On Shrieking the Truth: Mary and Proclamatory Wailing

Mary as Preacher

While thinking of the Virgin Mary as a prophet might be somewhat uncommon today, in medieval England this designation was commonplace. Mary was called, “Mary of Nazareth,” “Queen Mary,” and “the New Moses.” ² The Annunciation was a symbol of visionary experience and a model for anyone seeking divine revelation. ³ Syriac Christians believed she had the “wakened ear” of a prophet, and that when the Spirit came upon her she conceived in the ear. ⁴ She was celebrated for birthing the Magnificat as well as the Christ child. But Mary’s prophetic role emerges fully at the crucifixion. Here, the familiar visual scene centers on Christ and the two thieves, but the screaming Virgin dominates the soundscape. ⁵ Her wailing announces the divinity of Jesus and denounces the forces of evil in the world. ⁶

This image of the Wailing Virgin is not taken from the biblical accounts of the crucifixion. Scripture (John 19:25) only establishes her presence along with Mary Magdalene and Mary of Cleopas. We are left to imagine her demeanor at the foot of the cross. Ambrose is among early patristic commentators who envision a detached Mary who watches her son’s death with unusual reserve. ⁷ Ambrose and Richard of St. Victor were among those who believed Mary stoically awaited the salvation of the world through the death of her son, but patristic commentators like Origen had a less heroic view. ⁸ Origen focused on Simon’s haunting prophecy to Mary when Christ is presented at the temple: “A sword will pierce your own soul, too” (Luke 2:35). The sword, as Origen saw it, was soul-piercing doubt, and it was thrust upon Mary at the most vulnerable moment of her life—the crucifixion. Doubt shakes Mary’s faith, he argues, but does not lead to a loud spectacle at the cross.

The Eastern church of the Middle Ages gives us the sobbing mater dolorosa. The writings of Ephraim the Syriac and the poet James of Sarug offer this inconsolable figure of Mary, who gazes at the wounds, nails, and spittle, hears the insults, and begins to moan and wail. ⁹ This depiction of Mary becomes popularized in medieval devotional guides and in dramatizations of the passion. Mary’s wailing announced the climactic moment of the crucifixion. The Virgin’s response was so critical to popular understanding of the crucifixion that some devotees sought a feast day to mark the moment she swooned and fainted from wailing. ¹⁰ The Vatican objected, stating that Mary would have surely exercised more self-control. ¹¹

This tension over Mary’s composure also arises in the Digby cycle of the Gospel Plays. In one scene, the audience watches Mary Magdalene and John struggle in vain to keep Mary calm. She refuses to wear a mask of serenity or even calm down when she is told to comfort herself in the promise of resurrection. ¹² At one point the Virgin even rages at the angel Gabriel for failing to warn her of Jesus’s death. ¹³ Scenes like these posed a problem. The church had a lot invested in Mary’s image. She was supposed to model perfect faith. So, the idea of Mary screaming, pulling her hair, and tugging at her clothes was an embarrassment. The image of Mary wailing triggered censorship in the form of an official statement:

We also do not excuse those who portray in pictures or writings how the mother of God fainted upon the earth at the cross, overwhelmed and senseless from pain, similar to those women who, caught up in their sorrow, cry aloud, beat their breasts with their fists, pluck out their hair, scratch up their cheeks with their nails and proclaim loudly their misery… No one would portray anyone worthy of honor thus in expression of the bitterest anger of their motherly hearts. ¹⁴

Not surprisingly, this effort had little effect. Judith Butler explains that explicit censorship tends to fail because it announces that which cannot be spoken, and in doing so, reveals its own weakness. ¹⁵

In another attempt to save Mary’s reputation, Bonaventure tries a “both-and” argument, saying the Virgin had both “high” and “low” parts of her being. She suffered the passion in her lower being, experiencing her grief as a kind of maternal labor, while at the same time, in her higher being, she experienced perfect faith. Bonaventure insists on a confident Mary. But this confident Mary does not appeal to the masses as much as the wailing Mary. In a line from a popular monastic chant, Mary speaks directly to a mourning church, “You who love the Creator, now listen to my pain.” ¹⁶

Karma Lochrie contrasts the silent Christ with the howling Virgin, a scene which is brought to life in Niccolo dell’Arca’s fifteenth-century Pietá. ¹⁷ The sculpture portrays the dead Christ on a bier surrounded by Joseph of Arimathea, Salome, Mary of Cleopas, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin Mary. This depiction stands out because of the Virgin’s horror that is revealed in her open-mouthed wail. Sound has an overriding presence in the sculpture and seems to blow through the garments of Mary of Cleopas and Mary Magdalene. Viewers “see” the decibels of Mary’s wailing. The sculpture’s message about Jesus’s divinity and the agony felt by those mourning him are inescapable.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Niccolò dell’Arca (1440–1494). Pietá, detail of Mary weeping.

Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

How Mary’s wailing would have sounded remains a mystery. The cultural context offers clues but is not definitive because wailing is tied to both the weeper’s body and the culture in which that body exists. And, wailing is distinct from mere tearing up or soft whimpering. Wailing involves tears, deep sighs, and loud screams that make a visceral announcement: All is not well. This visceral announcement parallels Walter Brueggemann’s assertion that the prophetic word begins with a cry. ¹⁸ Devotees of the wailing Mary would push this argument further and suggest that a divine message is in the wailing itself. Rather than adding content, language tames and dilutes the message. Wailing works by sensitizing the listeners’ affect. Only with a softened heart is the listener able to discern the appropriate ethical response to the tears.

The wailing of these various depictions of Mary beckons viewers into the sonic dimensions of the gospel. These sounds of the crucifixion would have been especially evocative in medieval England because hearing, taste, and smell were understood as more intimate senses than sight. Sound enters the ear canal and achieves its ends inside of a person. And, in this case, sound severs. Spewing anguish, fear, and shock, Mary’s wail awakens quiet dread. With alarming clarity, the wail announces death. The Virgin’s wailing reflects the grief of all humans who mourn but is also uniquely rooted in the passion and in Christ’s identity as Lamb of God.

The Wailing Mary as Model Preacher

Mary’s mode of preaching is influential enough that it reappears in the ministry of Margery Kempe, a fifteenth-century medieval mystic and pilgrim. Predisposed to shriek, tremble, and wail to the point of exhaustion, Margery became a memorable figure in the many English villages she visited. The emotional displays shocked people but were consistent with a charism—donum lacrimarum, the gift of tears. The wailing confused and frightened Margery, too, but she was encouraged by a mystical encounter she had with the Virgin:

[D]ear daughter, don’t be ashamed of him who is your God, your Lord and your love, any more than I was ashamed when I saw him hang on the cross—my sweet son, Jesus—to cry and to weep for the pain of my sweet son, Jesus Christ. Nor was Mary Magdalene ashamed to cry and weep for my son’s love. And therefore, daughter, if you wish to be a partaker in our joy, you must be a partaker in our sorrow. ¹⁹

These words of assurance prove necessary because of the resistance Margery faces. In one case, she is banished from a church by a friar for disrupting his sermons with her weeping. Others perceive her as a threat, a nuisance, or an enigma. For instance, a priest, puzzled to find Margery crying near a pietá, tells her, “Jesus is long since dead.” ²⁰ This composure exasperates Margery. “Sir, his death is as fresh to me as if he had died this same day, and so, I think it ought to be to you and to all Christian people. We ought always to remember his kindness, and always think of the doleful death that he died for us.” ²¹

Seeing infant boys in their mother’s arms or a handsome young man could also stir Margery’s weeping and roaring. Such sights were reminders of Christ’s humanity and hinted of his continuing presence in the world. ²² So, pinpointing a singular reason for Margery’s tears is difficult. She wails about divine nearness, her own sin, the world’s sin and loss, Christ’s suffering, and as a means of participating in Mary’s mourning. ²³

Jesus helps Margery see her wailing as proclamatory. Describing her outbursts as “great rains and sharp showers,” he assures her that the tears are given “when it pleases me to speak in your soul.” ²⁴ He explains that her “great cries and roarings,” are manifestations of his grace and given in the hope that Mary’s sorrow will be known through her. ²⁵ These words embolden Margery. With Mary as her exemplar and equipped with a divine commission, she embraces her vocation as God’s weeping parable.

Tears as Prophetic Speech

Notwithstanding Margery’s unique charism, one objection to the idea of wailing as Christian proclamation is that weeping is internalized and that the fundamental gesture is one of turning inward rather than engaging the world. Yet, this concern may reveal a contemporary Western bias. In their seminal work on tears in religious imagination, Kimberley Patton and John Hawley suggest that, broadly speaking, weeping turns a person towards the community, not away, and that turning towards the community is done to communicate “something vital—something upon which life—or its very meaning—depends.” ²⁶ The wailer voices a rupture and compels her community to accommodate it. ²⁷ This is a moment when the scripted versions of Christianity are proven intolerable. By voicing dissent to the community, the loss can be integrated into the wailer’s faith and shape the community’s belief as well.

