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A Protestant’s Prayer to Mary on the Q.T.

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee,  to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, ‘Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you…. 
Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,  and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants for ever; his kingdom will never end.’

Luke 1: 26-28, 30-33

For one group this stop was the last on this year's Methodist Conference event, "We Make the Way by Walking" where we led conference members around Belfast city centre.... for others it waswhere they started. That in itself might be a metaphor for the different spiritual journies of Christians in this city.
Sadly, central to the general perception of Belfast and Northern Ireland in the eyes of the wider world is the division between Protestants and Catholics. And in popular understanding the place of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in Catholic spirituality, is a key difference between the two. 
But at one point there was a much more positive relationship between different denominations and congregations in the city. In the census of 1782, there were only 365 Catholics recorded living in Belfast, but with the support of a collection from local Church of Ireland and Presbyterian congregations, funds were donated to the building of the first Catholic Chapel in the town, dedicated to St. Mary the Mother of Jesus and it opened on 30 May 1784. Then in 1813, the pulpit from the then derelict St. George’s Church of Ireland church was donated to the Chapel. The irony is that this was the pulpit from which the Rev. George Royse reputedly preached a sermon on the 15th June 1690 to King William III en route to the Battle of the Boyne, entitled “Arise Great King”, telling him that God 
“shall tread down your enemies. Then as by your faith you shall subdue kingdoms, so you shall secure that faith too from all the dangers of Popery and superstition.” 
In 1954 the adjacent grotto dedicated to “Our Lady of Lourdes” was established and to many Protestant people of the city, who would never have been inside a Catholic church this is perhaps the most well-known local site of Catholic devotion… But many years ago when I was previously minister in Sandy Row, one young woman who was the daughter of a paramilitary leader there once said to me
“Don’t tell my Dad, but when things are getting me down, I pop round to St. Mary’s in Chapel Lane, because it’s the only church in the town that's always open for prayer...”
What follows is influenced by all this, but it only dawned on me at our church book group last night that it is also clearly (if unconsciously) influenced by our book of the month, Frank Skinner’s "A Comedian's Prayerbook", which offers an insight into his Catholic faith... This flips the concept...
 
Mary, 
You haven’t heard from me before
so forgive me if I am distracting you
from your more regular correspondents,
but I’m one of the “other sort”
so I’m not really sure,
whether I should be bothering you at all,
or whether talking to you
will actually get me in bother
with your son, a bit like
telling one of my friends’ mothers
what my mate has been doing
when she’s not around.
Not that I’ve anything bad to say
about your son. Who would?
Apart from those religious leaders
who stitched him up in that kangaroo court
back in Jerusalem, of course.
But I suppose it's because
of other religious leaders
down through the years
that I just wanted to have
A quick word. You see,
because they taught us
that we should only talk
to your son and not you,
or any of the saints who
are up there with you already…
Well, I think its got out of hand,
so that, not only do we not
talk to you or them, but
we barely think at all about you
or them (except for St. Nicholas
and St Patrick on certain days,
and I’m not too sure we are
doing them much justice when we do).
You are highly favoured, the Angel said.
Well, not by us, I would say.
All generations will call you blessed,
your cousin Elizabeth told you.
Well, only the generations
in certain parts of the church.
And sadly we haven’t seen those parts
as blessed or highly favoured either.
But we’re learning…
I’m just sorry it’s taken this long.
I long to be as open to God as you were.
See you soon.
Amen

Selah

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