St Mary the Virgin, 2021
St John’s, still online
Isaiah 7:10-15; Psalm 132:6-10, 13-14; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 1:46-55
My soul magnifies the Lord
In the mid-seventies, Robert Coles—a professor at Harvard University—brought some of his students to meet Dorothy Day, the long-time catholic activist, and a woman who had spent most of her life living with the poor.
Day’s health was not good; in fact she would die a few short years after the visit. For the moment, though, Day had retired to a small room, sparely furnished, in the upstairs of one of the Catholic Worker’s New York hospitality houses, where hungry people would come looking for soup, coffee, and friendship.
The professor’s students had been reading about the lives of poor people, and so they wanted to visit someone like Day, someone who had been living with and documenting the lives of people on the margins for over fifty years. Day had rather famously converted to Christianity in her twenties, and had spent the rest of her life following Jesus by caring for the people most despised and rejected by the world. For her that meant giving up her wealth, and living alongside the urban poor of New York City. And so that freshman class went to meet Day hoping to glean something of the knowledge and wisdom Day had gathered from a life of political struggle.
There wasn’t much time to waste, which gave the visit that much more gravity; Day’s congenital heart disease was going to take her soon. This wasn’t a secret. So as the class gathered around a table in the downstairs kitchen of the house of hospitality, Day started by talking about injustice, and the early development of her desire to make things at least a bit better in the world.
And despite the desire of the students that Day say far more about that— about the struggle to go good in the world, very quickly Day tired of that conversation, and started talking about what she really wanted to talk about. So she started talking, with those disappointed students, not about urban poverty and how to solve it, but about Dostoyevsky. And about Tolstoy. And about Dickens. Day, known well for her stubbornness, wanted to talk about literature. And so she did.
At risk of getting even further away from our feast today—the feast of St. Mary the Virgin—bear with me for a moment. I have my own story to tell about Dorothy Day.
I ordered a print portrait of Day on Etsy, an online service where small companies can sell handmade items directly to people like me. You don’t always know what sort of company you’re going to order from, and to be honest, most times you don’t really care. And I found on Etsy a really compelling portrait of Dorothy Day. The price was reasonable, so I ordered it. So I now have a lovely portrait of Dorothy Day awaiting a frame and a good place to hang it.
But like I said, you don’t always know what kind of company you’re ordering from, but I sure knew what sort of outfit it was once my portrait arrived, because they threw in some extras. I got a postcard that says “this little light of mine is for burning down prisons.” (I’m sure I can think of a Quaker I could send that to.) I got a membership card to Antifa, the sometimes violent anti-fascist protest group. (The name wasn’t filled in, so if you’d like me to fill in your name, that could be arranged.)
And in this packet of surprises that came with my portrait of Dorothy Day came one last thing, a sticker—a sticker with Mary on it, with her fist in the air, with one foot on a skull and the other foot stomping a serpent, with her surrounded by her own words: “cast down the mighty, send the rich away, fill the hungry, lift the lowly.” Mary surrounded by her own words, the words of the Magnificat, the words she spoke, in Luke’s Gospel, right after hearing that her world, that the whole world, was about to change in a profound way.
On a sticker from what turned out to be a rather radical outfit selling things on Etsy. Like Antifa membership cards, and radical abolitionist postcards.
And portraits of Dorothy Day: Christian convert.
Mary, and her words, aren’t so far from Dorothy Day at all—even the radicals can see that.
Part of what’s extraordinary about the words of the Magnificat, Mary’s words of praise to God, is that they are recorded. And even if the historicity of these words might be disputed, who cares, then or today for that matter, what a thirteen-year old, unmarried, pregnant poor kid has to say? But the logic of Scripture is that what she may have said matters. These are not words put in the mouth of the powerful that they might be believed; they aren’t Herod’s words, for example.
And as much as the story of Herod and the beheading of St. John the Baptist has made for great Christian art too, it pales in comparison to what the artists of the world have done with the Annunciation—the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary—and what the composers of the world have done with Mary’s words. Thanks to its place in Anglican Evensong, the Magnificat, Mary’s own words, the words of a poor woman praising God, have been set to music innumerable times, and sung in the most beautiful of church buildings (and some of the most humble, too) yet more innumerable times. The words of a peasant praising God and criticizing wealth are heard by the kings and queens and princes and princesses of the world; and the rabble, too, if you’ve ever lined up for Evensong at King’s College, Cambridge.
The making of something beautiful out of Mary’s words—words that tell us of a God worthy of worship that “has scattered the proud,” a God worthy of praise that “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly,” a God who makes your spirit rejoice that has “filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty”—the setting of these words to music, making them even yet more beautiful, gives us some insight into Day’s love of Dostoyevsky, of Tolstoy, and of Dickens.
They are each, in their way, examples of beautiful things that transform those who see, read, and hear them.
Day’s last days, spent listening to the weekly broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, reading great literature (and talking about it to unsuspecting students rather hoping for her to talk about something else), her last days were not, at all, a final escape from the world she had hoped to make just a little bit better for the precariously housed, for people with addictions, and people experiencing mental illness. It was quite the opposite.
Much like the way the words of Mary, the words and lives of the poor that are recorded in the Bible—whether we read them, or hear them sung in Choral Evensong—this is what was so important to Day about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Dickens. She read them that she might be changed.
As professor Robert Coles tells it, after reflecting on the visit he had, along with his students, with Day that afternoon in the kitchen: “… she had let us know what mattered to her, and why.” What mattered to Day was devotion, the Bible, and church attendance. But what also mattered was “the wisdom to be found in the great masters of … fiction. For her, literature or art were no mere opportunity for entertainment, no mere occasions for aesthetic satisfaction … She hungered for answers to the big questions—how ought one live this life, where, in what manner, and for what purpose? She found answers … in novels and paintings, and most of all, in Holy Scripture.”
And so, I’ve landed again, in what is probably familiar territory: the proximity of beauty to the love of others, and perhaps especially, the proximity of beauty to the love of the poor. These two things do not lie far apart from one another, but right beside one another in the artistic expressions of the church. It’s no suprise that Day was attracted especially to writers like Dostoyevsky, like Tolstoy, like Dickens, writers who gave voice to the poor of their own time, authors who spent time exploring just how one might live life in this sort of a world—a world of injustice and poverty. Much like Anglican settings of the Magnificat, they too give voice to the lowly of the world; and much like Dorothy Day reading Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Dickens, we hear those words of Mary’s and we are asked: how will you live in the world, in the face of this God?
The world of St. Mary the Virgin, a child facing something terrifying, only to express her feelings of thanksgiving and praise, a child expressing what God does about injustice. This is Christian beauty: something to which we are drawn not for self-satisfied reasons; but something that would also draw us into the service of others, draw us into God’s justice and hope for the world.
So not drawn to beauty simply for our own sake, but for the sake of the Lord Jesus that Day followed, that Mary followed, the same Lord Jesus whom we follow, and the God whom we would magnify, and in whom we would rejoice for having lifted up the lowly, for having filled the hungry with good things, and even the God who would send the rich away empty.
The Revd Dr Preston DS Parsons