When Mary Calls, It Is Surprising Who Hears

A new book by Margarita Mooney Clayton on Mary, the Mother of God, and what it might mean that a prominent UK philosopher, mother, and critic of feminism read it and reviewed it

Earlier this month, Mary Harrington devoted her popular newsletter to a book she says she did not expect to land on her doorstep. The book was When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God by Princeton Theological Seminary professor Margarita Mooney Clayton. Harrington’s review carried the title “The Icons Are Coming Alive Again,”. It is worth reflecting, I think, not only on what she wrote, which is a thoughtful and positive response to the book, but also on the fact that she wrote it at all.

Icon of the Theotokos, painted by David Clayton, the writer of this post!

In When Mary Calls, Margarita Mooney Clayton (who is, I should disclose, my wife) gathers seven personal accounts of encounters with the Mother of God, drawn from Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and secular lives, including her own perilous work among religious dissidents in her mother’s native Cuba.

She leads with these testimonies, hooking readers through the often unseen and untold drama of finding and deepening faith. Theology is not missing but rather embedded within the narrative of each story. In unique ways, each story emphasizes that the Christian faith is not about a dry grasp of dogma but about dogma in service of a deep personal relationship with Christ, with Mary, and with the saints, whose mission is to lead us to Him. The stories show Mary drawing seekers into deeper relationship with her son and into the living community of faith, which they need to journey from questioning to belief, where unique and extraordinary encounters with Mary are transformed into the sustained practices of a life of faith shared in community.

Mary Harrington is not, on the face of it, the sort of reader one would expect to be moved by a book of Marian testimony. She is an academic by formation, secular in background, a feminist who came to public attention, especially in Britain, where she comes from, through a critique of progressive feminism rather than through any religious commitment. Published in 2023, her book Feminism Against Progress argued that feminism has done little to help most women.

Five years ago, one suspects, the idea that she, or anyone in the world she occupied, would write a warm and deeply considered review of a book about the Virgin Mary would have seemed improbable to me. And yet here she is, not merely tolerating the subject but finding in it something culturally significant, even personally affecting.

Harrington has been sharing her journey with her followers, in which her critiques of progressivism and secularism are leading her not just to critique feminism but also to attend an Anglican church.

When a thoughtful female philosopher, one who, at least in the past, was resolutely secular, turns to a book on Marian devotion and finds those deeply personal encounters with Mary not embarrassing but compelling, one wonders whether something has shifted in the wider culture.

Harrington herself seems to sense this. The stories Margarita has gathered, Harrington observes, are not confined to Catholics. They include people who were once seekers, not people raised with faith, who are now Greek Orthodox believers, mainline Protestants, and Catholics, each of whom was drawn to Mary’s presence and, through it, to healing, transformation, or inspiration.

A young Protestant man was healed at a holy well in Ireland. Our Lady of Guadalupe speaks to a frightened pregnant woman and saves her life. Tammy Peterson, wife of Jordan Peterson, who had rejected Christianity as a teenager, makes her way through cancer in her 50s and begins praying again, eventually converting to Catholicism. These are not the testimonies of cradle Catholics confirming what they already believed. They are accounts of surprise.

The mother-shaped blind spot

Harrington reads When Mary Calls through the prism of a theme she has written and spoken about elsewhere: what she calls the cultural erasure of motherhood, the way the modern world quietly eliminated the maternal role and instincts from its understanding of what it means to be a woman.

The marginalization of Mary in the Anglophone world, she suggests in response to reading this book, was not incidental to the Reformation but close to its center. The purging of icons, relics, and pilgrimages, set in motion in England by Thomas Cromwell in 1538, meant, in practice, the radical setting aside of Marian theology in favor of something more verbal, less visual, less sensory and more abstract.

Harrington does not spell out the insight by which she connects the rejection of icons and devotional practices to the eventual decline in devotion to Mary herself and the theological truths bound up with her role in the Incarnation, but I think she is correct. A lack of appreciation for Mary, she suggests, led, in time, to the situation in which the visible, embodied, mother-centered spirituality of the medieval world gave way to something cooler and more cerebral, what one person profiled in the book called a “rational, disenchanted worldview” that had made its way into Christianity.

Was it a coincidence, Harrington wonders, that this spiritual marginalization of Mary was followed, albeit slowly over centuries, by the material and technological marginalization of women in the modern project? She draws on Ivan Illich, who argued that modernity had the displacement of women (at least women as women, not the same as men, and women as mothers) baked into its worldview.

One need not endorse every link in her argument to say that it is significant that a scholar formed by feminist philosophy is suggesting that the loss of Mary and the loss of the valuing of motherhood may be outward signs of the same error. An error, I would add, that only leads to misery for all if lived out. On this point, Harrington has won many followers precisely for admitting that the modern world never prepared her for the most incredible part of her life: becoming a mother. Motherhood changed her, setting her on a journey toward more than progressivism and feminism had given her.

