The Mystery of Mary
Lessons from a deathbed experience
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Okay, now for today’s reflection:
The Mystery of Mary
People wrangle over what to make of the biblical story that Mary conceived while she was still a virgin. Some insist that it is literally true. A miracle and a mystery. Others argue that what we now know about human reproduction requires that we read the story of Gabriel’s announcement to the teenaged Mary as a metaphor.
An experience I had with a dying woman has given me another way to think about the mystery of Mary, and along with that the mystery of God’s in-breaking into ordinary human existence. First I’ll tell you about my experience, and then we’ll take up the Virgin Birth.
A nurse had told me that Bernadette was nearing the end. So, I began making more frequent trips to her hospital room. When we were alone, I would sit in the chair next to her bed. When the family gathered, I would join them at the bedside or stand supportively in the background.
Within a few days, Bernadette’s breaths had grown visibly shallow and infrequent. She didn’t respond to her adult children’s gentle touches and tender words. At some point, the Hail Mary came unbidden into my mind. I wasn’t intentionally reciting the prayer. It sort of came out of nowhere:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
I love that prayer, but it wasn’t like me to say it very often. Even when I was a Roman Catholic, I was not much of a rosary guy. Besides, I was then and am now an Episcopalian right down to my toes.
A few seconds later Bernadette opened her eyes and weakly said something. Her oldest daughter leaned in and said, “What is it mom? What is it?”
Her daughter then said, “Mom, did you say Mary? Has Mary come to you?”
Bernadette nodded slightly and then drifted into unconsciousness. She died a few hours later.
Mary. That’s what I had heard her say. Mary.
After Bernadette had died, I gathered with the family to share memories of their mom and to pray. It was only then that I learned that Bernadette had had a lifelong devotion to the Virgin Mary. Since then, after some reflection and a little philosophical scrutiny, I’ve come to believe that Mary reached across the great divide to walk her friend Bernadette home.
Understandably, some might greet my interpretation of this experience as wishful thinking, as naive fantasy, or as rank superstition. They may insist on a natural explanation for what, in all likelihood, was a hallucination or a conscious state hovering somewhere between waking and sleeping.
After all, we do live in an age profoundly shaped by the natural sciences. And the basic assumption of the scientific method is that every event in the universe has been caused by some other event in the universe. Nothing supernatural breaks into this closed universe. They could even believe that there is something beyond the natural, but they might still insist that the supernatural does not affect the natural world.
Here's a shocker for them, and perhaps for you. I’m not going to try to talk anyone out of this perspective. Instead, I’m going to suggest that there is more than one perspective. And anyone insisting that this is the only viable way of seeing Reality doesn’t really understand how consciousness works. And their insistence amounts to a kind of reductionism. A reductionism that impoverishes our lives.
As usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s step back and talk briefly about how consciousness works. Our minds are not merely mirrors that passively reflect things around us or blank slates waiting to be written on. Consciousness anticipates what it’s about to encounter and then selects lenses that will bring that object into focus.
Weird right? Sounds like a bunch of philosophers stayed a little too late at the pub. And while philosophers like Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger have in fact said stuff like this, contemporary neuroscientists like Mark Miller tell us roughly the same thing. We see Reality through a set of lenses. We experience what Kant calls the Thing in Itself or Noumenon through the lenses we bring to the encounter.
Science is the lens that sorts our world into material causes and effects in space and time. The lens narrows our perceptions so that we can make sense of things. We don’t just impose cause and effect on reality. Instead, the scientific lens keeps us focused by excluding other ways of processing and interpreting Reality. Kant argued that there are two other major lenses to use for understanding our reality: the moral and the aesthetic. The good and the beautiful. I would add the religious lens: faith and the openness to God’s transforming presence.
Properly understood, none of this needs to suggest relativism, the idea that each individual has their own truth and that no one has a basis for contesting another person’s truth. Instead, what philosophers and neuroscientists are telling us is that human consciousness is limited. Reality is bigger, more complex, and nuanced than we can take in all at one. Trying to do so would simply overwhelm us. So, our brains come with more than one set of lenses for interpreting Reality’s multiple dimensions and unfathomable depth.
Science is an important and trustworthy lens. But it is not the only one. To reduce our available lenses to only the scientific one will obscure from us depths of the Noumenal (Reality as it truly is in itself) that require us to take on a variety of lenses to appreciate it and to navigate our complex lives.
At the risk of oversimplification, let’s put it like this. When it comes to the lenses we use—the scientific, the moral, the aesthetic, the religious—we should say “and” instead of “or.” So, in Bernadette’s case, we can readily acknowledge that there were neurological and psychological ways to understand her experience. And there is a religious narrative that frames it as well.
Now that we’ve talked about how consciousness works, we can return to the mystery of Mary. In a nutshell, the religious narrative of the miraculous conception of Jesus tells us that Mary’s faithfulness made space for a divine in-breaking into ordinary human life. Put simply, Mary said yes to God’s initial yes to her and to all of humanity.
The biological lens limits our vision to causes and effects within the closed material universe. That limit is what makes scientific inquiry possible at all. Scientists, acting in their capacity as scientists, should not go about looking for supernatural causes for natural events.
This does not mean that there is no supernatural dimension to Reality. Instead, it means that the scientific lens is limited. I won’t say much about that limit. But I will mention this. Science requires verification. An experience is valid for drawing scientific conclusions only if it can be repeated by others under carefully controlled conditions.
Spiritual reality does not work that way. Spiritual experiences cannot be controlled or reproduced. There’s a uniqueness about each encounter with the divine. We have to wait for God to initiate an in-breaking and then say yes.
God chose Mary. At that moment. In that place. Mary could not then write a tract about the seven steps to experience a divinely inspired conception as a virgin. On analogy, Moses could not tell you how to produce a burning bush experience like his. You won’t find a pamphlet by Jacob explaining how to schedule a wrestling match with God.
Mary’s story tells us about how mystery shakes up our lives. To get the point, we need to use the religious lens. Mary urges us toward faith. Faith waits. Listens expectantly for God’s yes to us. And then faith responds with our own yes to God’s yes. That is how God gives birth to something radically new in ordinary human life.
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The Rev. Pamela Dolan on her book Contemplative Gardening
An Advent/Christmas Series
Bishop Rob Hirschfeld on spirituality, wellness, and mental health (in 2025)
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After 18 months of cancer treatment, my husband was told there was nothing more that could be done and he needed to begin hospice service. As we drove home I asked what he would like his friends and family to pray, he said “the Hail Mary.” He was raised Catholic and received into the Episcopal Church at 40+. His Catholic piety remained strong and sustaining in those 20 years until his death. In that final month of morphine, he often saw things no one else saw. The morning he died, he was in his recliner and looked out into the hallway. He pointed and asked “Who’s that woman?” I looked to my right towards a side chair and in a brief instant saw what appeared to be an arm clothed in blue resting on the arm of the chair. It was just a flash and gone. It’s been 21 years since he died and I don’t remember what I said, if anything. But I thought it was Mary. Soon after, he set aside what was in his lap, leaned back in his chair and went into a deep sleep. He died peacefully, as he’d lived, a short time later. That sighting remains clear in my memory. I think the veil parted briefly in that moment.
Love this. Deathbeds are the thinnest of all thin places.