No, he had her permission.
No, he had her permission.
Umm, every lady of the night gives her permission as well. Will you answer the question?
Can we admit that there is a wonderful and fruitful tension here, even if we agree on nothing else?
She was pledged to one man, yet she consented to bear a child that was not his.
I often think a good question can be more fruitful in the soul than even the right answer.
Clearly when we use words like "spouse", "daughter", and even "mother" about Mary, we are taking leave of our senses. That's almost exactly the right expression.
As I have said before (forgive me, it is the privilege of the old to be repetitious, because, well, who can stop them?):
Even to think about "one" with respect to God is to realize that our categories of thought are at least stressed if not blown apart by the Triune God.
When I became a father, after the flesh, I learned something about God. But what I learned, after a while, was that HE is the REAL Father, and I am a simulacrum, and not a very persuasive one, at that!
When Mary utters her "fiat" (as opposed, obviously, to her Alfa Romeo) all the rules of thought are stretched to the point of rupture.
Rape, obviously, will not do as a category. Neither with bastardy. We are treading new ground, ground which requires us to take our shoes off.
Can we not agree that there is a way in which even the guys on this forum can claim to have been at least invited to be the bride of Christ -- while at the same time we would rightly scoff at any interpretation of that statement which veered into sniggering jokes about homosexuality?
In the best case, the case we hope and pray for, the intimate and total mutual self-offering of husband and wife is fruitful. Their love is productive, generative, a source of new life.
Whatever happened between God and Mary was like that, only in spades. I mean, SUCH new life that from it new life was spread to all creation!
Isn't this what we all pray for? "Lord, may my assent, my complete and unreserved (or as complete and unreserved as this sinner can manage) assent to you be a vehicle through which you make life available to those who do not know you."
May my feeble attempt to give my will to you -- as I pray daily when I ask that your will be done -- make me an instrument with which you share your love with a world in tortured and crying need.
We offer, or we wish we could offer, to God a self-yielding and assent (in all the trashy novels, the woman is always crying, "Yes! Yes!" in moments of passion) that we husbands wish our wives would offer to us and which we at least THINK we offer to them.
So talking of Mary as spouse of God is in one way obviously inadequate and the material of jokes. But in another way, is it really so very bad?