Tears have a prophetic role. ²⁸ In some Middle Eastern and West African cultures, ritualized wailing functions as a form of hallowed speech, including poetry and protest language. ²⁹ In a contemporary community of Jewish women in Yemen, laments sometimes take the shape of prophecy. ³⁰ Given the culturally-specific nature of wailing, flat interpretations of wailing as an expression of defeat fall short. Wailing has a capacious dimension and regularly comes with visionary insight. ³¹

One might object to the notion of wailing as proclamation and argue that words should be prioritized. This objection may underappreciate the violence in words and to which words are put. Overemphasis of words also obscures the rhetoric of violence that operates below the level of speech. Christina Sharpe, in describing the horrors of the Middle Passage, explains, “The first language the keepers of the hold use on the captives is the language of violence: the language of thirst and hunger and sore and heat, the language of the gun and the gun butt, the foot and the fist, the knife and the throwing overboard.” ³²

Similarly, tears are “a mode of language,” and a survey of the role of tears in spirituality suggests “the superiority of tears to language.” ³³ Wailing may be an “extralinguistic” form of communicating that is especially suited for ineffable or sacred experience. ³⁴ Rather than being hindrances to communication, tears exceed the power of speech, and are capable of carrying meaning internally between mind and heart, between humans, and between humans and God. ³⁵ One psalmist is comforted by the belief that human tears are not merely communicative, but precious to God. “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your record?” (Ps. 56:8).

Spiritual experience often pushes the frontiers of language. Because language can be wooden and yield easily to blasphemy, mystics and prophets tend to discount eloquence. Words fail to convey the depth and contours of mystical experience and become a source of frustration. ³⁶ Given the muddying tendencies of language, mystics and prophets tend to use rhetorical strategies out of necessity rather than confidence. Tears, on the other hand, communicate outside the realm of rhetorical strategy. ³⁷ They convey an urgency that subverts the quotidian communication strategies that tend to distance us from truth.

Of course, manipulative tears function as rhetorical strategies by drawing on the guise of transparency, so discernment is required. Reverend Billy, a contemporary New York-based performance activist, led a group of about eighty activists and artists in a protest at a Barcelona bank to lament the bank’s investment in environmentally dangerous power plants. ³⁸ Protestors, some naked and one covered in coal, gathered in the lobby to mourn. The group’s weeping and wailing were spectacularly disruptive. Observers were faced with a conundrum: In what sense were the tears manipulative? How was the wailing mere performance and how was it an appropriate response to impending natural disaster?

Whether shared privately or in the public square, part of the rhetorical power of wailing issues from emotional transparency. The wailer sheds the armor of words and the typical discursive defenses to become more present and more available to others. The trembling, the tears, and the heaving shoulders reveal the surplus of speech. The wailer’s anguish will not be confined to a safe distance.

Reverend Betsee Parker, who served as chaplain of the Ground Zero Office of the Chief Medical Examiner Office in New York, was asked whether weeping was like music because it “cuts below the level of distinction that we build up through words.” ³⁹ Parker seemed to agree, describing tears as “the deepest and noblest possible level of communicating from the heart.” ⁴⁰ She went on to explain, “Weeping is the most deeply communicating sound that the human can make. And words don’t get in the way of the sound of weeping. Words only hide the depth but when one hears the sounds—unobstructed sounds, no words in there—you really feel the depths of the emotion that’s in the person.” ⁴¹

If tears reveal the depths of a person, as Parker suggests, resistance to tears, whether on the part of clergy or laity, raises a theological problem. ⁴² Tears pierce the didactic veil, making it possible for a heart-to-heart encounter about questions of faith. More, they align with a mode of communication God employs. In the Masoretic translation of Jeremiah 9:10, God says, “I will take up weeping and wailing.” ⁴³ Alternatively, the phrase might be interpreted in the plural imperative, “Take up weeping and wailing.” ⁴⁴ The latter translation is used in the NRSV to implore the community to share in the expression of God’s grief. Since the line is accompanied by the messenger formula, “thus says the Lord” and a command to “hear the word of the Lord that comes from God’s mouth,” it is clear that God speaks through the wailers. ⁴⁵ Juliana Claassens even suggests that God becomes a wailing woman in this passage. ⁴⁶ God wails so the sound of divine desire, which is the heart of the message, will not be diluted.

