Mary as Model of the Disappearing Model

This paper is derived from a portion of a talk given at the FIAT! Conference in Ave Maria, June 22, 2024

If desire is mimetic, then we must be careful that, in imitating each other’s desires, we do not end up with desires for an object that cannot be shared.  As Rene Girard has shown in analyzing many key texts, conflict lurks potentially in every mimetic desire.  Two friends grow up sharing the same desire for basketball, for pizza, and for video games.   All is well until they share the same desire for a girl.  That, Girard has shown, is in many a Shakespeare play and echoes something fundamental about fallen human nature.

Is this a problem in schools?  Is it a problem for teachers?

One might argue that this is no problem in education since all of its ultimate goods are transcendental. We can all share in the acquisition of the true, the good, and the beautiful; we can all know, love, and serve God.  Indeed, we are called to orient our desires (and those of our students) to the transcendentals, to truths that can be shared, and toward God so that all can share in a growth in knowledge.  We are even called to inspire students to will the good repeatedly; all can do so without conflict.

At the same time, school life is filled with rivalry and competition, mutually shared desires for objects which cannot be shared: high status grades (or low status grades), top spot on the teams, and honorary titles and awards.   Students compete with each other for all sorts of un-sharable goods, and sometimes teachers and schools generate these things for competition.

Even in the relationship between teacher and student, rivalry can occur for the prestige of knowledge acquired or insight gained.  Interpersonally, the affection of a student’s love can itself be a scandal to a teacher’s pride if he or she imitates that love for himself and grows dependent on it to such a way that the teacher covets the student's affection due only to God (this is rivalry with God).  But the Girardian model predicts something more dangerous: the pride of the teacher is really in competition with other teachers for a student’s or students’ affection(s).  Mimetic desire to be a good teacher can easily become a desire to be the best teacher – or in the infernal underground -- a better teacher than so-and-so. . . 

If the teacher’s desire is not properly ordered to making Christ manifest within, these rivalries are bound to happen.  But the goal of mimetic modeling in the Catholic school is to bring Christ to the student in and through the teacher.  The teacher must then say, imitate me as I imitate Christ and then simultaneously, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Stepping back and fore-fronting Christ

At a later point in Msgr. Luigi Giussani’s book, The Risk of Education, after suggesting that the risk of education is primarily about engaging adolescent freedom and taking a risk that the child will or will not choose Christ, Giussani suggests a new possible risk to the pedagogical enterprise.

Giussani states, “precisely because of his discretion and respect for the student, in a certain sense the role of the educator is to step back behind the overshadowing figure of the one Truth by which he is inspired.”[1]  And he writes, “the increasing autonomy of the student is a ‘risk’ for the teacher’s intelligence and heart and even his pride.”[2] Thus, the risk of education is also a risk for the teacher.   How can this be?

If the emerging freedom (or autonomy) of the student is a risk for the teacher, then it must be that the relationship of mentor/disciple is one which can be in itself the object of desire. The teacher is tempted to desire the student’s dependency on him. 

Let’s think about why this might be more significant a threat to the teacher-student relationship than we at first suspect.  The very essence of a teacher’s vocation is to teach, that is, to help form Christ in children.  But the very moment of success is the moment the teacher is no longer needed; thus, teaching, if done well, must bring about its own annihilation.  The number of mimetic factors in a teacher’s life based on the student’s desire for him, rivalry with other teachers, or even large scale existential comparisons with any other possible career or role model could make this moment of absolute irrelevancy highly destabilizing for any teacher.

Giussani’s solution is one that only a Pastor and true disciple of Christ could envision.  His testimony is a very important witness for Catholic educators in our time: “precisely because of his discretion and respect for the student, in a certain sense the role of the educator is to step back behind the overshadowing figure of the one Truth by which he is inspired.”[3]  The role model must allow his own role model to win out; this is the primary face of humility in action.  The teacher’s risk in the face of adolescent freedom is that he chooses Christ rather than himself (or himself over against another) as the goal for his student’s desire.

The Model for Stepping Back: John the Baptist?

