Modeled After Mary

The Virgin Mary, The Blessed Mother, The Mother of Jesus, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Czestochowa, Our Lady of Good Help, Queen of Heaven-these are but a sampling of the names attributed to a peasant woman named Mary of Nazareth in the Christian Gospel tradition. For many, she is a person of biblical history, a continuation of goddess mythology across cultures, and a figure of veneration in the Roman Catholic Church. While Mary has traditionally been a symbol for the passive obedience, purity and submission to the role of motherhood for women, a growing number of feminist scholars and theologians understand her as having a prophetic voice in the struggle for human liberation, and that she also serves as a symbol/metaphor of the Divine Feminine in Western Christianity. Since Protestant Christianity has generally reduced Mary's role and place in the church to liturgical celebrations at Christmas and Easter, the purpose of this study is to examine the Marian tradition in its various contexts-in history, biblical scholarship, theology, as well as art and iconography-and explore the relationship between Episcopal women and their understanding of Our Lady. Based in a theoretical framework of hermeneutics (specifically that of fidelity and suspicion), I engage in a feminist collaborative inquiry which explores who Mary is as a heuristic concept. This study includes journal entries and group conversations with a sampling of women from The Episcopal Church, explores my own journey with Mary as an Episcopal priest, and concludes with the development of new iconography that speaks to the various ways Episcopal women look to her as a model.