I couldn’t be more grateful to colleagues and comrades at Political Theology, first for suggesting this roundtable, and then for reading me with such grace and precision, and allowing the for the echoes of these Marian waters to ripple across new questions and contexts for exploration. We are all aware that close reading is becoming increasingly more rare (as a longtime lover of an em-dash, to have to say that one is glad their book was published well before everything became AIgenerated is telling … ), and even more so, that being read is an exceptional luxury no one can really take for granted.
At this point in my own work, writing and researching (and for me, attempting to do so faithfully ) are sacred tasks if we wish for them to be, and making meaning of our thoughts and ideas is ever a communal exercise. Publishing a book is something of an outer-body experience, and as Immaculate Misconceptions makes her life in the world, I continue to see it with new eyes through the eyes of others. It’s a strange feeling, but one that leaves me full of gratitude and hope.
On this note, Nicole Symmonds’s essay is perhaps a good starting place, as one of the most frequent questions I was asked when I started writing and researching Mary was whether or not I was Catholic? (The next was, whether or not I believed she was a virgin? Sometimes questions tell you more about a person and their theology than whatever your answer may be). The question of Catholic belonging speaks volumes–in the South, and almost always coming from a Protestant white male, a question of veracity. Teaching at a Jesuit institution, often a question of ecclesial authority.
Who speaks with significance in the salon hang of Marian ideas (a nod to Zoe Boyle’s opening depiction)? Depending on the source, in one direction or another lingered a sense of distrust–both with me, and most certainly with the Mother of God. Most folks I would speak to about this line of inquiry with would either profess their devotion, confirm their curiosity, or recoil with suspicion. I think I found motivation across this spectrum, confirmation that these were signs that the matter of Mary was not so simply settled.
I’ve described in other places that the future of Mariology requires stronger conversation around (a) the ethical commitment to more life (b) the ecumenical and more broadly, inter religious nature of what she has to tell us, and what we have yet to learn, and (c), to take seriously the world on the brink of ecological disaster. As a well-trained Baptist preacher, I’ll stick with the alliteration here. But what I hoped to do in this work was hammer a crack in the resounding bell (the tinkling cymbals) of bifurcated dogma, and suggest that any vision of hope for a future means we all have work to do in rethinking Mary (coughs just like we do of Jesus, but that’s another story). As we traverse the bombardment of valleys of death, Black Mary helps me walk in the (over)shadow of the spirit.
Symmonds’ illuminates these hopes that I wrestle with, but that animate the book. Most particularly, that Mary cannot only be considered significant to reinforce virginity, or motherhood, (or any other role gendered or divinized) as most significant to her legacy or devotion. As I describe, I’m not interested in getting Mary right, but more so, asking what story of Resurrection she points us to, how she holds space between Friday and Sunday, and the gift of a Mary with space for manifold witness.
I deeply appreciate the language of a pro-living ethic–one that takes seriously the failures of language of survival split off from a vision of sustenance. It is hard to hold together (as we enter another Lenten season) the references of dying to oneself, in a world that seems actively intent on killing not just some, but many of us. One of my refrains in sharing from or around the work of the book has been “even in death, we still birth.” To me, this is the Mary who was brave enough to sing the Magnificat and align the work of the divine in the world with a vision of possibilities for justice that I desperately need. I am not Catholic, no. But I can also say that Mary is helping me, too, to tarry just a little while longer.
PS – This book reads with the same sarcastic, dry sense of humor that I happen to have in real life, and I appreciate that you got the jokes! It took a lot of work to allow myself to write as myself, and allow both the light and levity in!
I have a Catholic student in my class on Mary this semester, describe that, while many of her colleagues in the class were being introduced to and thus newly constructing their image of Mary, that the more she learned and studied, the more she felt that she was having to deconstruct her image of Mary. I really appreciated her perspective, and find her insight resonating for me between Symmonds’ response and the conversation with Hector Variela Rios.
