Eamonn Lynskey explores how The Virgin Mary became identified with the month of May
Again, the month of May, and I hear the long-familiar voice of Canon Sydney MacEwan on early morning radio with that song that releases such a cascade of old memories:
Bring flowers of the rarest,
Bring blossoms the fairest,
From garden and woodland
And hillside and dale …
Memories. And such a ragbag of memories. Those miraculous medals given out at school to my sisters which they wore until they lost them down the back of the sofa; the little cards given out for our Sunday missals with the words of the Memorare, the prayer to Our Lady to intercede with Our Lord on our behalf because we had sinned so grievously; the Legion of Mary selling magazines outside church after mass; rainy visits to Knock … but most of all the May altar at school, or rather the niche high in the wall from where she looked down on us every day, her arms outspread, her benign half-smile assuring us of her love and protection.
Every day. But on the first school day of May the altar would look different, garlanded with crepe paper in her colours of blue and white, and at either side a vase of fresh flowers in place of the artificial ones now stowed away for the duration of this month. Mary’s month.
The Blessed Virgin Mary is celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church calendar with several official feast dates, beginning with The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, on 1st January, and on through to December the 8th, Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It is not surprising that such an important figure in the gospel narratives should feature so prominently in the Church year and that she should be so celebrated by Christians, Roman Catholics especially. What is surprising is how little she is mentioned in those narratives.
The Evangelists make few direct references to her. There are only four occasions where we hear her speak, three are in the Gospel of Luke, firstly in the Annunciation scene (1:26-38); then when meeting her cousin Elisabeth (1:46), Mary sings the psalm of praise known as the Magnificat, though it is somewhat of a stretch to include this as an instance of her speaking because it is not in the form of a normal conversational exchange. There is also the occasion when, after a long search, she finds Jesus, then a child of twelve, preaching to Jewish religious elders in a temple (2:48). The one other occasion we hear her voice is at the wedding feast in Cana (John 2:3) when she asks her son to turn water into wine. Otherwise, references to Mary are indirect. For example, in Matthew (13:53) on hearing Jesus preach in the synagogue, people are astonished at his wisdom. ‘This is the carpenter’s son surely?’ they say. ‘Is not his mother the woman called Mary?’
However, it is not the frequency of her presence in the gospel narratives that explains her importance in church liturgy. For believers it is her status as the mother of God. This is what confers such a supreme importance on her and is the reason she has become so many times celebrated during the Church year, and from the earliest times of Church history, with such a great depth of devotion and worship by Catholics of every station, both clerical and lay,
And from those earliest times the month of May, with its fulfilment of the promises of Spring, has become identified with her. In early Greece, May was dedicated to Artemis, the goddess of fecundity. In ancient Rome it was Flora, the goddess of blossoms, that received recognition as May’s Olympian patroness. And when Christianity swept over those ancient customs like a tidal wave, old customs acquired a Christian significance. Innumerable popular commemorations were recast in a manner befitting the new religious dispensation and by medieval times the ancient May celebrations of the world’s renewal had become, for Christians, centered around the Blessed Virgin who, through the miraculous birth of her Son, had brought about a glorious spiritual renewal for mankind.
The Blessed Virgin. Alone of all her sex, Mary as a human being untouched by the physical nature of procreation, neatly complements the idea of the freshness and newness of summer. This is reflected in the way so many different sculptures and paintings over the centuries show her as a young, beautiful, virginal figure, the very epitome of all the unspoilt goodness that May yearly brings. The ancient Romans too prized this idea of sexual purity, requiring that the priestesses of Vesta, their goddess of Rome’s sacred hearth and its flame, be virgins
Mary’s virginity was confirmed as a dogma of the Church as early as 553 AD at the Second Council of Constantinople and pronounced later by Pope Martin in 640. For all Catholics it is an Article of Faith and must be believed as such. As it was in Greek and Roman times with the pagan goddesses, the Virgin Mary gradually became the figure symbolic of all the goodness that the month of May brings.
But which Virgin Mary? Why, out of all the myriad sculptures and carvings produced down the centuries, should the statue that stood in my convent classroom all those years ago (and in practically every other convent classroom all those years ago) be the one chosen?
There is no description of Mary’s appearance in the gospels but this has never deterred artists from devising imaginative portrayals. They range from the oldest extant image, a faint remains of a 2nd century head and shoulders on the walls of the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome, and onwards through the series of innumerable representations during the Renaissance, and on again into our own age in more abstract portrayals, such as those of Irish artist Mainie Jellett.
These various representations have sometimes been controversial. In 15th century Florence there was criticism of Michelangelo’s sculpture Madonna della Pietà for its unrealistic portrayal of Mary as a young woman, too young to be holding the body of a fully grown 33-year-old man. Conversely, some Catholics accustomed to seeing Mary portrayed as a young woman were dissatisfied when the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini cast an old woman in the role of Mary in his film The Gospel according to St Matthew (1964).
