Barbie and the Blessed Virgin Mary

Life in Barbieland is perfect. The sun is always shining; Barbie never has a bad hair day, nor does she experience pain, or fatigue; she doesn’t get cellulite and she doesn’t feel fear. She lives the best day of her life over and over again. It’s perfect, and it’s utterly, intentionally fake. It’s based on a lie, and that lie is that Barbie has solved all the problems of the patriarchy for little girls in the real world. She blithely explains that ‘we fixed everything so all women in the real world are happy and powerful!’ Because in Barbieland, Barbie can be anything she chooses – President, construction worker, supreme court justice, or party-girl – she believes that the same must be true of women in the real world. And when Barbie does suddenly discover things like the fear of death, and has a bad hair day, it's a sign that things are going seriously wrong. When she travels to the real world, she begins to discover the ways in which she has been marketed to sell unrealistic expectations to women and girls – most of all about their bodies, but also about their careers, their behaviour, the double standards by which they will be judged. Life in the real world hasn’t been fixed – everything is in fact the reverse of her expectations.

When we consider the figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary as she has been portrayed and venerated down the centuries, we might start to see some similarities. After all, the majority of depictions we have of the Virgin Mary perpetuate similar unrealistic physical expectations: she is young, beautiful, with a perfect postpartum body, and she is very much white. She doesn’t have a bad hair day. Like Barbie, the Virgin Mary has been desexed, the physical realities of conception, pregnancy and birth excised from her story. Indeed, the second century Proto-Gospel of James goes so far as to insert into the narrative of Jesus’ birth a midwife who, like midwives ought to do, seeks to examine Mary after birth. Because of this impertinence, the poor midwife is afflicted with a withered arm, and the legend grows that Mary managed to give birth without rupture to her hymen.

Mary has a similarly uneasy relationship with feminism, too. Some efforts have been made in recent decades to reclaim Mary as a feminist icon, but often these efforts have been stymied by the weight of the ingrained sexism inherent in her image. The South American feminist theologian Marcella Althaus Reid goes so far as to call her ‘the colonial spirit of servitude to patriachalism incarnated’ and ‘patriarchal gender performance going solo’. Most often, she is used by those on the other side of the coin, those defending the more unregenerate strands in the Christian tradition from criticism. She is used as an argument for separate spheres, and thus for women to remain firmly in their own box. It can’t be sexist, for instance, to deny the priesthood to women, if some of your favourite saints are women.

What, then, can we do with this immaculate plastic figure, our patron? Should we consign her to landfill, or, like many in the Church of England, avoid all talk of veneration or of giving Mary a special place among the communion of saints for fear of being ‘too Marian’ or ‘too catholic’? No! We are Mary’s church and she is our patron, and by her intercession and through her example, we can be brought into a deeper relationship with her Son. But it does need care.

In our Gospel reading, we heard the magnificent poetry of Mary’s song, the Magnificat. The song expresses Mary’s joy and gratitude for the honour of her own status as God-bearer, mother of the Lord, but it swiftly moves from there to praise God for all that God has done in salvation, not just what has been done for Mary. What is described is a set of reversals markedly different from those which Barbie discovers in the real world. Injustices have been righted: the humble have been lifted high, the hungry filled with ample food, the proud brought low. It’s a wonderful vision. But this puts in question the reality of the world that the Magnificat describes. After all, when we look around us, we see famine and food poverty, abuse of power and the slaughter of the innocent. We don’t live in Barbieland. Not all the problems have been solved.

But the poetry of the Magnificat is more subtle than this. Luke fills it with deliberate echoes of the Hebrew Bible: the Song of Hannah, also praising God for the miraculous conception of a child, and Isaiah 61, a song of praise in response to God’s promised justice. This is how God has acted in the past, says the Magnificat: God constantly remembers the need for upside-down justice and will do so again. And the work is far from finished: although the verbs in the Greek are in a past tense, they are in the aorist, an ambiguous past tense, not the perfect, the tense of matters fully accomplished. Some commentators have labelled this use of the aorist as the ‘gnomic’ aorist: a tense to describe actions known and trusted in, not completed. Mary is indeed living in the real world when she sings this song: she knows about the existence of the hungry, the humble, the proud and the mighty. If she doesn’t know it yet, she soon will: that being God’s mother brings with it a sword to pierce her own heart, fear, poverty, instability, and the sight of her first born child unjustly hanged by the state. And yet she has the confidence to sing that all generations will call her blessed, and the hope and assurance that God will continue to act according to God’s nature, through the child she is now carrying.

So what does it mean, to be Mary’s church? What is the call placed upon us, when we claim her as our patron? Firstly, it means being courageous. It means having the courage to face up to the world as it is, not as we should like it to be. It means noticing, naming, feeling the injustices that surround us, having the courage to live in the real world. Secondly, it means being hopeful. Mary’s song is one of powerful and astonishing faith in the face of the great weight of her calling as God’s mother. With her eyes wide open to the crushing needs of the world, still she trusts that God will continue to bring about salvation. Finally, to be Mary’s church is to be ready to say ‘yes’ to God: not just to have the courage to see injustice, not just to hope in God’s salvation, but to be ready to take an active part in bringing about that salvation, knowing how costly this will be for us.

Towards the end of the Barbie movie, there is a moment when Barbie is faced with a choice: to return to the perfection of Barbieland where she can live a thousand different lives, or to live in the real world, where she can live just one, but one of real joy, real sorrow, real life. She places her hands into those of her creator and says, ‘Yes.’ Let us, as Mary’s church, do the same. Amen.