Black Marian Wailing

My reading of Marian wailing is informed by the Black church—an arena where sonics have a special primacy. The Black church offers an alternative approach to the history of preaching in that the lush question is not only, what did a given preacher say, but how did it sound? ⁴⁷ Hortense Spillers describes the sensorium of the Black church when she says “the feast of the gaze is to the great churches of Europe” what “the feast of hearing is to the church of the insurgent and the dispossessed.” ⁴⁸ In these plainer worship spaces, “the listening ear becomes the privileged sensual organ,” and “the churchgoer hears double, or in excess, because it is between the lines of Scripture that the narratives of insurgence are delivered.” ⁴⁹ Aurality has a primary hermeneutical function.

William H. Johnson, a twentieth-century African-American painter, highlights the sound of Mary’s wailing in Jesus and the Three Marys. In this piece, painted around 1939–1940, all the human figures are of African descent. With his curving arms extended on a cyan cross and legs bent into an oval, Jesus occupies the center and takes up most of the visual space. Mary is doubled over on the ground near his feet. Lines beneath her elbow and knee indicate movement. She is the dominant figure in color and gesture despite the limited visual space given to her. Sound seems to rise from below, emanate from her corner of ground, and vibrate through her open hands. The painting is an invitation to hear Mary.

The tragedy that Johnson renders rests not only in the son’s crucifixion but in Black Mary’s disenfranchised grief. As Kenneth Doka explains, disenfranchised grief arises when a person’s loss is not socially recognized as worthy of sympathy and thus not respected by the broader community. ⁵⁰ The association of Blackness with the abject also complicates this analysis because it has led to a numbness towards Black suffering on the one hand and its gratuitous consumption on the other. Black Mary’s wailing, like those of other Black mothers, grandmothers, and aunts across generations, matters neither to the lynch mob nor the state. Within the schematic of Whiteness, Black Mary’s wailing is unremarkable, even tedious. Johnson’s painting dignifies her mourning by making her anguish visible and “sonorous.” Her wails are discernible as mourning and as resistance. By attending to individual and collective mourning, Johnson makes an implicit argument for change.

Some mothers make this connection explicit. Mothers of the Movement is an activist group composed of African American mothers whose children were killed by police, vigilantes, or gun violence. For these mothers, public mourning and activism coalesce. On an individual level, these mothers offered tearful speeches at marches, demonstrations, and vigils for their slain children. They also work together. Nine of the group’s members addressed the 2016 Democratic National Convention: Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin; Lucy McBath, mother of Jordan Davis; Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland; Lezley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown; Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner; Maria Hamilton, mother of Dontre Hamilton; Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar Grant, III; Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, mother of Hadiya Pendleton; and Annette Nance-Holt, mother of Blair Holt. ⁵¹ At the convention and in similar appearances, the mothers stood together to attest to God’s faithfulness, honor the unique legacies of their children, and advocate for justice. Experiences of personal loss were aligned with a sense of cosmic loss, and listeners had to reckon with both.

Each member of Mothers of the Movement is a herald of dissent who laments the racialized violence that relentlessly increases the group’s membership. Loss authorizes them to speak without the guise of objectivity. ⁵² They establish the truth about who their children were and about the circumstances surrounding their deaths. ⁵³ This establishment of truth requires challenging the anti-Black narratives of their children as well as the notion that their children’s deaths were necessary. ⁵⁴ In fact, part of what the mothers must claim is the dignity of motherhood itself in a climate when Black personhood is under duress. “What kind of mother/ing is it,” Christina Sharpe asks, “if one must always be prepared with knowledge of the possibility of the violent and quotidian death of one’s child?” ⁵⁵ Wailing in these cases, then, involves lamenting the mother-child relationship that has been ruptured, claiming the authority of motherhood, and indicting the death-dealing culture that denies motherhood.

The authorization of Mothers of the Movement as truthtellers persists years after their public wailing in the early stages of grief and shapes how they are understood when using more restrained speech. They speak with the authority that comes “from a position of deep hurt and of deep knowledge.” ⁵⁶ Mothers of the Movement embodies the centuries-long history of lynching and loss borne by African Americans and warn the nation as it approaches new thresholds of depravity. ⁵⁷ Because the mothers make existential announcements in the hope of seeing change, it is fitting to think of them as augurs or oracles who guide listeners toward God’s shalom. They engage in purposeful witnessing and are informed by experiences of suffering.

