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?
Amen. Very well said. And just because we offer ourselves to God mind, body, heart and soul doesn't mean that we cannot still love our spouses with all our hearts. I think you make a very good point about how even men are to be the "bride" of Christ, so I think it beneficial to get beyond earthy and human connotations of the words and understand their spirit.
I honor Mary and admire her very much. I don't think I have ever said other than that. She was so brave at such a young age but her faith and trust in God to take care of all her cares and worries concerning what she was to do in his plan for our (and hers) salvation is a shining example to us all no matter our age or our gender. I agree that talking of Mary as the spouse of God certainly does render not only Scriptural problems but the opportunity for crassness that she does not deserve. She rejoiced in God her savior and so should we.
Yes it absolutely is...It's a perversion of scripture and creates a pagan type of deity for Mary not to mention skews the idea of a Trinitarian God...
Mary was not the Mother of God, nor the Spouse of God...We need to leave it at that...