The Marys Around Us

I thought I'd start this blog off with a re-post of something I wrote over a year ago and published on my little-used and little-viewed personal blog. Here it is: 

About a week before Christmas we went up to Salt Lake to see “Savior of the World,” which is basically a musical Christmas pageant sponsored by the LDS church. During the scene where Mary tells Joseph that she is pregnant, I had a thought that has stuck with me for the past few weeks, a thought that had never occurred to me before, despite 23 Christmases of reading the Christmas story several times each December. The thought was simple: Mary didn’t have it easy.

Imagine if a 14 year old girl in your neighborhood got pregnant. Think of all the shame and ostracism she would experience. Now imagine she claimed she was still a virgin and that the child she was carrying was the Son of God, the result of an miraculous conception. Even if she was a nice, upstanding girl, something like that would be impossible to believe.

In Mary’s time, not only would people not have believed her, but she would likely have been the victim of some pretty intense persecution. Joseph’s decision to marry her quickly probably helped placate some of the critics, but I’m sure she was shunned, ridiculed, and abused.  Perhaps there were even some pharisees who threw rocks at her, wishing they could stone her to death as the law indicated they should.

I wonder if God chose an young unmarried girl for a reason. Of course, Mary was one of a kind--pure and virtuous “above all other virgins” (1 Nephi 11:15). But maybe there is a deeper lesson here. A lesson about judging.

How often do we judge others because of their mistakes? Do we exclude people from our social circles because they are a pregnant teenage girl, or an openly gay man, or an alcoholic? We should learn from the example of Mary: every circumstance has more than meets the eye.

Of course, what happened to Mary was unique. She committed no sin, in fact it was quite the opposite. But does that really matter? Does it matter if someone’s situation is a result of sin or righteousness?

 Jesus, born of Mary, taught “judge not that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7:1). The fact is, we are all sinners (Romans 3:23) and just because someone sins differently than we do, we don’t have the right to mistreat them. 

When Mary and Joseph left for Bethlehem, perhaps Mary thought she would be able to escape the criticism. Yet in Bethlehem, they were ostracized for a different reason. She was foreign, poor, and very pregnant. I wonder if a few innkeepers would have been more inclined to find room for them if they weren’t so dirty and different.

So what’s my point? There are Marys all around us: those who we might feel inclined to mistreat, judge, or just ignore, whether because of their choices or simply because they’re different than us. We should be like Joseph, who had the courage to accept Mary despite appearances, or Jesus, who spent his time with the poor, disfigured, sinners, and outcasts.