminist problematic, because, whilst the poor and unknown are elevated, the women’s issue remains, and is eclipsed. The woman is still the ‘handmaiden’. She is still only part of the story by virtue of her ability to give birth. There are still echoes of her falling into the ‘useful tool’ category; the good and obedient servant.
That God could use a woman for a divine birth was foreign to Jewish culture but not to Greco-Roman themes. This was used to explain the divine men Alexander the Great, Octavian, Augustus, etc. In the ancient world, women were the handmaidens of Divine schemes. They held the spotlights on others.
In her 1973 critique, Mary Daly inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, pointed out the contrast between the ancient goddesses and Mary as early as 1949; whereas the goddesses commanded autonomous power and utilized men for their own purposes, Mary is wholly the servant of God: “‘I am the handmaid of the Lord.’ Beauvoir notes, “a mother kneels before her son and acknowledges, of her own free will, her inferiority”; a philosophy that has echoes within our contemporary world. A mandate for women that is by no means finished with. De Beauvoir continues. “The supreme victory of masculinity is consummated in Mariolatry: it signifies redefinement of woman through the completeness of her defeat.” So we could put Mary in a wider systematic context: a remnant of the ancient image of the Mother Goddess, enchained and subordinated in Christianity, as the ‘Mother of God’.” The domesticated mother goddess. A modified and pale version of the more vibrant original, a copy of the original.
So, is this where our theology of Mary leaves us too? Without detracting in any way from Daly’s critique, I think there is cause for optimism within this portrayed image of Mary. It’s clear that Mary considers herself part of a fresh movement that brings about new values that come from nowhere within the status quo. Values that embrace justice and compassion – a positive progression that does not leave her behind as a mere launching pad, but a development within the life of the faith that she regards puts her in the forefront. The story does not lend itself to believing that Mary’s scream or outpouring was a kind of secondhand happiness in the shadow of patriarchy. This appears to be intensely personal, and resonant with another woman, a kinswoman. Her outpouring is an act of independence. In the Magnificat we see something that comes from too deep within the real person to be regarded as a subservient echo of patriarchy. The scream that cannot be contained, the scream that resonates with a kinswoman.
“Magnificat anima mea Dominum” [my soul magnifies God], in the tradition, indicates that her cry comes from something essential, something from the whole of the person, something that comes from the depths, an undreamt of hope, genuine and autonomous.
We’ve all experienced the primal scream for joy and for justice and for despair and for hope and peace. The scream of genuine emotion.
One of the mystic and ever-changing, always-in-a-state-of-advent inspirations in my life is the forest. The towering eucalypts, the refreshing tree ferns, the clean air, the silence that somehow occupies the natural sounds. I do not need human company although I often walk with a friend or two. But the setting does tend to silence us. The collective of trees tends to have that effect. I once got lost in the forest, and, as night fell, and I noted that I could hear no unnatural sound, no car, no tractor, no resonance of human activity, panic hit the pit of my stomach until I noticed light on a hill far away. That, I thought, that is the star of Bethlehem. I must keep this before me and find my way out. But the trees played tricks, and the forest enclosed me. And the great stands of ancient gums seemed to communicate, ‘This is our territory. This is where we belong. You do not have command here. You are not the top of the tree. You are just one of the creatures on the ground, in this place.’ Michael Leunig offered this, titled Givings and misgivings: Oxygen, wisdom, calm – a tree has much to give.
There comes a time in December, when the only Christmas trees that remain for sale in the front of fruit shops are the scrappiest of the scrappy. The big juicy trees have all been sold to the early birds, leaving just the scrubbers for the weary working parents who are running late with life. As with all things Christmas, what is available will have to suffice: the feeble turkey, the last unsatisfactory box of handkerchiefs, in the gift shop the manger in the stable. The unfortunate conifer is bundled home where, with some difficulty, it is stood up in a four-gallon drum or bucket, or whatever else can be scrounged. Some sort of star is then affixed to the drooping tip and its rapidly dehydrating branches are hung with tinsel and fragile glass baubles. Electrical wires may also be attached so that everything lights up and pulses like a sad casino. In the corner of the room, perhaps next to the television, the pitiful young Pinus radiata now stands as a symbol of life and renewal but, alas, is also a picture of death and humiliation. The little family are well pleased with the decorations and gather around admiring their captive tree: the wilting botanical corpse that will never rise to spread its arms in a forest and bring oxygen to the world. Who needs trees – the family is together, the Saviour has been born, and Santa is on his way!
Such a bleak interpretation, yet I remember in childhood sometimes feeling a small murmur of sorrow for the Christmas tree and its sad fate. In spite of all my excitement about its promise and the fragrant mystique, it seemed such a waste of a precious life to someone growing up in a tree-poor industrial landscape, which I shared for a brief time with Michael Leunig, for his sister and I were friends a long time ago.
Leunig then continues to talk about the modern-grown Christmas trees that are fed on hormones and fertilisers and pruned to produce perfect specimens that are uniformly plump and symmetrical, and the longing for the natural and the living, suggesting that a pilgrimage to a living tree may be a more appropriate ritual, than chopping one down, with stars and tinsel not out of the question.
John Williamson, the folk singer and song writer talks about an inner screaming:
Over the hill they go, killing another mountain
Gotta fill the quota – can’t go slow
Huge machinery wiping out the scenery
One big swipe like a shearer’s blow
Rip rip woodchip – turn it into paper
Throw it in the bin, no news today
Nightmare, dreaming – can’t you hear the screaming?
Chainsaw, eyesore – more decay
Christmas is a time to celebrate a new life that emanated from an unexpected place. The story of Mary’s child, in the stable in the back of the inn on a crowded evening in Bethlehem; who would have thought such a simple story would have endured to bring its message of hope and peace down through the millenniums? I’m glad the story has not been cut off at the stump; though it has been hijacked I think in some instances by the trivialising of the religious and the fact that Christmas is big business. Could it be that we sometimes kill off the inspirational voids in our lives; the forests, the oceans, the air, the collective and individual sources of spiritual food. This place CERES, is a living example of hope from a treeless landscape. A rubbish dump that, from the regenerated ground and the fertile imaginations of a few people some thirty years ago, turned this place gradually, back into a living park in the middle of a big city, attracting the Kingfisher and other fauna back into the area. The chronicle of Christmas is the story of the great possibility of peace and hope within our lives and within the world despite the mess we sometimes make of it.
Rev Dr Robyn Schaefer