Mary Our Priest

by Teri Daily

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Maria Sacerdota—Mary, Protopriest of the New Covenant


by The Rev. Dr. Alla Renée Bozarth

 Before Jesus 
was his mother. 

Before supper 
in the upper room, 
breakfast in the barn. 

Before the Passover Feast, 
a feeding trough. 
And here, the altar 
of Earth, fair linens 
of hay and seed. 

Before his cry, 
her cry. 
Before his sweat 
of blood, 
her bleeding 
and tears. 
Before his offering, 
hers. 

Before the breaking 
of bread and death, 
the breaking of her 
body in birth. 

Before the offering 
of the cup, 
the offering of her 
breast. 
Before his blood, 
her blood. 

And by her body and blood 
alone, his body and blood 
and whole human being. 

The wise ones knelt 
to hear the woman’s word 
in wonder. 

Holding up her sacred child, 
her spark of God in the form of a babe, 
she said: 

“Receive and let 
your hearts be healed 
and your lives be filled 
with love, for 
This is my body, 
This is my blood.” 


* From Women's Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated, by E.R. Rankin, M.A. Burke, A. Smith (Harrisburg, PA: 2000) 287-288.

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​I have had quite a few priests in my life; some have even worn a clerical collar.  Some, but not most.  Most don’t have an ordination certificate and have never had a bishop’s hands laid on them, not even in the rite of confirmation.  Being a priest is much more fundamental than all that.  

To be a priest is first to be attentive to the Divine or the Holy as it is revealed in the midst of our ordinary lives; it is then to share that experience of the Holy with those who stand beside us—those who wonder, struggle, and try to make sense of their own experiences of the Holy.  William Countryman, an Episcopal priest and professor of theology, writes that “the encounter with the Hidden [Holy] is a kind of fault line running through the middle of our lives; no one can escape its presence.”[1]  We recognize this fault line in sudden, brief life-changing moments—as when a seismic shift opens up the earth to reveal gold mixed with the rock, hidden treasure that has been there all along.  Such moments happen to us all; they are encounters with God whether we name them as such or not.  That’s why priestly ministry is an inescapable part of being human.  We can do it intentionally or unintentionally; we can do it poorly or well.  But we cannot avoid it.

Some of my best priests have been so unintentionally.  An older pediatrician came into the ER of the hospital where I worked.  He was losing blood rapidly from a tear in his aorta.  His wife sitting by his side, he asked to have his IVs taken out.  As he slipped into a coma and died, she quietly talked about all the children he had cared for during his life.  At one point the wife turned to a colleague of mine standing nearby and said simply:  “You never know what a day will hold.”  They were priests to everyone in the hospital that night, revealing the veil between the ordinary and the Holy to be so thin as to be almost non-existent.  

Both of my children have been priests to me, from the very moment of their birth.  Each time as I lay in bed, exhausted from giving birth, the newborn was laid on my stomach.  Each time the false dichotomy between works and grace was exposed—in the end, everything is absolute gift.  It is Holy.

The veil between the ordinary and the Holy has also been lifted for me by musicians who speak Truth with their melodies, teachers who explore the depths of Wisdom and not mere knowledge, and soul friends who bear witness to that which is Sacred even in the most messed up places of my life.  Anyone, or anything for that matter, who can name or facilitate or interpret the moments and places where the ordinary and the Holy touch is a priest.  The ordained priesthood merely serves as a reminder that we are all called to be priests to one another—to share our experiences of the Holy and to help one another make sense of them in ways that bring meaning to our lives.

Well, if that is what priests do—share their experiences of the Holy in the midst of ordinary life—then Mary was most definitely a priest.  For her very body was the border of the ordinary and Holy, the human and the Divine.  As early as the sixth century, Mary has been portrayed in mosaics, paintings, and icons wearing priestly vestments, sometimes wearing even the vestments belonging to bishops.  One icon in particular that portrays Mary in this way is called Mother of God of the Inexhaustible Chalice.  Mary is wearing a chasuble, the priestly covering worn during Eucharist.  Her hands are lifted up and out in an “orans” position, the position of prayer.  In front of her on the altar is a golden chalice which holds Christ, with the upper body of Christ visible above the rim of the chalice.  This is Mary as priest, revealing and bringing into being the inexhaustible presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  And we find Mary as priest not only in the art of the Church, but in its theology and its prayers; for Mary was sometimes referred to in the devotions and in the theology of the Church as “Virgin Priest.”

But in 1916, the use of images depicting Mary in priestly vestments was forbidden by the Holy Office.  And beginning in 1927, any devotions referring to Mary as Virgin Priest were prohibited as well.  It’s not surprising that the Church ultimately found this portrayal of Mary to be a little too dangerous.  After all, such images can easily become part of an argument for a sacramental priesthood that includes women as well as men.  

Still, Mary as priest remains an important image for some.  And, if we think of Mary in that way, what we have in today’s gospel reading is nothing less than Mary’s ordination.  Just as a person being ordained in the Church must consent to the demands of the office they take, so too does Mary consent to her role and to the action of the Holy Spirit, saying:  “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  Today’s canticle, the Magnificat, is her sermon.  In a stable nine months later, Mary would hold the newborn up as a priest elevates the bread and the wine, knowing that this part of her—her own body and blood—would now be separate from her.  It would be the first time she offered him up to the world in which he would grow and learn and play and experience both joy and pain, but it wouldn’t be the last.  Days later she would present Jesus in the temple in accordance with Jewish Law—it was another offering.  I suspect the offerings were almost endless—the worry when her twelve year old stayed behind at the temple without telling her, the pain of separation when he began his career as an itinerant preacher, the pride and joy as he healed the sick and spoke words of wisdom, the agony as he was arrested and tried that night in Jerusalem.  It would be a total of thirty-three years before his body was completely broken and given for the life of the world, but Mary would be there as well, standing at the foot of the cross, her tears a silent fraction anthem.  What priest would dare leave before the end of the mass?

But before we make Mary into a whole other category of human being, before we make Mary so different from us that her story becomes irrelevant to our own, we need to acknowledge that we are really no different from Mary.  The border between the ordinary and the Holy, the created and the Divine, lies within us just as it did within Mary.  William Countryman writes:  “As Genesis puts it, humanity was created from the dust and the breath of God (2:7); we belong to both worlds.  When we encounter the HOLY, we are encountering what is essential to us, even if it seems beyond us.”[2]

We are priests, too—just like Mary.  We live our whole lives on the border of the Holy, for God is both within us and much more than us.  And therein lies the answer to Mary’s question:  “How can this be?”  The lowly will be lifted up, the hungry will be filled, and the dreams of God will be made real because God has chosen to dwell, not in some remote heavenly realm, but here with us—even within us—making all things new.  The ordinary and Holy touch all the time, if we just have eyes to see, faith to be priests to one another, and courage to make Christ present in the world again and again.  

 
[1] William Countryman, Living on the Border if the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All (Harrisburg PA: Morehouse, 1999) 6.  I owe much of this discussion on the fundamental priesthood of all humanity to Countryman’s wonderful book.  I also want to acknowledge that other aspects of creation—animals, rivers, trees, and distant galaxies—participate in a universal priesthood as well, even though that is beyond the scope of this sermon.

[2] Countryman 28.