Wailing and Homiletical Scrutiny

Whether in the twenty-first century or the medieval era, wailing presents a discernment problem that must be deciphered in light of the sociocultural context. Several elements add to the complexity. First, thought and emotion are woven together into hybrid utterances within which sound proves more lissome than words. The bodily nature of wailing—the sobs, breath, tears, and gesticulations—shade any words or phrases that are spoken and draw the audience into the wailer’s tension. ⁵⁸ Complexity also stems from the wailer’s instability. An unwanted identity change is underway for the wailer, and listeners witness the associated distress. ⁵⁹ All who are in earshot are summoned to consider the wailer’s situation and presumed to have a stake in addressing the loss.

Wailing, then, is a call to scrutiny. Mary’s wail calls for the scrutiny of Christ’s tortured body and the brutality that led to his death. And though millennia separate them from Mary, the Mothers of the Movement make a similar call. The yearning is for slow and careful attention to the underlying tragedy and for the sharing of maternal anguish. In other words, scrutiny is not a purely intellectual exercise; it involves mind and affect, a seeing-with and feeling-with the grieving mother. So, the wailer does not draw attention to herself or to outrage for its own sake, but rather to an indefensible situation.

“Wailing,” Tova Gamliel argues, “represents a value system that clashes with contemporary values in reference both to the mourning (outer expression of distress) and the grief (inner experience of distress).” ⁶⁰ Wailing is a way of saying, “look at what I see.” Or, better, “Can you bear to see what I see?” And sometimes wailing is a way of offering a critique and asking, “Where is God in this situation?” A response from the Christian tradition is demanded. The wailer pushes past human answers—which prove academic and partial in the face of inconsolable loss— and reaches for relief. This can only come from the Eternal One.

Naturally, one might wonder about the role of the pastor and faith community when answers are not sought. Others have written on effective consolation strategies for people facing complicated grief, but in short, that role is best met through accompaniment. ⁶¹ The community can surround the mourner so that the grief is not carried alone, offering symbols and metaphors that in their very provisionality and porosity help narrate the terrain.

Sermons may play a helpful role in this process of accompaniment. Nelba Márquez-Greene’s daughter, Ana Grace Greene, a six-year-old, was murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut on December 12, 2014. Four years later, the mother reflects on her faith during that time:

One of the most compelling sermons I’ve ever heard was given at my daughter’s funeral. It was just a beautiful sermon. It talks about Jesus being with us in every season of our lives, including the winter. And that Ana’s death would signify the beginning of a long and hard winter season. And that winter would be made better with faith and family and friends. And I still feel that way. I really do. ⁶²

When asked by her interviewer whether she had entered springtime, Márquez-Greene said, “I can’t imagine a day that it will be spring. The moment I’m reunited with her, I want to hear two things … ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.’ And I want to hear, ‘Hi, Mom.’” ⁶³ So, hearing from God and her daughter and getting to the end of grief remain paramount. What the preacher can provide in the confines of a sermon is the promise of Christ’s presence, the promise of the church’s continual spiritual support (ongoing communal scrutiny of the factors prompting the loss), and a helpful metaphor for describing the path ahead. Though imperfect and incomplete, the sermon still offers much-needed comfort.

Yet, in this article, I stress the wailer’s role as addressor rather than addressee. I argue that wailing can function as a channel for divine revelation. God’s hopes for humankind and the failure of their manifestation become clear in the messiness of wailing. Whether in Scripture, history, or contemporary life, wailers voice personal losses and lead listeners to scrutinize a given tragedy. The urgency of this examination dissolves the usual script for the audience, turning it into a group of listener-agents who are called to compassionate response.

Christian preaching is also an act of scrutiny before a community of witnesses. It involves examining the tradition and Scripture in light of what is happening in the world so that the witnesses might pray and act accordingly. The wailed message is not peripheral to this process because it consists of a haunting blend of grieving and bearing witness in which the unsayable-but-essential is attempted. Traditional preachers need to heed this attempt and hear wailers as kindred proclaimers—proclaimers whose messages include argument but function at the level of sign or portent. With tears and “sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26), the wail announces the limits of the present age and the desperate need for God’s shalom.