Variela Rios describes this book as a labor of love, and I want to say thank you, because it most certainly was! And I think you’ve seen the goal. I won’t overextend any math analogies here, but I will say that I could easily modify my comment “simply adding race to the recipe of doctrine and dogma”–a lazy, but prevalent “critique” whenever someone wants to bring race into the equation, of course–to something more complex and more expansive. A multiplication, which I think you’ve captured wonderfully. But also a calculus – not because the idea of race is ever in flux, but because our idea of Mary is also – as it should be. I definitely intended to greatly increase the spices and seasoning for the recipe.
Which is perhaps why I so appreciate, first, that “Mary is mestizo/a/e.” A resounding yes! She has to be! I think that so much fruit can blossom from this kind of cross-pollination, and I intend for this to be a conversation that continues. I’ve certainly thought much about this, not only because I do not think one can think well womanist theologies without conversing with mujerista theologies, but for something much more obvious too–so many of our Black Madonnas in “the Americas” are also Latina. I was introduced to Guadalupe as a Black Madonna, first met Aparecida in Bingemer and Gebara, moved by La Negrita and more. This not only pushed me to think beyond what might be (pheno?)(stereo?)typical notions of the meaning of “Black,” but much more so, to ask why, how, and to what end these Madonnas are trying to disciple us, teach us new tongues, transgress all borders.
I also may have to craft an image of Our Lady of Fluid, thanks to you (I was just asked in an interview to comment on “women’s fluids” in reference to Mary giving birth, and I had to remind them that all people have fluids!). But your response makes me also think of something more like Our Lady of Fluidity. Mary has really been approached as a kind of theological Play-Doh–pushed, pressed, squeezed, stamped into whatever mold came with the package. And of course, soon forgotten, left out to dry and eventually be discarded. (I have children. These are my metaphors!) But I’d hoped to not keep Mary–her person, her personality, her womb, any of it– cast and fixed. But to return a certain pliability, one that would imagine Mary fully inhabiting, as a dear friend would describe, the idea of otherwise possibility.
This brings me to the ways Zoe Boyle brought the book into the Australian context, a conversation for which I am grateful. Her expounding of Mary’s symbology – a Mother church horrifically involved in sustaining and maintaining systems of sexual abuse against children, alongside the effacing devastations of colonization–are reminders of the long tentacles of violence is the reality we have to account for.
Aligned with power, the Queen of Heaven wreaked hell on earth, and there are many ways we must repent from what has been done in her name. This something I don’t completely account for, if and when there are limits to reclamation. Are all Black Madonnas, Black Madonnas, in terms of their context or creation? I think here of “Our Lady of the Aborigines” as an example, catching us between dangerous memory and she who is, and that the attempt to decide requires a kind of truth-telling we see disappearing in a world of alternative facts and AI generations. A longer conversation to be had.
And I am lingering with your connection to “making space.” My first thought was of my own frequent idiomatic distinction–when people ask me to find time, I tell them that they will forever be lost if we do that. Never in my life have I ever “found” time (though I won’t oppose it, should the opportunity arise). But instead, how I would love make time. But what I mean is that I will organize, prioritize, re-arrange how I spend my time, as time is not of our own making, anymore than space, really.
So yes, there must be intent to refuse, to resist, to abdicate. But if driven by love, what does it mean, most simply, to share space? To attend to abundance even amidst scarcity? I think about this in the ways that Mary shares her body with God. Freely received, freely given. And the Divine makes room within her. I think about a Mary who shares in the fullness of life, and subsequently the realities of death–her compassion with her son’s passion is so easily lost in the frey (certainly in a world where folks are using theology to declare that empathy is toxic).
And I suppose that this is Weil’s turn to grace. When we allow for grace, and maintain space to receive it, our growth, our love, becomes capacious rather than consumptive. I think this is what I’m trying to intimate between the plays of Éduoard Glissant’s consent not to be a single being and the reading of the Theotokos of the Burning Bush as inherently against consumption, the capacity to be filled with fire but not consumed. Perhaps those are the flames of love. And as you say, perhaps this indeed “is already our condition.”
Transitioning from voids to black (w)holes, here, leaves me with TJ Bryant to thank. While I have a number of responses to the question “What makes this Mariology Black?” one of the most important answers is certainly Black study (down to the titles and subtitles throughout – IYKYK). It is ironically much easier now to say “Hey! Theology matters!” given the explicit violence of white Christian nationalism we face in this moment, but it was much more difficult to counter interdisciplinary resistance to take theology seriously as a site of inquiry, with theology seemingly happy to remain with a reciprocally late-to-the-party approach to other interventions. In other words, AAR was exhausting. But I was never alone, and am glad to see more and more work attempting to faithfully hold theory and theology together.
