Days of Miracle & Wonder

Ouch! It's hard to type this morning because I grated a nice slice out of my index finger yesterday while I was grating ginger for cake.
I'm so used to dull, old graters, I was careless--this is a new grater and it's sharp! (I hardly knew graters could be sharp.)

I. Don't Grate Your Brain

Dinner last night with my brain-injured friends was so sweet.
Sophie can't have an Xmas tree this year because her brain is doing all it can to recover from a stroke in August. Luckily, I hadn't decorated the girlettes' tree yet, so I got that out, and Sophie really got into decorating it with the tiny wooden figures from Taiwan.

Sophie, far left, Mrs. and Mrs. (Maura, & bink with Pearl Duquette on her head):

Penny Cooper is back! just in time to help too. She'd been staying with Sophie, "like Florence Nightingale," Penny said.

I've genuinely missed Penny Cooper. I'd asked if she could come back for Christmas, and Sophie said she could come home forever, that Penny was a big help but not needed any longer.

Sophie still has miles to go, but it's amazing to witness:
BRAINS REPAIR THEMSELVES.
But, . . .  s  l  o  w  l  y  . . . .
Sophie is currently reading the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary. "I can only read at a third-grade level." She sounded as if she were ashamed of that.

"Sophie!" I said. "When I saw you in the hospital four months ago, you couldn't decipher a. single. word. Written language was total gibberish to you."

"That's right," she said, brightening up, "Thank you for giving me perspective."

bink's concussion is much, much better too: she can use her eyes to look down for long spans of time without being made nauseous. She's started to read her first book in eight months.
And she could concentrate on setting up the tiny creche.

II. Mary, the Unfucked [–Up]

The tiny creche has two Marys––Mrs. & Mrs. Mary; a contingent of the Heavenly Host arriving on skis, like Finns on the Russian front during WWII;
and the Magi bringing a big teddy bear for the baby.

I don't much relate to parental metaphors in spiritual stories. The Cosmic Mother, Father of Waters (Algonquin name for the Mississippi), and so forth.
I'm not a mother, and mothers have been problematic for me. Fathers, even more so.
I relate more to non-personal metaphors from physics: grace as gravity; love as kinetic energy--that sort of thing.

Mother Mary had never meant anything to me, so when I entered into the Catholic faith story in my mid-thirties I decided to do a deep dive.
I was shocked: she's revolutionary!

Her song of triumph to her cousin Elizabeth is a war cry.
It's BIG in Catholicism, where it's called "Mary's Magnificat", and it is fundamental to Liberation Theology (sort of a small-c communist catholicism that preaches "preferential treatment for the poor" as God shows in Mary's song).

A former–fundamentalist evangelical friend, however, had never heard it, even though it's in the gospels (Luke 1:46-55).
You can see why--this is no 'meek and mild' teaching. Here's a snippet [italics mine]:

"God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
God has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty."

Yeah, Mary's God is no fan of right-wing Trumpers.

The question of Mary's virginity has hurt a lot of people, including people I know.
The Church and Co. has held up Mary's supposed perpetual virginity as a virtue that women should aspire to--or feel dirty, sinful, and lesser if they don't. Men, of course, are tainted with this perverted teaching too.
My parents raised me with a 1960s' brand of humanism, outside of any church, and that kind of thinking was seen as dead and gone. (It's not, alas.)

In the Bible, Mary conceived Jesus through union with the Creative Force of the Universe, not by having sex with a man.
But the Bible never says Mary was a virgin for the rest of her life--in fact, as you know if you've read the gospels, it's implied that she and Joseph have "union" after Jesus was born, and Jesus has siblings. [Here's a run-down on that.]

I never call Mary 'The Virgin Mary' because that emphasizes a later teaching that I reject. It has no meaning to me.
But Mary conceiving a baby with a divine creative force?
That's juicy with generative meaning, and I love it!
There're lots of stories in religion/myth/fairy tale about divine children with human mothers, changelings, and half-humans of all sorts. Greek myth is full of half-divine characters.

III. "If I knew where babies came from, there'd be a lot less of you."

That sentence above is what Rosaria, my Sicilian grandmother, said to her ten children when she was in her 90s.
When she was 17 years old, she had not wanted to marry Vincenzo. Her father had not liked him either and refused to grant him permission to marry his daughter.

So, with a couple cronies, Vincenzo kidnapped Rosaria--forced her into a car as she was walking home––and held her overnight. "There was no pinky-ponky," said my grandmother (who always presented this as a humorous story). Rape wasn't necessary to ruin a girl's reputation and force her into an unwanted marriage.
This was in Milwaukee, 1917. Bride-kidnapping remained a thing in Sicily until modern times (and is still practiced elsewhere).

So, in that context––thinking of my grandmother who was forced into marriage with a violent man, and without knowing how children were conceived and with no recourse to birth-control, bore ten children, at least some of whom she didn't want––I absolutely love the idea of Mary being unfucked, as in Unfucked-up by the Patriarchy.

If you think about what sex and marriage was like for many women––girls, really––in history (and sometimes now)... it's often not so great. Mary was a teenager about to be given to some man she didn't choose. Seems he turned out to be a good guy, but if he hadn't been, there'd have been nothing she could've done about it.
Like my grandmother Rosaria.

Did God rape Mary?
No. The angel tells Mary she's been chosen. She expresses amazement (Who, me?) and then she says, Yes, okay.
This implies she could have said No.

Some prophets, like Moses, do say no to God.
Admittedly it never really goes their way--but then, we don't hear about all the prophets who hid under their beds until God said, okay, okay, I'll get someone else.

So, I don't mean to interpret the story for other people--there are a million facets to it, but just to say how I see it. As a Catholic Christian, even if a misfit-toy outsider one (sometimes the best kind!), it's my story and I can do what I want with it. Within reason. And I don't even depart from Scripture, here.
This is not the word used, but scripture says:
Unfuck yourselves!
(There must be fifty ways...)

Meanwhile, speaking of miracles and wonders, Hannukah started last night, and the girlettes have a tiny menorah to light. I left the tiny candles at work though, so they couldn't last night, but we'll light the Second Night candle tonight.

Happy ALL THE RETURN OF LIGHT!