And do you say to me....?
My Queen, My Mother Metmom, I offer myself entirely to thee. And to show my devotion to thee, I offer thee this day, my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my heart, my whole being without reserve.
Wherefore, good Mother metmom, as I am thine own, keep me, guard me as thy property and possession. Amen.
I don't think so......
Seriously, I think there are several reasons why you are needlessly disconcerted, and with patience maybe we can disentangle them and come to a better understanding of historic Christian practice.
We need to distinguish between three related but not identical things: style, devotion and doctrine.
First, style. A person from the planet Zorg who read Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Anne Bradstreet might well think that they adored Mr. Browning and Mr. Bradstreet as deities, and maybe worshiped Queen Elizabeth I as the Supreme Being. Just look at the fervent, florid, “totalizing” tone of their devotional expressions to their spouses and their sovereign queen!
We already looked at that. Reviewing some Browning and Bradstreet expressions:
This is not to be accounted blasphemy or polytheism on the part of Browning and Bradstreet. Even the New England Puritans of the 17th century, for example, took into consideration well-recognized standards of poetic hyperbole in Mrs. Bradstreet's romantic and courtly verse. They and we wisely understand Browning and Bradstreet as expressing ardent tribute without confusing it with Divine Worship of the Trinity, properly so defined.
We in the 21st century don’t write love poetry and courtly airs that way anymore, and more’s the pity. Almost all the honors of refined sentiment and ardent devotion have been lost, and it shows only the coarseness and witlessness of our culture. Our Christian FReepers bludgeon each other with the blunt weapon of polemic --with some stiletto-slashes of sarcasm thrown in --- and never share poetry. What does that tell you about FReeper-Christian civilization?
Point two: devotional as distinguished from doctrinal writing.
Much of what you’ll find in Marian piety amounts to fond opinion, sentiment and personal devotion, not doctrine. These are not unrelated, of course, but doctrine is going to be precisely defined, while personal devotion gives way to all the affections.
If I can put this with delicacy, an analogy might be comparing a Court Order for Child Custody with the babbling love-talk of a mom and a new baby. The Court Order defines the “doctrine” of the relation between the mother and the baby; the “I love your little toesies! Oh! My adorable little sweetums, I could eat ‘em up!” is something quite different. It is not definition: it is delirium. It’s the sweet delirium of love.
You being a mother, I ‘m thinking you will understand this, because it’s so womanly. Not that men are cold, but sometimes even the most loving of husbands/fathers don’t quite get this. All this kissing of baby’s hands and feet! All this giggly, babbly talk! You can’t quite share it with people who have never had an ocytocin/prolactin surge or who have a hard time hearing the neonate and higher soprano frequencies.
That’s not exactly the same as Marian devotional reading, of course, but the analogy touches on this consideration: what you have here centers around affectionate emotions. It's more dessert than dissertation. It’s sweet love talk.
Add that to the literary genre of courtly praise, as we were considering before, and you get an insight, maybe, as to where this is coming from.
Third point: doctrine.
Well, let me get to this separately. I have a batch of peanut butter cookies to attend to.
Later, OK? O Most Gloriously to be Admired Metmom?