‘Mary’s Song’
In “Mary’s Song,” also called “The Magnificat” in Latin, the prescient and visionary Mother of Jesus passionately reveals her son’s transformative message.
It’s the spiritual and mystical theme of the Hebrew tradition that Mary (Miriam) and Jesus (Yeshua) come from, reflected in both Old and New Testaments, though often lost in confusion.
While eluding fundamentalist thinking and interpretation so prevalent now, the message takes us to the heart of the matter, still beckoning to us today.
American culture and religion even when calling itself “Christian,” is not a wisdom culture nor necessarily spiritually focused. Thankfully we CAN look deeper within.
Rather than objectifying people and focusing on money, status, wealth and more objects, which Jesus tells us, will rust, burn and thieves can steal – we can choose to see life and each other as truly sacred.
Found in Luke 1:46-55, Mary expresses her social and economic revolutionary frame of mind, recognizing the vital need to connect our spirit and spirituality to how power is distributed.
In her song and ecstatic prayer, she states that God has cast down the powerful and lifted up the poor and lowly. He has “filled the hungry with Good Things,” conveying an equitable distribution of wealth, beyond just feeding people.
Saying that God “has sent the rich away – empty,” portrays Mary’s values and socio-economic vision further.
This surely isn’t Reaganomic, trickledown or Neoliberal systems, which prioritize pouring endless public funds into more lethal weapons and the morbidly obese military industrial complex that doesn’t even really value veterans.
These harmfully regressive systems would “balance the budget” by cutting already inadequate Social Programs like Social Security, Senior and School Lunches, Disability, FoodStamps, Subsidized Housing, and Unions, etc.
By voting against our best interests, and not caring to get informed and understand history and factual data, we’re allowing American democracy to be on the line. It’s competing with a criminal faction, a mega-indicted felon, proven liar, misogynist, self-described would-be autocrat whose stated pals are Putin, Mussolini, Hitler and the like.
We’ve allowed a handful of billionaires and corporations to become richer than pharaohs and the richest historical kings.
The exploding inequality and crushed ability for a worker to support a family or pay rent has fueled the bitterness, anger and fatalism, the desperation we see in everyday life.
When we become more informed, hate-filled anxiety, misery, depression and scapegoating will be replaced by power to the people for healthy focus on the real issues.
Then, the violence, mass shooting and homelessness, which reflect the indecent and painful violation of the rights and dignity of people in this richest country – will largely end.
Can you hear Jesus calling us to take his beloved mother Mary – home, and her passionate message into our hearts?
May we care to respect and serve one another with empathy and compassionate love!
Merry Christmas,
Joy Wilson Lone Pine