[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”1451688385″ locale=”us” height=”110″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41gPYzvQlFL._SL110_.jpg” width=”74″]Page 2: Colm Tóibín – The Testament of Mary: A Novel
Tóibín seems to be writing against something, against the cult of Mary that holds her up as mediatrix of grace, endowed with a superabundance of faith, honored by heavenly proximity to the Father and the Son. In The Testament of Mary, the mother of Jesus is an embittered doubter, a staunch materialist with no hope of an eternal future, her eyes open only to the political and religious spheres of men that stole her greatest joy.
I imagine that the book is harder to swallow for Catholics than for Protestants, who don’t generally share the deep veneration of Mary and her exemplary faith. My Baptist Bible training does call to mind the Magnificat of Luke 1. But it also calls up Mary and Jesus’s family coming to take him away, their fear of his apparently unbalanced and risky behavior outweighing any sort of faith in his mission and divine origins. Mary’s frankness, her doubting, might even be looked upon as a refreshing portrayal of a truly human response to radical loss. Indeed, the book’s willingness to venture into the depths of a mother’s grief is perhaps its primary strength.
But I feel as though we miss something important with Tóibín’s Mary, both in terms of characterization and in terms of gender politics. His representation of her anger and regret renders her character all too thin–where is the love, the tenderness that justifies such a depth of sorrow? Imagining the picture of Mary the faithful (present at the cross and in the upper room with the eleven, agreeing to become the theotokos, or God-bearer) as a later construction of men who twisted her stories, imagining her as turning away from her Judaism towards Aphrodite, imagining her as loathing even the scent of men–these are secularist visions, but they are hardly feminist. Instead, they contribute to an unhelpful binary that sees the church as a wholly male enclave, with women left beyond the pale.
For those of us who seek to follow in the Way of Jesus while rediscovering the often overlooked biblical and historical roots of women’s participation in the faith, The Testament of Mary steals away one of our exemplary figures, flattening her dynamic blend of faith and doubt–a blend we see in nearly all the Bible’s (and history’s) accounts of Jesus’s disciples. Per Tóibín’s perspective, it seems to be a compliment that Mary is not counted among the (dubious) faithful. But my heart is stirred with the crazy hope of resurrection, and so I can’t help desiring a Mary whose life, like mine, is a stew of competing sorrows and joys, losses and budding love.
Perhaps that’s the most honest final summation: it all comes down to desire. We are always left to use our imaginations when we seek to make sense of this woman, for the Bible tells us only so much, and the churches’ traditions are rich with contradictions. Colm Tóibín has imagined a Mary with her own sort of moral integrity, a refusal to accept a logic of redemption that is repugnant in the face of radical suffering. I can admire such integrity. Still, I’m rooting for redemption.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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