This week my brain has been marinating in both Mary and drywall dust. I've requested a stack of books on Mary, but this might (might) be the last post dedicated to her for a bit.

The questions So What and For What are never far from my mind as I think and write. I love a thought experiment as much as the next nerdy girl, but I’m not interested in a flight of obsessive fancy about Mary, or in seasonal sentimentality (though I will always cry about Mary in December, dammit). Mary—for what?

“The Table” is an invitation to bring all of myself—including a faith background both rich and traumatizing—to the millennia-long struggle against domination and for wholeness, justice, and joy. Practically, that looks like identifying and enacting the practices that support a life of generosity and “proximity” with the people who understand much of the world from its underside.

Philosophically, it looks like learning new ways to think about and with other people, people whose lives and minds are different from mine. And spiritually it can look like seeking role models, guides, helpful ancestors.

These days, the evangelicals I grew up with are mobilizing around social justice, since—weirdly!—it’s become a trendy topic (?!?) in the past few years. Some of them find the whole notion repugnant, too try-hard and do-gooder for people solely dependent on God’s grace. Some of them are noting, accurately, that certain strains of Christianity have always been about caring for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger.

And some are doing what they usually do: barreling into the space and hollering that only conservative American evangelicals, as the exclusive heirs to historic Christian orthodoxy and Truth, can do social justice right. (This crowd acknowledges the Bible’s obsession with justice but then severely limits it, in all the ways you might expect, along lines of gender and race and sexuality and “lifestyle.”) This last crowd gently shares your concern for justice but would like to convince you that, having surveyed the field in 2024, they and only they understand what justice is and how to enact it. (I was recently gifted a book that makes this precise argument. :/ )

I am not convinced, not by a mile.

Many years ago someone told me that the struggle for justice is a river, millennia long, surging forward, crashing around obstacles, getting dammed up now and then but flowing inexorably ahead. Immediately, the image both energized and relaxed me: I don’t have to reinvent the wheel! It’s not my job to fix everything! There’s momentum here, ancient momentum protecting the most vulnerable from the most powerful, and I can jump in and join!

This is where Mary and the Table collide. (In the river, with metaphors allll mixed up.) As described by the gospel writers, Mary deeply knows this river, this momentum. She has memorized and internalized the ancient prophecies—enough to remix them into an on-the-spot manifesto. She immediately understands her Christ-bearing mission as part of God’s centuries-long justice project and jumps into the river—not to direct it, but to join it. Elizabeth, in grouping Mary with Yael and Judith, sees her in that river, links her with powerful, wily liberators across the centuries. Mary knows she’s a powerful wave, but she doesn’t see herself apart from the stream.

And we! We get to jump into that same river, sit at that same table. We don’t have to reinvent from whole cloth, we don’t have to get it, or make it, all right. As we seek justice and wholeness, we’re joining, being invigorated and empowered by, these powerful and faithful and brave people across millennia. Yael and Judith and Hannah and Sarai and Miriam and Elizabeth and Mary and [your name here].

Rad, right?

An orbital sander awaits. And this river!