Your Mother Drives a Fiat

One of the things generally overlooked about The Beatles' "Let It Be", penned by nominally Catholic Paul McCartney, is the title, and its context within the lyrics: "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom: 'Let it be'." Over the years, some of the overly analytical have seen "mother mary" to mean what in that era was also called "mary-jane", or marijuana – "420" to you young whelps. Thus pretty-boy Paul is hinting to us that he thinks best, or most calmly, with his system temporarily altered.

Others note that his mother's name was Mary, and that she died of cancer when Paul was fourteen… less than a year before he met John Lennon, aka //oo\\. These analysts see a wistful looking back to younger, more innocent times – especially with the Beatles juggernaut fraying heavily at the edges when they recorded his song. (This image is far sweeter than that painted by John's later bitter, aching ode to his own mother – killed by a drunk driver around that same time – in his characteristically simply named "Mother".)

Granted that today is Mothers' Day, here in the Disunited States. But I see in Paul's lyrics… Mother Mary herself, Theotokos, mother of God incarnate, who stood and watched powerless as her son died before her eyes.

Blow the dust off your Bibles, and flip open to Luke 1 (our Protestant cousins can find it in the dark, and are already there; for you Catholics unschooled in which books are where, it's about three-quarters of the way in). An old high priest by the name of Zechariah is confronted by an angel, and is told that his wife would bear a child who was to become a great prophet and who would pave a metaphorical path through the wasteland to his cousin, Jesus: John the Baptist.

To paraphrase a bit, Zechariah made a colossal blunder. We assume he recognized this being as an angel… yet doubted him – and this even when he knew full well that angels come to us straight from the Throne of God. He said to the angel, "Oh, yeah? Prove it. In case you didn't notice, the Mrs. and I are too old to have children. It ain't gonna happen."

Don't doubt an angel bearing great tidings – they have a direct line to the Front Office.

So this angel (a particularly mighty one named Gabriel, who was last seen some centuries earlier warning King David himself – and thus all of Israel – both of a coming devastating series of conquests of their country, and the coming as well of their longed-for Messiah) took note of his chilly reception. Wong answer, Zechariah: when you meet Gabriel, you fall on your face and do exactly what he tells you, up to and including taking on an army with the jawbone of an ox, to willingly jumping off a cliff.

And you don't tick off an angel. They might be messengers of the divine (it's what the word "angel" means in the original Greek), but they're not merely messengers: they also have some serious powers.

So Gabriel struck this old man speechless (and probably deaf, too) as punishment. Okay, I'd accept that too, if I were Zechariah (and he did) – sure beats being turned into, say, a pillar of salt, or dead on the spot.

Now, about half a year later Gabriel comes down again and visits young teenage Mary, daughter of Anna and Joachim (no, they're not in the Bible – but neither is the word "Presbyterian"), consecrated to the Temple as were many first-born. Gabriel brings similar word to Mary: she, too, would conceive and bear… not just a prophet, but the new (ah, though metaphorical) eternal King of the Jews.

Mary is an ideal role-model for all Christians: she was educated, and she wasn't stupid, yet she had a genuine humility about her, and a total trust in her God. She didn't doubt this angel, but did admit she didn't understand how this could be possible: though betrothed to marriage to Joseph the carpenter (who was very possibly a somewhat older man, and widower with children), son of Jacob, son of Matthan (etc.), she had even earlier committed herself to a life of devotion and consecration to the God of Israel and to his temple.

If angels smile, then I suspect Gabriel smiled indulgently at Mary's utter trust even in the face of the unknown she was being called to. So he explained that the conception would not be done via the usual route of human sexual mechanics, but rather through the power of God Himself which reaches into all of humanity: the Holy Spirit. Most of us – even those wise enough to be face-to-the-flagstone at this point – would look up and say, "Wait a minute. What was that?"

(Interestingly, the terminology Gabriel gives is very similar to that used in biblical descriptions of the Ark of the Covenant, which – as both your Bible and Indiana Jones will testify – carried the very real and powerful presence of God Himself. ("Ark", by the way, means "chest" here, in the sense of a protective container – e.g., "treasure chest". This has nothing to do with Noah and his floating menagerie.) So some modern Catholic mystics/theologians (e.g., convert Scott Hahn) realize that Mary became a modern-day
Ark, both metaphorically and literally; this shows up also in the Book of Revelation (11:19-12:1), where she is actually identified as the Ark of the Covenant.)

Anyway, the angel's answer satisfied Mary, and she said, simply, "Then I am God's servant. Let it be done to me just as you've said."

And there are those three words: Let it be.

Much of the Catholic Church's work is still done in Latin (publications, etc.), even while the Masses (services) and most day-to-day work have largely been conducted in each country's/region's own language for forty years now.

In Latin, as in pretty-much every language except Esperanto (which is artificial anyway), the verb "to be" is highly irregular. This means that the forms of the verb don't follow the kind of pattern that's common to most verbs. In English you have "I talk, you talk, s/he talks, we talk", etc., or even the somewhat irregular "I have, you have, s/he has". No; with "be", we've got "am, are, is; was, were; be", and all that… in one verb. Brother!

So in Latin "to be" is – anybody remember this from High-School Latin? – "sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt", or "sum, esse, fui, futurus". Fratrē!

And what we render in English as "let (her, us, them)" + "[verb]" is called the subjunctive – a big and uncommon word that just means that this form of the verb expresses a wish or even desire for something to be/happen (sometimes referred to as "contrary-to-fact conditions"). E.g., "let them eat cake"… English, being a devolved, mongrel language, can't express the concept in a single word, while Latin and its descendants (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, Italian, and others) are in this instance the heart of precise brevity. Thus, Latin: "superemur"; English: "we would be conquered".

And in Latin, "let it be" has long been said as the simple "fiat"… yes, just like the humble little Italian car.

This long, long lecture has been (well, besides in honor of Mothers' Day) to provide the setup for a stinky pun.

After Mass today, I sat awhile with pun-loving Father Paul. We were discussing some serious items of the church: Eucharistic ministry, icons and other images, and so on. Finally, having leapt and bounded through a millennium or so of Church history and doctrine with him, I got ready to go and turned the spotlight to lighter fare.

"You know there's sports in the Bible, right?"

He looked at me askance and raised a grey eyebrow. "Really," I insisted. "Look at the very first line of the first book Genesis 1:1, 'In the big inning'. And in the New Testament, it says that the prodigal son stole home – there's baseball in two different places."

Do you know, Father Paul was actually half smiling at this. So I plowed on: "There's also tennis – it says in the Old Testament that Uriah served in the courts of David".

"That could also be handball," Father acknowledged. And he segued into, "Did you know the Bible says it's okay to drive foreign cars?"

I was baffled a moment, and twisted my face up – then interrupted to say, "Yes, that's right – Mary's Fiat!"

Father nodded. "And it also says that the Apostles were all in one Accord."

I was still laughing five minutes later as I got into my Honda and drove off to breakfast.