The Visitation of Mary
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
May 31, 2007
Among the profusion of documents I was presented when UCLA hired me to teach in the English department there in 1985 was a statement dating from 1949 (the year of my birth and the height of anti-Communist sentiment in America) called the California Oath of Allegiance or Loyalty Oath. This oath is required of all California state employees, and when you sign it you swear that you “will support and defend the . . . Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” (I guess that means double agents from Nevada and Arizona.) I had no problem signing this part, but the second part (if this is possible) both offended me and made me laugh: "And I do further swear (or affirm) that I do not advocate, nor am I a member of any party or organization, political or otherwise, that now advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States or of the State of California by force or violence or other unlawful means.” Now I ask you: if I actually were a member of any party or organization, political or otherwise, that now advocates the overthrow of the government, do you think I’d admit it on a state employment form? The Loyalty Oath dates from a depressing time in American history, and that it still exists in California is a source of embarrassment to all of us who love the Golden State. But it’s also kind of laughable: what revolutionary worth the name would actually tell the truth on such a document? It’s an exercise in futility.
As I got to thinking about the California Loyalty Oath I remembered my once-in-a-lifetime meeting with one of my real radical heroes who was in fact at one time a Communist and who, unlike me, never compromised herself by signing such a pledge: the writer Tillie Olsen, the author of Tell Me a Riddle and one of the great American fiction writers of the 20th century. Tillie Olsen died on New Year’s Day this year in Oakland, where she lived in a cooperative apartment building owned by the Longshoreman’s Union. During the time I taught English at UCLA I used Tell Me a Riddle in almost every American literature class I had—it is a wonderful book about the reality of the lives of working people, especially working women. It is so uncompromising in its socialist critique of America and its communitarian vision for our future that I always thought that Tillie Olsen would be a stern, ideological angry Marxist, an advocate of violent revolution.
In 1996, one of my UCLA colleagues--Constance Coiner who had written a book about Tillie Olsen called Better Red--died in that still unexplained crash of TWA flight 800 off the Long Island coast. Tillie Olsen came down to Los Angeles to participate in the memorial service that the UCLA English Department put on for Constance , and I had the opportunity to sit and talk with her before the event began. Here was the great surprise: though she had written about human pain and her writing was fueled by an angry passion for justice and peace, she was perhaps the sweetest, gentlest, kindest person I have ever shared a room with. I was prepared to meet an unrepentant fiery revolutionary; instead I found myself sitting with a radiant and compassionate grandmother. In that brief encounter I experienced what was for me a life-changing epiphany: some people want to pull down the system because they are enraged. Others want to transform it because of the over-abundance of their love for the people that system betrays. Tillie Olsen was the second kind of revolutionary. So, I believe, was Jesus.
When we turn to tonight’s gospel—Mary’s visit to Elizabeth—we see something of that loving, revolutionary spirit. As this scene is usually rendered in visual art—say by Fra Angelico or Giotto, we sense the love and camaraderie of the two women but their revolutionary zeal seems to be absent. And yet listen to what they say. From Elizabeth: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” And from Mary: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” To all outward appearances, the visit of Mary to Elizabeth may look like a prenatal coffee klatch, but if it is one it’s on the revolutionary model. Mary and Elizabeth are cooking up more than religious bromides: they are preparing themselves for the overthrow of the religious and political establishment. Neither of them could have comfortably signed the California Loyalty Oath. Nor, for that matter, could Jesus.
Two things
occur to me as I ponder this confab of a couple of religious radicals dressed
in domestic camouflage. The first is that they are revolutionaries,
but not of the stereotypical kind. Like Tillie Olsen, like Jesus, like
Martin Luther King and Gandhi, Mary and Elizabeth are revolutionaries of
love. They so love life and the world and the people in it that they
dream of a new life and new world where a restored and transformed humanity
may live with each other in fairness and peace. But don’t be
mistaken about their radical fervor or zeal: they really do want to
topple the lofty from their thrones and exalt the humble and meek. They
really do want to see the fulfillment of what has been spoken by God through
the prophets. The first thing about tonight’s gospel is this: as
companions of Jesus you and I are called also to be revolutionaries of love. We’re
called to embrace the world so fiercely that we will dare to reimagine and
reform its structures in order to bring about real distributive justice. Whoever
thinks that Christianity is safe or easy or complacent about injustice has
been reading the wrong Bible.
And yet: that
transformative, revolutionary Christian zeal which Mary and Elizabeth exemplify
is best characterized as a spirit of joy, not rage. In the same year
that I met Tillie Olsen, 1996, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan—not
someone normally quoted here in the pulpit--famously coined (in a somewhat
different context) the term that he is still best remembered by, “irrational
exuberance”. Perhaps the most memorable moment in tonight’s
gospel occurs when the unborn John leaps in Elizabeth’s womb for joy
at the approach of the unborn Jesus. You might characterize John the
Baptist’s leap as a fetal act of “irrational exuberance”. Something
about the presence and coming of Jesus makes him jump and for no other reason
than mere exultation, what Robert Frost called “sheer morning gladness”. It
is that “irrational exuberance” that “sheer morning gladness” which
most clearly marks the revolutionary of love. If there is a Christian
attitude, a Christian position, a Christian stance toward God, God’s
creation, and the human community, it is one of “irrational exuberance.” John
the Baptist leapt for joy before he really understood why he was leaping. It’s
not too much to ask of skeptical, worldly, cautious Christians like you and
me that we might trade our customary reserve for a dose of morning gladness.
Leaping can actually be fun, once you get the hang of it.
John leapt in Elizabeth’s womb. Mary sang a song of hope and revolution. Elizabeth rejoiced in the dawning fulfillment of God’s promises. God is up to something that we are part of, and that something expresses itself in radical change and is grounded in love. For that love, and for the promise of that change, and for thier glad and exuberant movement toward us, we proceed in the Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.