Like a Virgin

“I was born in the mud. With my feet on the ground. I had nothing to give, and no words in my mouth. I was born in the mud, and it’s where I belong. So why me?”

So sings our French saint-to-be, the malnourished village girl Bernadette, in a contemporary Broadway-style adaptation of her story. Bernadette received 18 visitations from an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the 1850s, and in the most unlikely of places: a muddy and swine-infested grotto in Lourdes at the foothills of the Pyrenees.

The illiterate 14-year-old, asthmatic and sickly, felt unworthy of the vision, and a clamor formed all about her – villagers and priests and nobles all seeking their piece of the spectacle and vicarious grace from ‘Our Lady of the Grotto’, whom only Bernadette could see. Some claimed Bernadette was hysterical, feverish with the icon-soaked imagery of rural Catholicism. That she saw only what she wanted to see.

Poor Bernadette. She’s like us: of the mud, the clay from which our bodies are molded, but gazing upon the light. She didn’t have the education or words to enrol her experience into an argument about the nature of God. It’s almost an archetypal story, the saint who felt unworthy upon the illumination of a direct spiritual encounter. They spend the rest of their lives trying to live up to that image of purity, burdened by the weakness of flesh.

And what exactly did she see? The Virgin Mary – mother of God – the immaculate ideal against whom all women are bound to fall short: the perfect virgin and perfect mother. Except that’s not exactly true.

The tiny maiden

The present-day statue of the Virgin Mary in the cave where the visions took place is a typical Marian sculpture with the figure adorned as Bernadette described: a white veil, blue sash, and a yellow flower at each foot, matching the colour of the string of her rosary. She’s also a fully grown woman.

Yet over and again Bernadette insisted her vision was of a “small young lady” much the same size and age as herself. In Bernadette’s regional dialect, she described her vision as “uo petito damizelo”, which can also be translated as “a tiny maiden”. Imagine that? The Virgin Mary not as the demure vessel of God, but a tiny maiden? For the Catholic Church, that didn’t wash. Author Paulo Cohelo called it a full-scale appropriation of Bernadette’s story and experience.

“She repeated the same story all her life and was deeply angered by the statue that was placed in the grotto; she said it bore no resemblance to her vision, because she had seen a little girl, not a woman,” Cohelo writes in The Zahir.

In fact, Bernadette, an uneducated miller’s daughter, wasn’t believed at all at first by religious authorities. It was only when she was pressed to ask that the apparition provide her name that she gained credibility. The name she received from the vision was a term known to theologians but not uneducated village girls.

“I am the Immaculate Conception.”

Transforming dogma

Now that’s a strange name. It’s the name of a dogma, one that holds that Mary was free of original sin, which had only been enshrined by the Catholic Church four years previously, in 1850. She’s the exception to the rule that proves our fallen nature. Our Lady didn’t offer this answer straight away. Bernadette visited every day for a fortnight bearing the question and each time received only a smile. “After the fortnight I asked her three times consecutively,” Bernadette said. “She always smiled. At last I tried for a fourth time. She stopped smiling.”

In Bernadette’s account it’s hard to escape the impression that the vision is indulging the request, knowing that it’s not Bernadette’s petition, and the answer will change her fate. “I am the Immaculate Conception.” The tiny maiden seemed to be speaking both to and beyond the Church: confirming the dogma in order to transform it. As Cohelo writes: “She describes herself as a fact, an event, a happening, which is sometimes translated as ‘I am birth without sex.”

The use of the definite pronoun – “the Immaculate Conception” – draws parallels with “the Christ” meaning the “anointed one”, and “the Buddha” the “awakened one”. These are titles, rather than names, seemingly representing fields of consciousness. Jesus, Mary and Siddhartha are passing through, just like the rest of us.

This suggests the use of the definite pronoun is not about the singularity of Mary, but the unitive ground of being from which she emerges. If the Immaculate Conception is an event and the universal creative principle is feminine, that bestows a lot of generative power to the bone-and-blood women of this world. Through the lens of a male, celibate, monastic tradition acting as middlemen between the people and God, that feminine was wild and needed to be contained.

God as Mother

If robbing Mary of her supernatural luster seems mean spirited and literal, it is only because it veils something far more stunning than a virgin birth. Interestingly, the term “virgin” used in the Old Testament to foreshadow the birth of Christ doesn’t actually mean virgin. The Hebrew term almah appears only seven times in the Hebrew Scriptures and is usually translated as “maiden” or “young woman”. It’s given an asterisk in modern renderings. So when Isaiah 7:14 says “the virgin shall be with child” and Matthew later uses this passage as proof, it’s circular logic.

The image of a tiny damsel further disrupts the expected narrative. Can men of a cloistered God bow before a girl, barely a woman?

Virginity in a metaphysical sense is the absolute inner unification—ironically which includes the union of the masculine and feminine in the transformative fires of eros—that must occur to be restored to the ground of being from which we are all given birth, first as spirit and then in flesh.

Perhaps the Immaculate Conception is an event, a happening, the birth of something without sex. It’s the start and end of everything; the alpha and the omega, all contained and exploded from the original cosmic seed. If we were to describe the big bang of creation, sexless but feminine, then Immaculate Conception is a very good name. Not Mother of God, but God as Mother. That God giving birth to the universe would have a feminine face is so obvious that it’s escaped notice.