It may seem that the saint to whom one should go for inspiring this self-abnegation in the face of Christ is John the Baptist.  His famous line, “He must increase; I must decrease” seems to encapsulate this principle. The problem with this approach, though, is that it leaves out the way in which Christ is really in the teacher as model.  John the Baptist does not say, “in following me you have always been following Christ.” 

Also, we read that “John sent some of his followers to Jesus. They asked him, ‘Are you the One who is to come, or should we wait for someone else?’”(Matthew 11:2)   The commentaries on this passage in Thomas’s Catena Aurea[4] leave us unconvinced that John is fully innocent here.

The gloss suggests jealousy at work: “The Evangelist had shewn above how by Christ’s miracles and teaching, both His disciples and the multitudes had been instructed; he now shews how this instruction had reached even to John’s disciples, so that they seemed to have some jealousy towards Christ.”

St. Gregory increases our suspicion with challenging questions: “we must enquire how John, who is a prophet and more than a prophet, who made known the Lord when He came to be baptized, saying, Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world!—why, when he was afterwards cast into prison, he should send his disciples to ask, Art thou he that should come, or look we for another? Did he not know Him whom he had pointed out to others; or was he uncertain whether this was He, whom by foretelling, by baptizing, and by making known, he had proclaimed to be He?”

Ambrose understands John to have waivered in faith, albeit out of love: “Some understand it thus; that it was a great thing that John should be so far a prophet, as to acknowledge Christ, and to preach remission of sin; but that like a pious prophet, he could not think that He whom he had believed to be He that should come, was to suffer death; he doubted therefore though not in faith, yet in love.”

Chrysostom tries to balance these positions by saying, “But this seems hardly reasonable. For John was not in ignorance of His death, but was the first to preach it, saying, Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. For thus calling Him the Lamb, he plainly shews forth the Cross; and no otherwise than by the Cross did He take away the sins of the world. Also how is he a greater prophet than these, if he knew not those things which all the prophets knew, for Isaiah says, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter. (Is. 53:7.)”  Are we convinced?

Without completely throwing John the Baptist under the bus for the seemingly faithless question he has his disciples ask (after all, he is a great saint!), but at least acknowledging that elements of John’s behavior were somewhat erratic and countercultural in a kind of competitive way (attacking the Pharisees as hypocrites while eating locusts and condemning pagan adultery), we might ponder whether there is a better model for one who carries Christ within so that He may be born in the hearts of others?  I think the answer is Mary.

Mary as Best Model for Disappearing Model

Marian devotion is arguably encapsulated in the phrase “to Christ through Mary:  I am all thine and all that I have belongs to thee oh my sweet Jesus through Mary thy holy mother.” At the same time, her last words in the Scriptures are: “Do whatever He tells you.”  She, in a sense, disappears only to accompany in the background, silent at the Cross.   She is never mentioned in the resurrection appearances. At Pentecost, she is model of prayer, but all of the attention goes to the apostles.

Thus, Mary is the model for one who gives birth to Christ, contemplates him, brings him to others, assists in helping others receive him, and then disappears quietly when Christ is formed within the other.

In this light, four mediations, themselves heavily dependent on several mysteries of the Rosary, can assist the Catholic teachers especially in liberating them when the teaching occupation becomes a risk for their pride.

Meditation #1: Mary teaches Christ and then disappears

If we read the Annunciation in light of a teacher’s call to bring Christ to others, then we see Mary as the one who hears the call to teach and says yes.  Pregnancy is then the silent preparation for this announcement to go public; it is fraught with challenges.  Will others understand this mission?  What dangers must I be aware of? Mary is the model of humble trust at the birth of the teaching vocation.

The Visitation shows us, though, that this call to teach immediately puts us in special relationship with others, even before we begin.  We are made special, anointed by the call. We are moved to praise the Lord and magnify His Name with our soul.  He has looked on us lowly ones and invited us to such a task. 

