Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Good Letters

Home
Catholic
Madonna and Child

Madonna and Child

Last updated on: December 2, 2014 at 1:07 am by Tony Woodlief

Madonna and Child 2014-12-01T15:27:10-07:00 Tony Woodlief

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The entrance makes all the difference.

I recently watched the opening of a Madonna concert, mostly for the same reason that I struggle not to crane my neck when driving past an accident. It was her MDNA tour, which is a clever title when you think about it, because MDMA is an acronym for the drug known as ecstasy, while MDNA evokes the sacred genetic strands that constitute the entertainer known as Madonna.

Her clever set designers put those letters to further use by stationing them around the intersection of a large cross, where once might have gone the letters INRI, signifying the Latin for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

Madonna of Bay City is herself a kind of royalty, perhaps not equal in circumstance to the deity with whose trappings she adorns herself, but certainly surpassing him in pomp.

On the stage preceding her appearance, figures cloaked as monks moved in obscure ministrations around her cross, loudspeakers poured out something resembling ancient hymns, and gigantic censers sent dry-ice vapor coiling toward the rafters. A beat began pounding through the fog, the crowd reciprocated, and the monks threw off their robes, revealing themselves shirtless and oiled, more Chippendale than cenobite.

Then Lady Madonna appeared to her enraptured followers. Flanked by her acolytes, she bumped, she grinded, she shook her fifty-six-year-old moneymaker. She stood before her cross, amidst her swinging censers, where seconds before the air had thrummed with Byzantine chants, and she declared with full-throated conviction that bad girls want to have fun.

That’s it. No incendiary rage against the machine of industrial capitalism, no lament for what’s going on in the inner city, no rebuke of a glamour-queen cast out like a rolling stone—just a randy remix of a point Cyndi Lauper made quite aptly thirty years ago.

I guess poor Madonna had to lead with the looming cross, the prancing monks, the unscented incense, because otherwise she’s just another horny middle-aged mom trying to eke out a little pleasure from existence. And how depressing is that? How common?

“I’m unhappily convinced,” wrote William Alexander Percy in Lanterns on the Levee, “that our exteriors have increased in importance while our interiors have deteriorated: it is a good paint job, but the lighting and sanitation are execrable. A good world, I acknowledge, an excellent world, but poor in spirit and common as hell.”

If hell is absence of the heavenly then we’re wallowing in it. Percy labeled it a disease that “eats to the marrow,” and surely that is us: marrow-rotted and common as dirt, leaning Godward when it suits us or when we have no practical alternative, but always with the intention of making him relevant, as if what pleases us is what’s divine, as if we got here first and he is the one who ought accommodate himself to us, as if we are owed.

The entrance makes all the difference, and as our imaginations have become smaller, our words duller, our lives coarser, we have made everything around us more voluminous—our homes, our cars, our music, our ceaseless chatter—all so we might feel significant, having mistaken small for insignificant. What worth is there in anything small and weak as man?

What good can come from Nazareth?

We have pumped up the volume for fear of the silence, and we are drowning in it, we are made smaller by it. But there’s a blessing in the smallness, in all of us feeling like we, too, stand outside the inn, no matter how fashionably we dress or confidently we speak, because who among us hasn’t suspected he does not belong, that no matter how he molds and fits himself to the vulgarity of the age, he will never really be at home in it?

We are cast out in spite of ourselves and the virtue of being out here is the silence. The silence, if we can shut up long enough to hear it. The terrible silence, the silence that is necessary if we are to discern the earth-stepping God who could have come as a whirlwind but chose otherwise.

We are so sickened that only a whisper will do, only a baby will do, only a humble entrance—not to a stage but to a cave—will do, and this by someone more fully enfleshed than we care to be, more fully humbled than we know how to be, more fully willing to make his cross not an adornment but an implement, because we small-hearted, big-talking people can’t save ourselves, even as we dream ourselves gods.

We light up this season like a distress signal, and we are all of us awaiting something, aching for something. This ache is so big, we imagine only a big remedy will do. We forget how everything metastasizes in a vulgar age—our prayers, our churches, our decorations, our gifts, our hungers. This damnable hunger that is a cancer.

And so it’s an odd and small remedy to leave the cast-off light of the inn and climb cave-ward, to ascend to the mountain of the Lord and stand in his holy place: an animal stall, a den of hay and shit made holy, and perhaps even the likes of you and me with it, because the entrance makes all the difference, the entrance of God into the hell we’ve made.

The entrance makes all the difference, the entrance of God into the world and into us, and we into something bigger, thank God, than ourselves.

Tony Woodlief lives in North Carolina*.* His essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The London Times, and his short stories appeared in Image, Ruminate, Saint Katherine Review, and Dappled Things. His website is www.tonywoodlief.com.

Lanterns on the Levee

Madonna

MDMA

MDNA

William Alexander Percy

Previous Post

December 1, 2014

Mantras for Advent

Next Post

December 3, 2014 Angel Trades a Shotgun for a Shovel: An Interview with Terry Scott Taylor, Part 1

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A. G. Harmon Alissa Wilkinson Allison Backous Art Authors Brad Fruhauff Bradford Winters Bryan Bliss Caroline Langston Chad Thomas Johnston Chris Hoke Christiana N. Peterson Culture D.G. Myers D.L. Mayfield Daniel Bowman Jr. David Griffith Elizabeth Duffy Faith Film Greg Wolfe Guest Contributor Interview Jan Vallone Jeffrey Overstreet Jessica Eddings-Roeser Jessica Mesman Griffith Kelly Foster Lindsey Crittenden Morgan Meis music Natalie Vestin Nick Olson Peggy Rosenthal Personal Reflection Poetry Friday Reflection Relationships Review Richard Chess Richard Cole Sara Zarr Shannon Huffman Polson Sonya Bilocerkowycz Tania Runyan Tony Woodlief Topical Categories Uncategorized Vic Sizemore Writing

Select a Month October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 February 2008

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What metaphor is often used for the righteous in Psalms and Proverbs?

Select your answer to see how you score.

A sun A tree A river A mountain