Home - The Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary
‘The Word became flesh and made his home among us’ (John 1.14 - Common English Bible)
As we celebrate the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary this coming Sunday I thought I’d use this ‘column’ to reflect on the ‘home’ that Mary offered to the ‘Word made flesh’, and to begin to tease out some of the sense of ‘home’ that we might consider in the light of Jesus ‘dwelling amongst us’.
‘Home’ is foundational experience for each of us, and also an increasingly complex and contested notion in a world of mass migration, and where many places are becoming increasingly uninhabitable. Many of us will have grown up with relatively stable experiences of ‘home’ though most will also identify times of feeling profoundly not at home. I’m currently reading the fascinating and challenging book Nation of Strangers by Turkish political thinker and writer Ece Temelkuran. In it she reflects on ‘home’ and displacement, through a series of letters written to an imagined ‘stranger’, and based in her own experience of political exile. The subtitle of her book is also its invitation: "rebuilding Home in the 21st Century”. ‘Rebuilding home’ is a compelling and daunting vocation, perhaps only truly understood by those who experience a significant degree of alienation - the experience that Ece Temelkura expresses as being ‘un-homed’.
‘Home making’ or ‘Home building’ adds a verb to the noun ‘home’ - only captured in some translations of John 1.14, including the one I quote above from the Common English Bible. This task of ‘home making’ begins with Mary offering her body, her womb and her whole self, to be the dwelling place of God’s incarnate living presence. The womb is the place of all our beginnings - our collective first ‘home’ offering safety, nourishment and nurture, in necessarily fragile and contingent situations. Our mothers are our first ‘home-makers’, giving of themselves that we might have life. Mary’s own offering is both universal and particular, speaking of the space each mother makes for their child, as well as Mary’s own vocation to make space for God’s life ‘dwelling’ within her.
The Greek of John 1.14 uses Eskenosen (ἐσκήνωσεν) a verb meaning "dwelt," "resided," or literally "pitched a tent" / "tabernacled." The language draws on imagery from the Hebrew Scripture’s portable Tabernacle where God’s presence lived among the Israelites in their journeying through the wilderness. This fragile and continually shifting ‘place’ of dwelling speaks of the God who dwells amongst us on the long road to Freedom. As the symbolic backdrop for God’s incarnate presence it offers a more dynamic and contingent picture of ‘home’ conveyed by John 1.14. The poem Christ amongst the refugees by Malcolm Guite offers startling contemporary resonance around the implications of Eskenosen. Meanwhile the verb also suggests that Mary is the ‘tent’ or tabernacle’ of God’s birthing, underlying something of the fragile contingence of her life and her ‘Yes’ to God.
The gospel reading for this weekend’s Feast of Mary takes us to the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth as the newly pregnant Mary hastens to the hill country to join her cousin, also expecting her first child. In this ‘home’ that opens to the shared joy of expectant birth Mary offers her song of praise: ‘Magnificat’. As the song unfolds Mary anticipates God’s promise of a radically reordered world where the hungry and poor are raised up. We might see the vision of Mary’s song as an invitation to the creation of a world that offers a ‘Common Home’ (Pope Francis) to all the ‘unhomed’ peoples and creatures of this shared earth.
In thanksgiving for the shared ‘home’ we are building in the life of our communities of faith, and for the living presence of God who ‘tabernacles’ amongst us still,
In peace and friendship,
David
