I Was Trying to "Be Like Mary"

An advent story of the sacred rendered into sacrilege

During this season of Advent, I think a lot about Mary. I look at images of her, so often with downcast eyes, and I feel some inexplicable kinship with her.

“The Virgin on the Rocks” by Leonardo da Vinci (Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett)

Again and again, when I was a kid, my pastor told me I should “be like Mary.” And God knows I tried.

The pastor wanted service of my young body, and since nothing made sense, I was balky. So, he would chastise me by invoking Mary.

“Where would we all be if Mary hadn’t trusted God even when her special role was something she couldn’t understand?”

As a girl who loved God with whole heart, I pondered the question in all earnestness.

According to the Southern Baptist faith of my childhood, if Mary hadn’t been willing to trust in what God wanted of her, however crazy it seemed, then human beings would be destined for eternity in hell without a savior. And we aren’t talking some mere metaphorical hell. The church I grew up in dished out a constant threat of a hyper-violent hell where the unsaved would burn forever without ever burning up.

So, the pastor’s admonition that I should “be like Mary” weighed heavily.

He said that I too was “chosen” for a special role and that I needed to “live by faith.” So, like Mary, I said “according to God’s will.”

It was incomprehensible but I trusted that God knew best, and I trusted the pastor as God’s emissary.

I answered the call of God. I complied.

With Mary as my model, how could I have done otherwise? I would have a faith as strong as hers.

Not that I ever specifically imagined I would give birth to a Christ child. I only believed what the pastor told me — that just as God had decreed a special role for Mary, so too did God have a special role for me. And it wasn’t my place to try to understand — indeed I was being sinful if I even tried. My role was simply to live by faith in submission to God’s will.

It was an impossible bind for a faith-filled kid raised to “lean not to thine own understanding.” How could I say no to God?

This is the horror of a pastor-predator. He will twist everything, even the Christmas story, into a weapon for his unholy ends of child rape.

I complied but I could not possibly have consented. This is a realization of my adult self.

Unbounded faith turned out to be a weakness; it’s what made me prey. I did as I was told God willed, and I trusted a spiritual authority figure. And now, forever more, even the beauty of the Christmas story is, for me, neurologically networked with childhood rape.

Childhood rape. That’s what it was, dozens of times over the course of months. Now many years later, I’m not inclined to mince words or soften the reality of it.

But I do keep thinking about Mary.

How could a naïve young girl — fifteen at the oldest — consent to have her body “overshadowed” & impregnated by the ultimate authority figure — an all-powerful god?

According to the account in the Gospel of Luke, Mary complied. But to my mind, that brings no resolution to the question.

I know it’s a question that makes some uncomfortable. But how should I not wonder about it, given how firmly I was instructed to “be like Mary” and given all that it cost me? If there is some wrong in pondering the comparison to Mary, then I would point out that it was the pastor who first planted the comparison, insisting that I should have a faith like Mary’s and trust in the rightness of God’s will, no matter what.

It was the pastor who rendered the sacred into sacrilege. I only tell of it.

And in the telling, questions arise — questions that were forbidden to me as a kid when the only faithful response was “trust and obey.”

Recently, I had the privilege of reading an advance copy of Beth Allison Barr’s forthcoming book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife. (My advice? Just go ahead and pre-order – you’re gonna want to read it.) Barr recounts that Dorothy Patterson once wrote a paper explaining how Mary “let” the incarnation “happen to her” with “a quiet spirit,” and praising Mary’s behavior as an example of “a godly woman in submission.”

I felt a lurch in my stomach on reading this, because I know too well the potential impact of that kind of thinking. As Barr points out, according to scholar Amy Peeler, Patterson’s framing casts Mary as the “Total Rape Victim.”

And there it is again – that feeling of kinship with Mary. Once upon a time, I too was a girl of “quiet spirit.”

When another scholar, Eric Sprankle, tweeted that Mary didn’t consent and suggested that, because of the power differential, God acted in a “predatory” manner, Southern Baptist mega-pastor Robert Jeffress blasted Sprankle’s words as “blasphemous babble.”

Furthermore, wrote Jeffress…

“A sovereign God doesn’t need consent from any of us for anything He chooses to do.”

Yikes. This seems to me a framing that does indeed cast God as a rapist.

I can’t help but wonder whether this may help explain the Southern Baptist Convention’s unabated systemic problem of clergy rapists, abusers, and cover-uppers. Maybe a lot of those pastors are imitating their god.

In any event, I’m left with a conundrum. If I believe that Mary consented to being “overshadowed” by God, then how should I not believe that I too consented? After all, I too said “according to thy will,” and I too was instructed by an emissary of God (albeit a pastor, not an angel), and I too answered the “call of God” on my life and complied, believing myself to be a servant of God.

Yet, if there’s one thing I know for sure, it is this: Compliance does not equal consent.

I was raped. Was Mary?

It’s a conundrum beyond my capacity. But this is what I ponder during this season of Advent.

Parts of this piece are excerpts from my book, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation.