Mary the Contemplative
Some years ago I met Father Chrysostom, a Greek Orthodox monk, on Mount Athos. He lived in a hermitage with his disciple at the foot of Karoulia, the bleak rocky desert at the southernmost tip of this peninsula as it juts defiantly out into the blue waters of the Aegean Sea. On top, 250 feet above the waters, individual hermits rooted their one-room cells and sat like fearless eagles peering into eternity.
Because of his age, Father Chrysostom lived below the precipice. But I suspect he chose that spot also because of the cave that he made as his “holy place” to be alone with God. He could move directly from his cell into the natural cave carved out of the base of the mountain.
As he led me into this cool dark cave, he explained what it meant to him to pray there. “You see, it isn’t very large. The ceiling and walls surround me like the arms of a mother. It is hard for me to describe the sense of God’s warmth and intimacy that comes over me as soon as I enter into this cave.”
Scattered man needs to “localize” himself when he wants to communicate with God. God, the incomprehensible, can never be comprehended, held in by any man-made concept or natural, spatial confinement. When man stakes off a sacred place and enters “inside,” he enters into an archetypal experience that is not unlike his primeval experience of beginning life within the maternal womb.
I could understand now why the Greek Fathers were so fond of calling Mary the Uroborus, the womb of God. Mary, for all true Christian contemplatives, will always be the archetypal symbol of the ideal Christian in prayerful adoration and loving surrender to God almighty. The feminine element found in every human being, man or woman, can be described as the empty receptacle, as St. Irenaeus defines man before God. The anima is the vessel that opens to receive life. It is described as a circular movement of two walls that meet and enclose life itself.
It cannot take the aggressive initiative. It is pure receptivity, waiting to receive the male element that will begin the new life-process. It does not have it within itself to begin life. It must therefore wait expectantly.
It is typified by a joyful exuberance of expectancy. It hungers and thirsts to go beyond itself through communion that comes by a total surrender of itself as gift in love to the other.
Michelangelo, in his famous Sistine-Chapel fresco depicting God’s creation of woman, has captured something of this contemplative spirit in woman. Eve stands facing God her Creator, eyes focused upon Him with hands folded in loving adoration. God’s face registers, along with the gesture of His hand, a look of tender love and hope. Into this receptacle God would pour the fullness of His Being.
It is no wonder therefore that Mary would be called the New Eve. She, both by her spiritual and physical virginity, would become God’s womb out of which would come the New Adam.
Tertullian (c.220) shows that into Eve, while still a virgin, the word of the organizer of death crept,
“… likewise into a virgin (Mary) was introduced the Word of God, the builder of life, in order that that which through the same sex was lost, would through the same sex be restored and saved. Eve believed the serpent: Mary believed Gabriel. What that one (Eve) lost by believing the serpent, this one (Mary) corrected by believing.”
The Fathers liken the womb of Mary not merely to the physical receptor of God’s life, but to the intellectual focal point, the “heart” where Mary listened and heard the Word of God spoken through the Holy Spirit by the message of the Angel Gabriel. St. Ephrem the Syrian (c.373) has a number of references to Mary and Eve describing the differences of ”wombs.” “Death entered and spread through the womb, the ear (of Eve), so through the ear, the new womb of Mary, life has entered and spread.”
St. John Damascene also repeats this image of a “hearing womb” by which Mary becomes the Mother of God. “The conception was effected through the hearing.” In his second homily on the Assumption, St. John Damascene writes: “But she, the truly blessed above all, (in contrast to Eve) inclined her ear to the Word of God and was filled by the operation of the Holy Spirit, and through the Father’s good pleasure announced by the archangel, became pregnant.”
~ George A. Maloney, Mary: The Womb of God
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