knowledge through Truth
In 1998, when I was 16 years old, I toured the Iberian peninsula with my grandparents, including a few hour stop in Fátima, Portugal where I first opened a little window into Nazareth, so to speak, and grew curious about the person of Mary, a figure from the Bible I knew very little about and, as a Protestant, had kept a safe distance. (see previous post)
Through a series of events that transpired that fall, I began to take Catholicism a little more seriously, though certainly approached it with a great deal of skepticism and suspicion. After about a year, after reading bits of the early Church Fathers and feeling winded by all I was learning about the early Church—for example, that it looked very Catholic—Mary was the figure that stood in my way. She was, in many ways, a safe haven in the sense that she was the official reason I could never become Catholic. However true the Catholic faith may be, the Marian stuff was the limit.
But there were historical and theological bits that would give me pause about my hesitancy towards Mary, not to mention the example of the faithful. The Catholic Marian doctrines were beginning to make a bit of sense.
By this time, there were a couple saints with whom I felt a kinship. I had first been impressed by St. Faustina and the other-worldly love she shared with Jesus Christ. When I learned of her devotion to Mary, I had to acknowledge that it clearly hadn’t disrupted her love for God.
The image of Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant pierced my Old-Testament-reared Scripture-brain. I knew what the Ark was, the importance, what it housed—and what happened to those who touched it. The early Church Fathers immediately recognized Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant, this vessel who had housed God, made holy by her Creator for His divine purpose.
Even more intriguing to me was the way by which Mary came to be called Theotokos, which means “God-bearer” in Greek, or Mother of God. In response to a heresy that threatened to separate Christ’s dual natures of God and man (Nestorianism), the Church at the Council of Ephesus in 431 declared Mary to indeed be Theotokos, God-bearer. If Christ the man was in Mary’s womb, then Christ the divine was also in Mary’s womb; His natures could not be divided. This was my first experience of seeing how anything Marian inevitably points to God. Even in apparitions, her message is always one that leads people to Christ. She, by her very being, glorifies our Lord.