Yesterday, we went to Mass, and there was a May procession and crowning before Mass in the Church. No little girls – this is a parish with no religious ed, and while children are certainly present, it is not a child-centered scene. Most of the altar servers, for example, are older, even some adults.

So, a statue of Mary was walked around the aisles, carried on a platform by four men (they should probably make sure they’re all a little closer in height next year), followed by a little boy carrying a crown of flowers, which was placed on the statue’s head, not by him, but by an older women. All the while accompanied by venerable Marian hymns. Bring Flowers of the Rarest, and so on.

Boy, does this stuff leave me cold.

The sentimentality, the cloying Victorian romanticism are just such an odd blip in the history of Marian devotion. It draws snippets and bits from the worst of Marian piety of the preceding centuries and mixes it up in a recipe that produces precious little Jesus, no tension, no sense of the greater context, unlike, say, the Regina Coeli:

Queen of heaven, rejoice, alleluia:
For He whom you merited to bear, alleluia,
Has risen, as He said, alleluia.
Pray for us to God, alleluia

For another, interesting look, try this older Tablet article by Eamon Duffy, on Marian devotion. He pulls out the elements of real value from the tradition, and even takes time to score the post-Vatican II "Mary as model disciple" emphasis. Interesting.

The whole point of the hymn [Stabat Mater] is inclusive, not alienating: the devout Christian aspires to share Mary’s grief and so to share also something of her closeness to her Son. In this hymn Mary becomes the enabler of real human feeling. What is important about her is not that she is different from us, infinitely pure and remote, as in the nineteenth-century hymns, but that her humanity is seen here as the pattern of what ours can be, and her grief as a means by which we can learn something of an authentic human response to the death of God incarnate. Mary represents redeemed humanity under the Cross. And once again, this is a Marian poem deeply embedded in the liturgy, this time of Holy Week.

One of the most welcome aspects of the theology of the Second Vatican Council was its drastic reorientation of the whole basis of Mariology, in an attempt to recover the richness and inclusiveness of the patristic and medieval inheritance. The bishops of the council momentously rejected the notion of a separate document on the privileges and place of Mary, thereby calling a halt to the doctrinal and devotional inflation which had been taking place in Marian doctrine over the course of the previous century. Instead, they dealt with Marian themes within the framework of the council’s greatest theological achievement, the constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. The mere fact that the bishops placed what they had to say on Mary within a treatment of the Church was itself a major theological breakthrough, for it reconnected doctrine about Mary to doctrine about the Church.

The Second Vatican Council opened the door for the recovery of an image of the Madonna which does not maim. But such a Mariology has rather conspicuously failed to materialise. Much post-conciliar preaching and writing about Mary has been self-defeating. Most recent treatment of Mary has been relentlessly hortatory and moralistic. It has set aside most of the poetry of the Marian tradition, and instead has looked for immediate intelligibility and straightforward "relevance". It has refocused disproportionately on the annunciation story in Luke, and has seen Mary as essentially a model of obedience to God, someone we should imitate. It is my strong conviction that any Mariology focused primarily on this aspect of her role is doomed from the start, for it is far too cerebral and abstract. Whatever the faults of older Mariologies, they were rarely dry.

Fra Angelico, and the Ceremony of Carols, and the Litany of Loreto remind us that the figure of Mary is too complex, too rich, even too contradictory to be simplified and moralised into banality. A Madonna who is primarily an example is as oppressive and dispiriting and as life-denying as any of the projected Madonnas of the past. In Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, the Lord did not invite us to contemplate Mary in order to see in her what we must do, but to see in her how we are loved. Christians have never thought of Mary primarily as a good example. Rather, she has been loved as the principal miracle of God’s grace and power, and because she is the cause of our joy. We must learn again not to imitate but to celebrate the multiple glories of the Theotokos – the Ark of the Covenant within which the glory of God came to rest: the Rose of Sharon on which the dew of the Godhead descended: the Gate of Heaven, through which the light of life shone on humankind. Christians love the Mother of God not because she sets a standard they must imitate, but because, beyond all desire or deserving, she was the Mother of God.