What the Protestants forgot

Here I want to add something that Harrington’s account seems to invite, though she does not quite say it. We are accustomed to speaking of the Reformation as a rejection of Mary. But it may be closer to the truth to say that in many cases Protestantism forgot Mary rather than rejected her. Woven throughout When Mary Calls, and explained in the book’s appendix, is something I didn’t know: the Reformers themselves did not reject fundamental Marian doctrines such as the Virgin Birth or the Mother of God (Theotokos).

Rather, the apparent hostility to the Mother of God comes from questions about improper forms of devotion to Mary. Luther and Calvin were concerned about medieval devotional practices that had grown up around Mary, which they feared had displaced the honor due to Christ alone. Over time, this in turn led to the neglect of Mary herself.

The icons coming alive

Harrington’s title is well chosen. “The icons are coming alive again,” she wrote, and not because anyone has mounted a campaign to revive them, but because people who had no particular reason to look for Mary are finding, it seems, that she calls them by their name, she lets them know in their hearts, as she told Saint Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill five centuries ago “I am your mother.”

Two chapters of When Mary Calls I would particularly commend to artists and to anyone who thinks about the making of beautiful things. The first, specifically referred to by Harrington, features the composer Sir James MacMillan, whose words about Mary as a model for creatives Margarita puts into dialogue with a Promethean model, where the artist is defiant and human-centered, in which the artist seizes the fire and turns away from God to assert his own sovereign making.

And there is the Marian model, drawn from the Annunciation, which MacMillan describes, in which the artist receives rather than seizes, saying fiat to an inspiration that comes from beyond himself and extending the incarnational moment into the work of his hands. This is not a sentimental contrast. As an artist myself, I find that MacMillan offers a genuine account of where creative work comes from. Drawing our attention to Mary’s cooperation with God as an inspiration for creatives, it reframes the whole question of artistic vocation in a way that a secular age, perhaps exhausted by its own self-assertion, may be more ready to hear than it was a generation ago.

The other chapter from When Mary Calls that I recommend for artists is the story of the conversion of my own icon-painting teacher, Aidan Hart, and his journey from a young seeker to a mature man of faith and master iconographer. He speaks of devotion to Mary not as a doctrine held at arm’s length but as something that has guided his personal journey, both as a Christian and as a maker of sacred images.

The icon painter does not invent his subject. He receives a tradition and submits to it, and in that submission finds, one might say, not constraint but greater freedom. There seems to be a direct line between the fiat of the Annunciation and the discipline of the practicing iconographer, and Hart’s own path, from a secular beginning through testing a monastic vocation to a life as married man a working artist, could in many ways be considered a living illustration, one might even say icon, of the very pattern MacMillan describes of openness to inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

The clever title of Harrington’s article refers as much to images of Mary as to Mary as an icon in the more modern sense of the word, a figure who has become emblematic of an idea or a movement, someone the culture recognizes and reaches for. That the two senses, the painted image and the cultural emblem, should converge on the same word is itself a small instance of what Margarita’s book on Mary is about. The icon on a chapel wall and the icon in the imagination of a secular readership may be nearer to one another than many are aware.

What it means to venerate again

Harrington closes by wondering what it might mean, culturally and spiritually, if people were once again to regain the desire and capacity for veneration — the willingness to kneel before a figure like Mary and ask for her help. She rightly describes Margarita Mooney Clayton’s book as a gentle, careful work of ecumenical restoration.

I am inclined to put the point more strongly. The capacity for veneration is part of what it means to be fully human. The widespread loss of this capacity to venerate Mary, outside the Catholic and Orthodox churches and perhaps some Protestant churches, has cost us dearly. To venerate the Mother of God is to acknowledge, at the deepest level, our need for a model of love and self-giving, and for Christ Himself as the ultimate source of all that is good. In her fiat, Mary herself recognized this truth: “Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” (“Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word”). As a pastor recently observed in a homily I heard, these may be the most important words ever spoken by any human being aside from those of Christ Himself.

That a secular feminist scholar can see Mary as an icon in the religious and cultural sense of the word, and write about it with such elegance and care, is astounding. When Mary Calls is a book for Catholics, certainly. But its deeper interest perhaps lies in the people it reaches who are not Catholic or Orthodox, but Protestants and seekers, who seem to be discovering that the figure their culture set aside was waiting for them all along.

The icons are indeed coming alive again. We would do well to pay attention to who is noticing.

When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters With the Mother of God by Margarita Mooney Clayton is published by Odysseus Books

Below is a YouTube presentation by Margarita Mooney Clayton about her book, delivered at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, DC.

David Clayton is Dean of the Faculty of Sacred Arts at www.Pontifex.University and Artist in Residence of www.ScalaFoundation.org