We also must accept that our identity -- and thus our title -- has shifted; Elizabeth calls Mary the mother of my Lord, and so are we as teachers in the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, our mother.  We are participating in the maternal giving of Christ to the world.  We are, in a spiritual sense, as Catholic teachers in the Church, mothers of our Lord. St. Gregory says “Be it known by us then, that he that by believing is made brother or sister of Christ, becomes His mother by preaching; for in pouring Him into the heart of the hearer, he may be said to beget the Lord; and he is made the Lord’s mother, when by his word love of the Lord is begotten in the mind of his neighbour.”[5] In sum, The Magnificat is the expression of the humility necessary for the Catholic school teacher: I will be called blessed, but only because the Almighty has done great things for me.

Next, the Nativity is the beginning of the active ministry of teaching.  The Lord is now made manifest and Mary externalizes the teaching event.  Her actions symbolize the externalization of teaching, an outward movement that is deepened in the Presentation.

Then, the Finding in the Temple reminds us that Mary has been, for 12 years, the primary teacher of Jesus and the primary face to others of his growth and development.  There is something in her experience of being mother to him that allows her to take a prime responsibility for him so that, when he disappears, she is utterly confused.  His strange response about the father’s house causes her to ponder in her heart, but she consents to the fact that the Christ she is giving to the world may be now governed by another teacher, the Father in Heaven.  Moreover, those who encounter Him may no longer need her maternal invitation and governance.  Mary is now the model of the model gradually letting go.

Now, when the Lord begins His ministry, we read ultimately of his Proclamation of the Kingdom; then, at a key moment, “While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.’” Mary is clearly involved in the teaching of Christ and others know her role.  She has a kind of gravitas that makes many turn to her as “bearer of Him.” In fact, Christ’s response that his family is those who do the will of God only accentuates that everyone’s normal instinct is to consider the relatives and especially the mother of the Prophet as exceptional faces in the ministry or Word delivered.

All of this comes together in the Wedding of Cana. It is evident that the Mother of Jesus at this wedding has an exalted status: “Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.”  In other words, Mary is a key guest, perhaps more-so at this point than Jesus himself.   Moreover, when she learns of the waning wine and speaks to Jesus about it, she is the one to command the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.”  This is the disappearance par excellence.  Had Mary any pride or attachment to her status as guide or path to Jesus, she would have been tempted to play “middle man” in this scene. In other words, Mary might have said: “Jesus, tell me what I should tell them, and I’ll let you know what they have to say.” Instead, she completely removes herself from the situation.  

John Paul II explains, 

In these mysteries, apart from the miracle at Cana, the presence of Mary remains in the background. The Gospels make only the briefest reference to her occasional presence at one moment or other during the preaching of Jesus (cf. Mk 3:31-5; Jn 2:12), and they give no indication that she was present at the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist. Yet the role she assumed at Cana in some way accompanies Christ throughout his ministry. The revelation made directly by the Father at the Baptism in the Jordan and echoed by John the Baptist is placed upon Mary's lips at Cana, and it becomes the great maternal counsel which Mary addresses to the Church of every age: “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5). This counsel is a fitting introduction to the words and signs of Christ's public ministry and it forms the Marian foundation of all the “mysteries of light” (RVM 21).

Thus, the words are those for every age drawn to Mary; she turns and points only to Christ.

Meditation #2: The Actual Disappearance

A second thought might be, though, that Mary’s total disappearance really only comes together at the Assumption.  After all, even at Calvary, Jesus entrusts her as mother to John. Evidently, her role of teacher has not ceased, for she is still being asked to teach Christ to others. At Pentecost, she prays with others that Christ is born in them, that they have mission, and that they go forth.   In fact, in religious art, Mary can be seen at the center of Pentecost images.  Moreover, from tradition we know that she goes to Ephesus with John and not until the Assumption has her work ended on this earth.  Perhaps the Assumption is the final disappearance.

The Catholic school teacher can, in this mediation, look at the whole life of Mary as a model for educating others in Christ, an education that ends only at the end of this life.  This meditation stresses the need for teachers to constantly lead others to Christ even as they enter fully into their apostolate and even become the new princes of the Church, as Mary does with all the apostles.

Meditation #3: The path of disappearance in every devotee

But then a final thought is that this pattern repeats in the lives of every believer.  Mary lives in heaven; she has returned not a few times to us.  She is still leading us to Christ: The perpetual work of the Blessed Virgin is, thus, in a sense, as long as history now unfolds unto the end of time.  In this final mediation on Mary teaching us Christ we look at Marian devotion itself.

