Central to the feast of Christmas, which Christians —and let’s face it, many non-Christians — will celebrate Wednesday, Dec. 25, is the story of the angel Gabriel coming to the town of Nazareth to tell the Virgin Mary that she will miraculously conceive and bear Jesus, the Son of God.
Much has been written about Mary as the new, obedient Eve — the anti-Eve, as it were — acquiescing to become the mother of God, with all the suffering his Passion will entail for her as well as him. (Think Michelangelo’s poignant “Pièta.”) And just as much has been written about so-called sacrilegious interpretations of Mary doubting this calling, (see Netflix series “Mary”); and Jungian interpretations of Mary as yet another mother in the miraculous birth narratives of famous men (see the stories of the Buddha, Alexander the Great and Augustus).
All these interpretations miss the point of the original text. The Mary of the Gospel of St. Luke is hardly “a handmaiden,” her own words, in the manner of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s a description many Roman Catholic women have chaffed at.
“Handmaid! Not I!” writes Pat Deleeuw in the “Advent Reflections 2016” (Sacred Heart Parish of the Lexington Collective, Massachusetts). Like Deleeuw, I — a feminist and a real Athena type who had difficult relationship with her own mother — took a long time in coming to Mary. But what I learned about this great intercessor is that she is not the passive creature of conservatives and critics alike. For one thing, Luke tells us she’s “troubled” by the angel’s greeting, as any of us would be, and as some artists have depicted her. “One of us” was how the Rev. Chrisitan Goebel described her on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, her guise as patroness of the United States (Dec. 8, but celebrated this year on Dec. 9 as Dec. 8 was a Sunday.)
In that humanity, she’s also straightforward and pragmatic about sex— more so than Eve in all her dithering, slut-shamed, throwing-the-devil-under-the-bus nakedness — asking the angel how a girl who’s never “known a man” is going to have a baby.
Most of all, Mary has agency: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to your word.”
Could she have refused? Possibly. The point is she took ownership of what was happening to her, her destiny — as many have done throughout history.
Hans Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves — painted in 1539 for Henry VIII as he was casting about for a fourth wife — was thought to have flattered the woman who was known as Henry’s ugly spouse. It is now considered to be a reasonable likeness of a gracious woman who served England as a generous queen and benefactress. Surely, a later king thought so. No less than Louis XIV of France purchased the painting, which hangs in the Musée du Louvre.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about another famous virgin who took an active role in going with the flow, only in the secular sphere — Anne of Cleves, fourth wife of Henry VIII, who is played by Dana Herfurth in “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,” coming to PBS’ “Masterpiece” Sunday, March 23.
Anne, so the story went, was the big-boned, sheltered, unattractive German princess who failed to recognize “true love” Henry when he showed up in romantic, chivalric disguise to greet her upon her arrival in England. History and recent fictional portrayals (Joss Stone’s charming portrayal in Showtime’s 2007-10 miniseries “The Tudors,” Hillary Mantel’s novel “The Mirror and the Light” and Broadway’s “Six” musical) tell a different, truer story. The PR campaign against Anne turns out to have been a bit of narcissistic projection, with Henry as the old, smelly, unattractive one.
Poor thing: You can feel her fright at having unwittingly offended the less-than-desirable king, fearing for her life. And you can imagine her mixed hurt pride — and relief —when Henry came calling with an offer of an annulment. But fearing for her head perhaps (it’s doubtful he would have beheaded a foreign princess, so necessary to a Protestant alliance), she used her head. Instead of digging in her heels, she basically said, behold the handmaid of the king. Be it done unto me according to your word.
As a result, she was richly rewarded with property, cash and sumptuous clothing as well as the title of the king’s “honored sister.” She maintained good relations with Henry’s children — the future Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I — was kind and generous to her servants and beloved by the English people. Anne even had a cordial relationship with the lady in waiting who became Henry’s tragic fifth wife, Katherine Howard. (There’s a stunning symmetry to the wives, with one and four, Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves, being divorced/annulled foreign princesses; two and five, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, being beheaded cousins, and three and six, Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr, being sisters-in-law who would ultimately die in childbirth. It’s almost as if with wives four, five and six, Henry was replaying the marriages to one, two and three.)
So well did Anne of Cleves get on with Katherine Howard that they danced together during Christmas and New Year’s (1540-41) while the old, sickly Henry went to bed.
A little more than a year later — Feb. 13, 1542 — the Katherine Henry so adored would go to the scaffold as an adulteress. When Anne died in 1557 — probably of cancer at age 42, having outlived Henry and the other five wives as well as Edward —Mary gave the Roman Catholic convert (Anne’s mother had been Catholic) a majestic funeral that Elizabeth also attended and a burial in Westminster Abbey — the only one of the wives so honored. It would be another, more familiar queen, Elizabeth II, who in 1970 provided the plaque that reads “Anne of Cleves, Queen of England, Born 1515 — Died 1557.”
A couple of things here: What is meant for you in this world will be there for you and no one can take it from you. Anne may have been Anne of 187 days (Jan. 6 to July 12, 1540), unlike Anne (Boleyn) of 1,000 days — having never consummated her marriage or apparently even understood at that time what it took to make a baby — but queen she was, with a grave in Westminster, however hard it is to find, opposite St. Edward the Confessor’s to boot.
Secondly, Anne, like the Virgin Mary she venerated as a Catholic convert, understood that giving in is not the same as being a doormat. We, like them, live in perilous times. And we, like them, must learn to control what we can and let go of what we cannot, in the spirit of the Roman Stoics, or, in the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, to “yield and overcome.”
The Virgin Mary and the secular virgin Anne played the cards they were dealt. It would behoove us to do the same as we move through a season of darkness to the light.