Kathy,

I like this piece a lot. I think it has a feminist slant that coheres well with Derek's attempt to retrieve perpetual virginity without implying agreement. Perhaps by refocusing on poetic readings of the annunciation, as well as the Lukan nativity narratives, we can refocus our energy on Mary's free cooperation as the Godbearer.

Kathy,

Thank God for poetry! Your piece moves me. It takes us back to a more Biblical sense of miracle - where all that we see or touch or feel is miraculous, all held in life by God.

By focusing on the profound theological importance Mary's consent it takes us to a more graceful kind of 'necessity' than the constraints of a first century understanding of conception and biology really affords us.

On David Jones' and your focus on God needing Mary's willingness, I'm reminded of the distinction Gerry May makes in "Will and Spirit, a Contemplative Psychology" between willfulness (where grace can only overwhelm us) and willingness (that welcomes grace in freedom).

Theotokos and even the awed reflection of what it means to mother God incarnate (not just conceive and bear but raise a child and shape the child's character) seems truly fertile territory to me.

I think I mentioned in response to the previous posting that Geza Vermes in 'Jesus the Jew' documents first century rabbinic reflection on 'virgin birth' that was conception by an apparently pre-menstrual very young bride. Intriguingly that 'miracle' fits a more Jewish and Biblical sense that the extraordinary need not be 'supernatural' and that all life is miracle and by God's act.

So I'm very glad to see possibilities of opening up a richer theological reflection through poetry and prayer. And in 'miracle,' I think your emphasis here delivers us from the weird cunundrum of wondering whether we're doctrinally committed to Aristotle's biology (generative seed from the father alone and receptive vessel in the mother) that 'needs' God to be the father instead of an ordinary man, or whether, in more contemporary biology, 'miracle' means we're supposed to celebrate a parthenogenesis that produces a male child when what we know is at least theoretically possible physically or biologically is a 'virgin birth' where the offspring is genetically identical to the mother.

Somehow we've got to cut through the nature vs. supernature construct. Somehow we've got to get beyond the Hellenic idealism that's ashamed of spirit in body and regards sex as unworthy of spiritual beings. Somehow we've got to get beyond the Hebrew fear of women, body fluids, 'purity,' and blood. I think you're showing us a good path here. Again, thanks.

Poetry - yes - a most wonderful way of interpretation. One of my Daily Office ways of "hearing" the word - is to read it = focus on a phrase that sticks in my mind and play with it poetically -- always more comes out than I knew was there.

Donald,

There's nothing wrong with the distinction between natural and supernatural, so long as we stict to the true Thomistic distinction. The problem is extrinsecism. I also think that Aristotelian hylomorphism, though not his biology or theory of gender, points us in a non-dualistic direction, similar to what you are getting from a more biblical anthropology.

Bill,

I'd be glad (and am very willing) to hear the grace you find in the way St. Thomas makes distinction between nature and supernature, and I certainly recognize that intellectual and theological pioneers can't be judged on the basis of what people centuries later do with their thought-
but
I think we're in an intellectual bind. The God who shows up in the Hitchins-Dawkins conversation is a Supreme Being at the pinnacle of a continuum of being and their understanding of science and nature seems to be that theology assigns broad, planful agency to the realm of science while reserving a right of particular divine exceptions to this imagined God's own laws. The first thing that goes in this construct is the miracle of ordinary life, the ground for gratitude and wonder in the moment. A modern listener seems to assume that the psalmist's 'I am wonderfully and fearfully made' reflects simple ignorance of biological discoveries and the wonders of science.

It's intriguing to me that more physicists and astro-physicists are inclined to express wonder (and even faith) than biologists. 'Nature' lives somehow in day to day conversation as another God and 'the supernatural' as an imagined God acting against Nature.

Kathy's piece opens up opportunities in our moment for a different conversation. I'm grateful for that. And I also hear in her invocation of the wisdom of poetry that we're not glibly retreating to metaphor, another modernist reduction, I think, of a more Biblical means of experiencing and interpreting story and text. I expect you might agree with me that, "We really mean it all metaphorically" strips us of liturgical and theological means of acknowledging real encounter with a holiness which is genuinely and utterly other. "Symbol" is a word that's more deeply rooted in the tradition, and I love it that in Greek it's also the word to describe the roiling convergence of two rivers. We're looking for collisions of realities, moments when what we know and what we don't know are inextricable. That's what poetry offers and prosaic invocation of metaphor does not.

And like you again, I think, what I'm hearing in Kathy's sketch of all this is that we're verging toward the grace where whole of what IS has begun to reverberate and sing with the presence of the unknowable That and Whom beyond and other than any being.

I resonate with what you are saying here, Donald. I think that Kathryn Tanner's retrieval of the distinction in Thomas and others (denys, proclus) between primary and secondary causes is helpful. Tillich makes a related distinction between beings and Being itself.

I would want to insist that God quoad se is supremely knowable but that quoad nos God is strictly incomprehensible and not really knowable either.

No serious theologian has ever thought of God as an especially powerful creature.

The annunciation is ultimately a rather poetic way about talking about grace and freedom, or operative and cooperative grace, which are two ways of describing the one action of the Holy Spirit, which is at once really and truly our own.

God's action funds our own without being in competition with it.

Because our ordinary experience is with beings that are at leaswt potential competitors, we need symbolic, analogical language. I think there is real cognitive content hidden in the midst of a greater dissimilarity, but to speak of God is to stretch our language to the breaking point.

God is ipsum esse subsistens.