St. Paul VI, in Marialis Cultus, explains:

There has also been felt with greater urgency the need to point out once more the importance of a further essential element in the Rosary, in addition to the value of the elements of praise and petition, namely the element of contemplation. Without this the Rosary is a body without a soul, and its recitation is in danger of becoming a mechanical repetition of formulas and of going counter to the warning of Christ: ‘And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words’ (Mt. 6:7). By its nature the recitation of the Rosary calls for a quiet rhythm and a lingering pace, helping the individual to meditate on the mysteries of the Lord's life as seen through the eyes of her who was closest to the Lord. In this way the unfathomable riches of these mysteries are unfolded (MC 47).

The way we are to pray the Rosary, for example, reminds us that the devotion to Mary is but the formal attributes through which, at its core, our gaze is on Christ.  Mary draws the Marian devotee to her Immaculate Heart only to lead him to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  In every Marian devotion this same path to Jesus through Mary is reflected in some way.   Thus, every Marian devotion is a reminder to the teacher how to brings souls to Christ through us without ever allowing it to be a harm to our souls.  Mary guides us in humility.

All of this is summed up I think in JPII’s letter on the Rosary where he writes that 

The Rosary, though clearly Marian in character, is at heart a Christocentric prayer. In the sobriety of its elements, it has all the depth of the Gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to be a compendium. It is an echo of the prayer of Mary, her perennial Magnificat for the work of the redemptive Incarnation which began in her virginal womb. With the Rosary, the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths of his love. Through the Rosary the faithful receive abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer (RMV 1). 

Mary is a teacher, a teacher of Christ.  She is the model teacher; we want to sit at her school.   However, we do not gaze on her in that school.  The teacher is ever disappearing, for she is fixed in contemplative gaze on her Son, drawing us mimetically to desire him through her so that she will disappear and He will be all in all.

Meditation #4: Mary teaching Jesus

But perhaps the real model of Mary is as a teacher of Jesus himself.   She is the one who must guide him to the Father.  She must carry him to safe birth and teach him the basics of language and culture.   She must guide Him to the right guides, especially, perhaps, if Joseph is no longer around.  She must direct Him in all things for thirty years such that he is obedient to them (Luke 2).  And all the while she is teaching him to grow and flourish, to achieve His destiny as Messiah and Anointed One.

And she accepts.

This acceptance is maximized, in a sense, at the Cross; there, she must accept His path, an inscrutable one perhaps at the time.  It raises questions for anyone.  What did she ponder in her heart? Has she taught Him correctly all these years?   Has she guided Him on the way?   How could He end up crucified in the Roman Empire, the worst criminal of all? Perhaps she ponders these things.   Or perhaps by the time Calvary arrives, and in light of Simeon’s prophecy, she is fully aware that this is God’s plan. Regardless, her final teaching of Christ as mother at Calvary is one of ultimate compassion.

John Paul II writes

And again, after the events of her Son's hidden and public life, events which she must have shared with acute sensitivity, it was on Calvary that Mary's suffering, beside the suffering of Jesus, reached an intensity which can hardly be imagined from a human point of view but which was mysterious and supernaturally fruitful for the redemption of the world. Her ascent of Calvary and her standing at the foot of the Cross together with the Beloved Disciple were a special sort of sharing in the redeeming death of her Son. And the words which she heard from his lips were a kind of solemn handing-over of this Gospel of suffering so that it could be proclaimed to the whole community of believers.

As a witness to her Son's Passion by her presence, and as a sharer in it by her compassion, Mary offered a unique contribution to the Gospel of suffering, by embodying in anticipation the expression of Saint Paul which was quoted at the beginning. She truly has a special title to be able to claim that she "completes in her flesh"—as already in her heart—"what is lacking in Christ's afflictions " (SD 25).

The school of Mary as teacher is one which must accept the suffering of the student even in martyrdom.  We must work as potential martyrs even to the point of accepting the martyrdom of our students if it is God’s will.