Growing up in the church, there was a somewhat common yet rarely discussed fear among young girls that you could become “the next Virgin Mary” – meaning you could become pregnant without ever participating in sexual intercourse because God decided that it be so. This was a horrifying idea, especially considering the lifelong challenges that would accompany being an unmarried teenage mother. I myself would have regular nightmares that I found myself pregnant, swearing I never had sex, all for no one to believe me as I gave birth ashamed and alone. Later in life, friends and I would confess this childhood fear to one another and laugh with recognition and relief. Maybe we weren’t crazy after all. We found it almost as funny as we did sad. 

Throughout my life, I have continued to hear from people who grew up in church that the annunciation and even the figure of Mary frightened them. While some may dismiss the theological significance of these fears, I believe young girls’ dialogue with the scripture reveal a series of disturbing and significant theological questions: 

Did Mary have a choice in all of this? If she didn’t, what does that mean?

We shouldn’t assume that Mary was overjoyed to receive the news of her pregnancy. In fact, the gospel of Luke narrates complicated emotions. Luke 1:28-29 says, “Rejoice, highly favored one! God is with you. Blessed are you among women!” Mary was deeply troubled by these words and wondered what the angel’s greeting meant.” Womanist and Biblical scholar Rev. Dr. Will Gafney asks, “Did the Blessed Virgin Mary say Me Too?” I think this is a fair question. In the gospel, Mary is told what will happen to her body. While she arguably gives her consent later in the conversation, the language is somewhat passive, “let it be done to me.” Furthermore, feminist activist and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon reminds us that the presence of consent is not always a foolproof method for evaluating sexual violence, as it can often reinforce a “doer and a done to,” failing to analyze the context of power in which consent is given. Gafney too acknowledges that Mary’s consent is “troubled and troubling.” Gafney writes, “Given what we know about power dynamics and hierarchy, (not to mention the needs of the narrative), how could she have said anything else?”

Did Mary have a choice? It appears not in the terms of “enthusiastic consent” to which we often look to determine agency. So where does that leave us? Where does it leave her?

Queer liberation theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid says there are basically two types of readings. One that legitimizes current power structures and one that questions standard interpretation and thus power itself. Borrowing from Paul Ricoeur, she names the second as a reading of rupture (From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology, 17). The second reading is produced by the imagination and dialogue of communities in conversation as they see faith in their everyday reality, such as the conversations girls have amongst themselves about their sexual fears surrounding sacred stories. Communal interpretations that produce readings of rupture are vital for texts to have liberative meaning outside the standard patriarchal order. As Althaus-Reid reminds us, this is crucial because the text we interpret also interprets us. In other words, interpretation is a process of self-understanding (17). Thus, Althaus-Reid wondered how to read a Mary dominated by Mariology in the Latin American context, which emphasizes motherhood and heterosexual purity politics, providing foundational pillars for the internalization of patriarchal oppression (31). Any attempt to produce a liberating theology, she says, needs to consider how knowledge is invented, why and how certain ideas become authoritative paradigms, and who suffers under this order (16-17). Because Christianity has historically relied on colonizing patriarchal orders of sexual decency to interpret sacred stories at the cost of poor women’s lives, this led her to believe that theology needs to be “indecent” by its own standards if it is to express true preference for the poor that includes poor and colonized women – whose sexual lives are rarely ever considered decent.

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception is not where we celebrate the annunciation. Rather, it is a celebration of the Virgin Mary wherein she is imagined without original sin since her conception. To many Catholics, this is key to making sense of salvation and Mary’s sexually decent role in it. But Althaus-Reid warns that theology which tries to translate symbolic systems in perfect order, cannot translate indecent reality (Indecent Theology, 108).

Conscience Magazine is one example of a faith-based community of story tellers prioritizing theology as a dialogue with “indecent” sexual experiences in pursuit of faithful reproductive justice. In their Storytelling Issue, they challenge simplistic frameworks and false binaries of choice that surround the abortion debate. Individuals who work as organizers, mothers, teachers, artists, ministers and more share their reproductive struggles. Additionally, they highlight an ongoing research project aimed at examining how women understand their abortion decisions within the context of their lives as women of faith, as well as how religious identity shapes their decision to terminate a pregnancy, and understand the meaning and value of their reproductive decisions to end a pregnancy. In centering this dialogue, they allow marginalized epistemologies to rework theological assumptions of feminine holiness.

Image description: Against a shadowy background stands a statue of Mary, hands folded in front of her, praying. She wears a light colored garment over her head, and a white shift underneath. From her eyes stream red tears.

Shown above is a still from the video Crying Mary originally produced by Grabarz & Partner, together with director Charly Stadler, Pullover Films, and Mokoh Music to draw attention to the systemic sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. (​Weeping Virgin Mary Highlights the Systemic Sexual Abuse of Children in the Catholic Church | LBBOnline) Although disturbing, Mary Mother of Sorrows assists us in grieving in all sorts of contexts the devastating amount of sexually abused, dismissed, suffering, and dead at the hands of our standard theologies of decency.