Writers too have been fascinated by her. She appears in the final verses of Dante’s magnificent Divina Commedia and that hard-drinking, hard-living rapscallion French poet, Francois Villon (1431-63), who twice narrowly escaped the gibbet, could write a Ballade to Our Lady in a moment of tenderness (Your graces, Holy Dame, I hardly dare / Think can outweigh the load of sins I bear…); and William Butler Yeats took time off from his ventures into Irish myth and legend to write The Mother of God, a poem in which he allows Mary to give voice to her feelings as the one chosen to bear Jesus, thereby giving up the life of an ordinary mother (Had I not found content among the shows / Every common woman knows, / Chimney corner, garden walk, / Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes / And gather all the talk?). In our own time this fascination with the image of Mary as divinity, as mother, as woman, continues with Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s short novel The Testament of Mary, (2012) which presents her story in a realistic, though of course, fictional setting.
On a personal note, I will say that my own appreciation of the power of words was awakened at an early age when reciting in class The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I can still hear its luminous elegant phrases, dating from the Middle Ages, ringing constantly in some deep recess of my mind:
… Mystical rose,
Tower of David,
Tower of ivory,
House of gold,
Ark of the covenant,
Gate of heaven,
Morning star …
Looking back on those pre-Vatican Council days of Irish Catholicism I remember it as a time of severe emphasis on sin, self-denial, and suffering. The ‘Good News’ gospel had not yet arrived, at least not in Ireland. By contrast, the figure of Mary, with her promise of a sympathetic understanding of human frailty stood out starkly against the rather forbidding expectations of a Church in which the doctrine of Original Sin was taken very seriously and the road to eternal salvation strewn with many traps and snares. She was, for many Catholics, a beacon of light in that darkness.
And despite those countless intellectual and artistic interpretations down the centuries, it nevertheless seems that in the Catholic popular mind there is a clear and persistent idea of how Mary should be represented. Doubtless this representation has been influenced by those artistic interpretations. However, for believers, the commonly accepted image of Mary, the Blessed Virgin and Mother of God, is that which year-long looked down on our primary school class of 40 youngsters: the young woman clothed in blue and white, standing in the posture of downcast eyes, arms outstretched, palms open in welcome, a delicate foot planted firmly on the neck of a writhing serpent with Eve’s apple in its mouth. A stunning combination of solicitude, protection – and power.
This depiction seems to go back about six centuries when a statue of the type described was dedicated at a church in Cambray in France in 1472 by the Bishop of Arras. It is a persistent image, this ‘Lady of the Graces’ and is largely in keeping with the figure described by the child Bernadette Soubirous which, she said, appeared to her at Lourdes: ‘a lady wearing a white veil, a blue sash and with a yellow rose on each foot.’
This is the Mary that in the past was yearly garlanded for May celebrations and which in some parts of the world of Catholic culture is still sometimes ceremonially paraded through a town’s streets. Devotional customs like that are becoming rarer today but pilgrimages to Marian sites such as Lourdes in France and Medjugorje in Bosnia/Herzegovina are as popular now as they were in the days of Chaucer’s famous pilgrimage to Canterbury. It is this statue of ‘Our Lady of the Graces’ that is to be found in many small shrines on street corners in Italy, or in the artificial grottos in towns and villages in Ireland which survive from the Marian Year in 1954, which was ordered by Pope Pius XII to commemorate the proclamation in 1854 by Pius IX of the Immaculate Conception. This dogma pronounces that Mary herself was conceived without Original Sin and further enhances her status in the hierarchy of divine entities.
Whatever her history, her place in the gospels, her importance as an interceding agent in the working of divine justice; and however innumerable her competing images fashioned over the centuries, when I hear Canon Sydney MacEwan singing that hymn, especially on the first day of summer, I am always filled with a strange mixture of nostalgia for my 1950s Ireland (grim as some of it was), and an expectation of good things to come, now that summer has arrived again with month of May. Mary’s month.
O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today
Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May …
Canon Sydney MacEwan (1908 –1991) was born in Glasgow, the younger of two brothers. After his parents separated, they were brought up by his mother, who was Irish from the Portadown area of County Armagh. The family was poor but Sydney’s mother managed to pay for music lessons for both her sons and both won bursaries to good schools.
During World War II Sydney served as an ambulance driver. He was ordained in St Andrew’s Cathedral in 1944. After the war his concert tours in North America and Australia helped to provide funding for the building of St Columba’s Cathedral in Oban, and the renovation of the Church of St Margaret’s in Lochgilphead in Argyll where he was parish priest for 17 years.
At university he began a singing career on the advice of Sir Compton Mackenzie and Irish tenor John McCormack. He began recording in 1934 while still attending the Royal Academy of Music in London. His most popular song, the hymn Queen of the May, is played over the radio in Ireland on the first day of May each year. It was written by the American composer Mary E. Walsh, born in the mid nineteenth century.