A few notes, first, on the blood (that gives me strength….!). I have to offer a clarification – I would not exist as a theologian without Eugene Rogers. His was the first religion class I ever walked into as an upper-class undergraduate, and when I found myself immediately overwhelmed and tried to walk out, he gave me some of the most important advice of my life – that it is always good to be in a conversation one doesn’t completely understand. And of course, that I should stay.
I had no idea what we were talking about between Barth and Bonhoeffer and Schleiermacher and Rahner–and I have never regretted persisting in figuring it out. I have repeated those words in the mirror more times than I can count, and have probably passed down his wisdom to every student who has ever come to me for guidance. I do not know that he knows this, but it is true, and to follow words of advice I once heard from Jennifer Nash, I try to cite who I love. Theology makes that impossible. But, still.
So of the two citations in the book (and there could of course have been more, but … page counts, revisions, editing, etc), neither are meant to read Rogers negatively or dismissively, but both as affirming the respective points of Mary’s broader construction theologically. That said, you are exactly right about further possibilities here on blood (though I’m taking a break, and thinking about milk at the moment).
Soskice attends to repeated tropes and trajectories that are worthy of further exploration, particularly what we might learn from the kinds of reversals that Jesus ushers in (one iteration of the chapters included an extended meditation on the ‘woman with the issue of blood,’ but did not make later versions; similarly, I would have liked to explore more fully the multiple miraculous pregnancies and women in the Bible, though I settled on Eve and Elizabeth). Likewise, I absolutely would read these chapters alongside Blood Theology (I would attribute the absence here more to scope and chronology than anything else–though I would want to consider differently the idea of purification and purity), as well as other studies, such as Gil Andijar’s Blood: A Critique of Christianity. I think here particularly alongside Delores Williams’ contention in Sisters in the Wilderness, “There is nothing divine in the blood of the cross.” I’m not sure we need there to be, but I also know there is more to be said.
I will respond to your notes on pleasure and Afropessimism in tandem. First, you think I’m a covert Afropessimist operative? (I’m joking. Though, you’re welcome to ask me again in a year). Attending fully to Afropessimism in this book was more than the scope of this project would allow, but I thought it was necessary to at least mention, given much recent interest in what we should probably describe more accurately as Afropessimism(s) and Christian theology. Here, I will emphasize my parenthetical in your original quote–I think these (multiple) analyses are incredibly important, and use many of the authors associated in this camp of thought throughout the book.
However, in far too short a hand, I would say that while I find value in narrations of structural epistemologies of blackness, the conditions of said usefulness does not extend to the ethics of the project – not for an enfleshed theological anthropology, and not to extend a theological conversation to more particularly around accumulated pleasures, around uses of the erotic, around poetry, around persistence, around possibility.
The violence accounts for my nightmares but not my dreams. I haven’t found it able to account for the lived, material realities of my Granny and Grandma Nancy and Mama Mabel and Grandma Nannie and, and, and….the intentional conjunction. At least, for me, not well. Though sometimes it helps. I’m more interested in the collaborative affections of these other categories, the what else, the sense of what Kevin Quashie has called Black Aliveness (as opposed to Black life, or even Black optimism). I think Mary models for us, this poetics of being. And as such, should be a conversation partner to Afropessimism. I would be happy to support someone else’s project of doing so.
In sum, I really just want to say thank you, to each of the respondents, to those who have read and conversed with this forum, and to those who have or who intend to read the book. Colleagues, each of you have sat with these words and thoughts, and have done the only thing one can really hope for in writing, which is, to continue a conversation worth having. There are so many more things that must be written and said, and I hope we continue to find spaces to say them. I really did mean it when I said that I think we will find new clearings, signposts to freedom, in following the condition of the Black mother. I come to the Black Madonna as one who reminds us, with the wholeness of her life…that we here are flesh. And we are meant to love it hard. For this is the prize.
