麻豆社

Good morning.

The French summer holiday season, which began on Bastille Day, the 14th of July, reaches its traditional climax today. It does so not through a feast founded on bloody revolution but with a religious festival, a celebration in honour of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It鈥檚 a public holiday. Banks, businesses and many shops will be closed. Processions will wind their way through villages, parading large effigies of her that live, for the rest of the year, in their parish churches. It鈥檚 not a great day, as I found to my cost some years ago, to be running low on petrol.

Mary intrigues me. Traditional artwork tends to depict her near the beginning of her story, those few months when she takes centre stage, encountering an angel then nursing her infant child. Mary鈥檚 voluntary and joyful acceptance, of her place in God鈥檚 plan, presents a pattern for the Christian response to God, one that echoes down the ages. But, and perhaps it鈥檚 because I鈥檓 getting older myself, it鈥檚 the Mary of her later, post childbearing years, who fascinates me more.

The middle aged Mary who, joining with Jesus at a wedding feast, persuades him into the first great miracle of his ministry. The Mary who, when most of his friends and followers have fled, keeps watch as, nailed to a cross, and with almost his final breath, Jesus commits her and his friend John into each other鈥檚 charge. The Mary who is a key member of the first Church community around Jerusalem, before living out her life, supporting and supported by John, probably in the city of Ephesus. Her life may have been shaped by the events of her teenage years, but Mary doesn't stay frozen in time. She matures beyond child rearing, embracing a life that continues to hold meaning and purpose, even beyond the death of her son.

From airline cabin crew to TV news presenters, the Britain I grew up in tended to move women away from more public facing, visible roles, at an age far earlier than their male counterparts. Women actors too found offers of leading roles dry up as youthful beauty faded. And whilst arguably some of the cultural pressures that airbrushed older women out of the picture may have lessened of late, the legacy of that long devaluing lives on. So today I will think of a Mary much older than the statues being paraded through French streets. A Mary white haired and wrinkled, playing her part in forming and leading the Christian community in Ephesus. Offering the wisdom she has gleaned over the decades. Living the values she first instilled then observed in her son. A tribute to the contributions of older women and maybe even us older men.

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