Heaven's Tiger Mum
Over the weekend just past, Dan and I dropped our latest episode of Awkward Asian Theologians and, because we are a Catholic podcast, we thought we’d focus our attention on that most Catholic of topics, namely Mary, but with an Asian twist.
We organised the episode around the claim that Mary was both the most Asian and least Asian of Mothers at the same time.
On the one hand, we claimed that she was mother most Asian, because of her role as the Mother of God. We drew on the theology of the early Church Fathers, which looked Mary’s status as the Mother of God as acting as the safeguard for the incarnation of the divine Word. This is another way of saying that what being born of Virgin did was confirm the full humanity of Jesus of Nazareth.
Building on this, we also relied on the theological observation of Graham Ward, that the incarnation, inasmuch as it is the divine Word’s taking on of human nature, then it would also mean the words integration into all of human culture. The incarnation, says Ward, becomes a cultural event. Because of this deep integration with human culture, we claimed that it should come as no surprise that the depictions of Mary will become deeply culturally inflected, or to put another way, the various cultural adornments on the person of the Mother - including the non-European adornments like the Chinese and Vietnamese - are also artistic confirmations of a fundamental Christological reality, namely the humanity of Jesus.
On the other hand, the basis of our claim to her being the least Asian, is due to the fact that Mary is not only the Mother of God, but also the daughter of her son. By this, we mean that Mary is no super-human, but a human just like any of us, though in receipt of many graces from God. Making use of the joint official Mariological statement between Catholics and Anglicans, Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ, we made the claim that Mary was just as much in need of a saviour as anyone else. Against this backdrop, even the most extraordinary of Mariological dogmas are, counterintuitively, signs of her profound humanity and her profound need for grace like everyone else. Put more constructively, these dogmas do not so much speak about Mary as they speak about how and where the saving power of God operates within the concrete circumstances of a person’s life.
The episode can be listened to in full on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Amazon Music.
