WHAT ABOUT MARY?
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THE BIBLE tells us very little about the mother of Jesus. The veneration that has grown around Mary for two millenniums can be ascribed at least partly to that very paucity of available biography — devotees and doctrine-makers have been able to project what they want onto her. But that same sketchy canvas is also a gift to anyone with the inclination, and the guts, to attempt to demystify and humanize her.
Enter Colm Toibin, whose greatest acclaim thus far came with his novel The Master, a re-imagining of Henry James. A closeted great man of letters is one thing; now, in a development perhaps hinted at in a story collection called Mothers and Sons, Toibin has taken on one of the more potentially provocative jobs any writer — especially, perhaps, any Irish writer who once considered entering the Catholic priesthood and has since come out as gay — can take on.
The Testament of Mary opens with the widowed wife of Joseph living alone in Ephesus, the Asia Minor town where she was taken for her own safety after her son’s Crucifixion. Even decades after that awful event, she is still too grief-stricken to say Jesus’s name out loud. Under what amounts to house arrest, she is subject to the persistent and unwanted attentions of two of Jesus’s old disciples (never named, they sound like Paul and John), who are occupied in writing the Gospels and looking for Mary’s corroboration on the allegedly divine events that followed Jesus’s death. To these men Mary is an inconvenience, their questions little more than a courtesy. Mary can express all the skepticism and claim all the memory gaps she wants: They’re going to write what they’re going to write.
Alternately consoled and tormented by her memories of a happy early family life with Joseph and their child, Mary sensed trouble right from the time when young Jesus began to preach, “his voice all false, his tone all stilted.” His first followers, as far as Mary is concerned, were “fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers,” the kind of young men “who can’t look a woman in the eye.” The growing gap between mother and son peaks in what may be the book’s most emotionally wrenching scene: the moment when the adult Jesus, carried away with his growing notoriety, refuses his mother the simple acknowledgement of recognition: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” As the scene around Jesus grows more hysterical along with Mary’s unease, the book moves inexorably to the climax of the Crucifixion. Without descending to the overkill of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Toibin evokes the full horror and barbarity of the event. You may never see a crucifix in quite the same way again.
The reader is so caught up in the human story being told, and so seduced by the economical and lyrical style in which Toibin tells it, that it dawns only by degrees just how subversive this project is. Every deviation from the standard version — and Toibin makes many — involves the dismantling of someone’s cherished tenet. Take the decision to have a frightened and traumatized Mary leave the scene of the Crucifixion before Jesus has been taken down from the cross. Well, there goes the basis for the Pieta, the iconic tableau immortalized by Michelangelo’s sculpture in which Mary cradles her dying son in her arms.
As in the New Testament, Lazarus is disinterred from his grave at Cana, but in Toibin’s version, this isn’t a miraculous resurrection but rather proof of the folly of messing with nature; sickly and silent, Lazarus himself gives every appearance of wishing Jesus hadn’t gone to the trouble. “If (Lazarus) had come back to life, it was merely to say a last farewell,” thinks Mary, and that “if ” alone speaks volumes.
The water-into-wine miracle is similarly called into question: Carried out under suspiciously confused conditions, it becomes an action no more inspiring than providing more booze for a wedding whose guests have already overindulged, a trick done to bait the watching Roman authorities who are already poised to deal harshly with Jesus and anyone connected to him.
Christopher Hitchens, in God Is Not Great, expressed exasperation with the idea of Immaculate Conception, decrying how “many religions force themselves to think of the birth canal as a one-way street.” But Toibin, for all that he may well sympathize with the late provocateur’s views, has not written a screed against the cult of the Virgin Mary. Instead, Mary is no more and no less than a mother who has lost her son in the most awful of ways, incurring all the suffering one would expect from such an experience.
Nor does Toibin follow Mary to her death, but it’s not hard to guess his stand on the question of her bodily ascension into heaven. Feeling her days on Earth winding down, the notion that she might become a figure of intercession with God is the last thing on Mary’s mind: “How easily it might not have happened! How easily we could have been spared! It would not have taken much.”
Toibin’s greatest accomplishment may be to force readers, regardless of their religion, to ponder just how different history might have been with a simple act of mercy.