Thanks for this beautiful post, Kathy. Reading it, I was reminded of the viewpoint of Fr Tissa Balasuriya, who says that Mary was the first Christian priest because, through the way Jesus was conceived, only she could have stood at the foot of the Cross and said, "This is my body, this is my blood".

Gerry Dorrian

Sorry - I've done it again! The comment about Fr Balasuriya was by Gerry Dorrian.

But it IS all metaphor as we cannot grasp reality without it. What I call the basic pronounal character of all words.

Bill,

I'm doing a little Thomas reading to follow up on what you've written, specifically trying to bridge between Thomas and the Eastern tradition of the unknowability of God (and of our human essence since we're in God's image).

Kathy,

I'll have to pursue the source for this, but think you'd be fascinated and probably delighted to learn that Christmas is December 25th because the Annunciation (actually the older feast) is March 25th. The early church calculated that March 25th was the date of the first Good Friday and deliberately (knowingly and arbitrarily - - - or is it poetically) set the Annunciation on the same day.

Ann,

My problem with most of our talk of metaphor is that it hides the reality of what's actually there. Liturgically, for example, the metaphors of 'moving the people' or 'touching the people' replace what we're actually doing.

God coming to dwell with us actually (not metaphorically) says something about dwelling and about us that disappears when we're just saying one word or image is standing in for another. I don't know another word besides 'symbol' (and it's an archaic use of it) that actually keeps us considering the collision of otherwise distinct realities.

Don - I AM delighted if Christmas is Dec 25 because of the annunciation -- and I like Bill's language about operative and cooperative grace in speaking of the Annunciation. I think what poets do is push the implications of the symbol/metaphor -- not only to claim but to imagine God "made flesh" as a child born of a woman: and if you look at it from a more feminine point of view - i.e through the lens of people who have actually borne children -- there is this amazing mix of mystery and "of course-ness" about it: of course, if the God we know from Hebrew Scripture was going to do this, it would involve a woman actually giving birth: that's just how the story has to go.

Anyway - I appreciate all these comments -- I may do another post soon on poetry and theology -- two ways of approaching reality that are really inseparable, for me.

Retrieval of forms of discourse like narrative, poetry, and metaphor are definitely on the agenda for theology. David Tracy's The Anaological Imagination is now nearly 30 years old. The title is evocative of a series of thoughts about the role of images/phantasms in the Thomistic account of understanding, particularly in the intellectualist version of that theory put forward by Tracy's great teacher Bernard Lonergan. But Tracy is also in dialog with a whole bunch of other works, from Kant's third critique to the hermeneutical theories of Gadamer and Ricoeur. The issue raised by Tracy of the public claim to a work of art and of the classic.

Might profitably inform the kind of work Kathy is doing. I myself prefer immersion in the symbolic world of the scriptures and the liturgy as source and framework for our theological reflection. Poetry helps us unpack some of the deep resonances of that world, as well as resonances outside the text, which we should expect to be there since God is the source of all Truth from whatever sort. I see the project of great Christian poets as akin to the monastic theology which LeClercq describes.

Kathy - yes - keep writing on poetry and theology - it is what speaks to me of the Holy shot through our lives, burning bushes and all that. Donald - I think I have a broader definition of metaphor - probably from doing EfM where we are not very fixed in the technical definition - more sliding around through image, symbol, metaphor. It is more a sense of something that carries the meaning between and among us.

Ann,

I'm intrigued at this and find it a useful reminder of how context and mode shape our theological language and conversations -

"I think I have a broader definition of metaphor - probably from doing EfM where we are not very fixed in the technical definition - more sliding around through image, symbol, metaphor. It is more a sense of something that carries the meaning between and among us."

And part of what it clarifies for me is that I'm concerned about another way 'poetic' or 'metaphorical' gets used in some conversations to suggest 'just a figure of speech' or 'not real.' I'm guessing that some very productive 'sliding around through image, symbol, metaphor' can happen while holding a binary 'real or metaphorical,' 'true or metaphorical' conversation at bay.

And as I hear it that's useful because there's some important middle ground where what's so 'is' and/or 'is metaphor' in varying degrees or along some kind of spectrum. So sometimes our faith is a comforting way of looking at the world and sometimes it's a means of engaging mystery and the wild Energy of creation or love, and sometimes it's somewhere in between.

Yes Donald - mystery is a big part of faith for me -though to encounter it sometimes takes the day by day steps of dailyness.

Ann - thanks for this -- & Don. Flannery O'Connor once said of the Eucharist "If it's 'only a metaphor' then to hell with it." And yet clearly she was aware of depth of mystery and the need for symbol, imagination, metaphor, story. I think a lot of my reflection about this, way back, was formed by Paul Ricoeur, whose book was translated the "rule of metaphor" -- with "rule" in the sense of a monastic rule or way of life-- you understand sacred reality through the lens of imagination, analogy, connection -- and that opens up truth. This is probably not a good summary of Ricoeur's argument but it summarizes what I've learned from him and what has come into my own practice as a poet-- and also -- again 'way back -- David Tracy and "The Analogical Imagination". But most alive for me are the insights of the poets and my own experience, as a poet, of having words open up new insight into Reality (T.S. Eliot's word: as in "humankind/cannot bear too much reality.")

David Jones says we are by nature "sign-makers" -- we hold things up and say "this 'is' something other." So there's an analogy to our creative work and the sign-making that Christ engaged in in instituting the Eucharist, and in the meaning that comes through the whole story of salvation-history. The day-by-day steps of simply being awake and alive to what is are an important way into this because we are always "making signs" - seeing connections-- living in the story.