Vigils Reading – Memorial of BVM

MARY’S VIRGINITY

From the writing of Lucien Legrand

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The significance of Mary’s virginity is entirely different from both cultic

virginity and philosophical continence. Mary knows that her virginity has no

value of its own and no power but that of the Spirit. She does not speak of the

greatness of her virginity. For her, it is not virginity that makes her great: it is

the Lord. As far as she is concerned, she is nothing and her virginity seals her

nothingness. Because she is a virgin, she is ‘poor’, a contemptible thing,

considered worthless by the world.

Of course, in the case of Mary as in that of the ‘Poor of Yahweh’ in the Old

Testament, poverty should be taken in the biblical sense. It is not merely

negative. It does not mean only destitution. As we find it in the life of the great

biblical figures such as Jeremiah, Job the anawim in the Psalms and the

Suffering Servant in Isaiah, poverty is a religious attitude which underlies the

spiritual development of the Old Testament and prepares the way for the

abasement of the cross, the imprint of which it bears by anticipation.

Biblical poverty does indeed mean life deprived of any human hope but

also and mostly at its deepest, radical detachment, total humility and

consequently utter confidence in God. Mary’s virginity belongs to this type of

poverty. It is a form of that religious attitude made up of faith and abandon, joy

and confidence; it is akin to humility and can be summarized as an attitude of

religious expectation. It is silence, readiness, emptiness. And her greatness

comes from the faith and confidence in god which spring in the heart on that

emptiness, and from the answer God gave to that faith and confidence.

Virginity of this kind differs entirely from its pagan counterparts. It does

not represent an attempt to substitute our influence for God’s power: on the

contrary, Mary has no other ambition than to be the handmaid of the Lord.

Neither does Mary’s virginity correspond to a merely human longing for purity

and moral greatness. Her virginity does not belong so much to the moral as to

the theological virtues. It manifests an attitude before god rather than an effort

of moral perfection and of self-achievement. Luke’s Gospel of the Infancy does

not describe in Mary a heroic form of the virtue of chastity. What it sees in her is

sheer faith and hope which has no reliance in creatures but is entirely turned

toward God.