In the Courtyard -- Christmas

If Mary was a virgin...

I distinctly remember a conversation between my brother, Brian, and me when I was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, and he was thirteen, a freshman. The exchange happened right after the Christmas Eve candlelight service at our family church in Sidney, Ohio. Near the end of the service, Brian and I had stood in our pew next to Mom and Dad, each of us holding a small lighted white candle in a round paper base. My sister, Rose, was up front in the choir. With the rest of the congregation, we all sang the last hymn, “Silent Night, Holy Night”:

Silent night, holy night,
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin mother and child.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.

On the way home after the service, Brian pulled me to one side, out of our parents’ earshot, and asked, “If Mary was a virgin, then how did she have a baby?” I don’t know at what age, exactly, Mom and Dad unveiled the facts of life to my little brother, but either he had acquired some new information during the past year or he found himself putting two and two together for the first time. “That’s the miracle,” I whispered back. “It proves that Jesus is God.”

“Ooooooh.”

That’s how I thought of the virgin birth in those days. It was God doing an impossible thing to prove that Jesus was his son. It was the same as Jesus healing the lepers, raising the dead, making the blind see, turning water into wine and crazy people into sane people, and finally rolling away the stone and walking off into the pre-dawn Judean morning, ready to start a new life. It was all evidence. That stuff was impossible, and only God did impossible things. So Jesus was God.

Twelve months later, a college freshman in a black leotard top and faded Levis, I didn’t believe any of it. I didn’t think that Mary was technically a virgin when she discovered she was pregnant, that Jesus healed any more effectively than Pastor Bob and his Traveling Gospel Hour, or that a three-day-old corpse had stood up and walked. I wasn’t interested in a God who had to work magic tricks to inspire belief. I called myself an agnostic because I didn’t want to sound like a know-it-all, but in fact I was an atheist. It took thirty years, until my first Christmas with the Unitarians and the Episcopalians, before I was ready to take another look at the virgin birth.

From one angle, I had been correct in telling my little brother that Mary’s virginity proved Jesus’ divinity. As I read in my Interpreter’s One-volume Commentary on the Bible, it was a Hellenic tradition in the ancient world, not a Judaic tradition, for remarkable people to have divine parentage. Alexander the Great, a Greek who lived more than three centuries before Jesus, was also widely reputed to be the product of a virgin birth. And it was a first-century Greek who provided most of the details about Jesus’ divine conception, the author of the Gospel of Luke, writing at least seventy years after the fact. Once I knew all that, it seemed obvious that Luke used the idea of a virgin birth to help prove to his fellow Greeks that Jesus was of divine origin.

And yet, the more I read about how religion and myth worked in the lives of early Christians, the more I thought that “proof” wasn’t the whole story, or the end of the story. When I saw the virgin birth as proof of Jesus’ divinity, I was looking at it through my post-Enlightenment eyes—the only eyes I’ve got. Nobody in the first century had post-Enlightenment eyes. Back then, hyperbole was a more acceptable literary device than it is today, and stories of divine conception were commonly applied to powerful men, military commanders, or political leaders who changed their world. The big difference in Jesus’ case was that the myth got hooked onto a nobody who had been executed by the state for what he said and did. It may be that Luke wasn’t saying, “A, and therefore B,” so much as he was saying, “Here, where I least expected it, I found the one who changed my world.”

Nobody cares how Alexander the Great was conceived anymore, but the conception of Jesus Christ, believed by many to be the living mediator between God and humanity, has been a source of inspiration for two thousand years. Even in today’s sex-soaked culture, the virgin birth remains one of the defining images of the Christian church. This was a myth that worked across time and culture; something in it felt true about how humans were reconciled to their divine nature. Whatever the physical facts, Mary’s virginity worked for many people on a spiritual level. How come?

For me, the question had changed from this: “How could Mary possibly have been a virgin?” To this: “Why a virgin? In bringing God to earth, why did an angel’s visitation take the place of the sex act? Could Mary’s virginity possibly have anything to do with me?”

When thinking about this, it helped me to forget for a moment the sorrowful Mother of Christ and to picture instead a regular, contemporary virgin. Like me, when I was a virgin. Like the ordinary virgin down the street. The image that came to my mind was of a youth, between fifteen and twenty-five years of age. Either gender would do. A virgin is someone who hasn’t done it . . . yet. What’s dancing around this young innocent, the image that gives the word its frisson, is the idea of what’s coming, what’s right around the corner. The image of the first time.

Will she be in love? Will it be fun, or scary, or exciting, or all three? What will it be like for him? Will he wear a condom? Will she have a good time? Will it be worth it?

A virgin is loaded with potential. Virginity is quite different from passivity, which is the end of retreat. Virginity is the beginning, the moment before the advance. The moment I’m open to receive the divine.

When could God come into me? When I was like a virgin—or as much like a virgin as a middle-aged lady who’d been around the block a few times could be. It wasn’t when I thought I knew what I was doing. It wasn’t when I’d just done something good. It was more likely to be when I knew I’d screwed up and wanted to make amends: the moment before I picked up the phone, or turned to my spouse, or set out on a long, long walk.

The sex act is just that. An act. Letting God inside doesn’t have anything to do with actions. God comes like the angel Gabriel, saying that something is about to happen. Then I decide what to do about it: then I act. God comes when the most important thing about me is not my experience, but my potential; not what I’ve done, but what I might do. At that moment, I’m a virgin, ripe with possibilities. This is the moment when the door is open and the holy can come into me, and God can be incarnate again on earth.

When I thought about it like that, the Virgin Birth could be a story about me, after all.