Regarding Holy Mary, Mother of the Other

Forgive me, Cornellians, for you might think that I’ve sinned real bad. Yes, dear friends, “father” and anyone else who cares, my confession is this: my favorite song is the Ave Maria. That is, the Christian prayer calling for the intercession of Mary, mother of Jesus.

But I’m Jewish.

And although this paradox might strike you as weird, it sits just fine with me. Bobby McFerrin once advised an audience, “If you’re Jewish, and you have a problem singing the ‘Ave Maria,’ you can sing the ‘Oy-vey Maria.’” He then laughed at himself, and the audience laughed, and that’s how you know singers are corny.

But, Bobby, I tell you no thanks on the “oy-vey.” The Ave Maria is far too beautiful for that.

I’ve become convinced over the past few months that this is my favorite song. Until I sat down to write about it, I knew nothing about it, and I didn’t understand a word of the Latin, except “Amen”— but that is why music is music. You don’t have to know a thing about it to dig it so much you want to cry.

In my little interfaith love affair with this piece, I should like to be a bit nostalgic. The first time I heard this song, I was sitting in my friend Ardon’s room back home, his iTunes cycling through Ben Folds and Radiohead, and then — what was this? Church music. Raw vocal projection; short phrases of stark counterpoint that filled the church with sound. Then they were gone, their echoes floating in their wake. And now the next phrase. Gibberish to me, but it was raw, and it felt sacred, like Europe, or somewhere even further than that.

It was during the second time I heard Ave Maria that things got a little teary. I didn’t even know there was more than one version, when in fact there are many. It’s probably the world’s most covered song, even more ubiquitous than Journey’s extremely annoying anthem, “Don’t Stop Believing.” And with good reason.

Now, it was June, Reunion Weekend, and I was standing in the lobby of Goldwin Smith Hall. Some 60 members of the Cornell Glee Club were assembled with alumni in front of an impromptu crowd of alums and undergrads. The shiny foreheads of the performers and the open containers in the audience wouldn’t let you forget it: this was college, baby! The tenors began with the climbing introductory melody:

Angelus Domini

Et concepit de spiritu sancto.

The words sounded pretty, because I didn’t know what they meant. Forgive me for this, father, but fetishizing foreign things isn’t so bad if they’re Latin, right? I mean, I’m a citizen of America, the superpower. So if I look at colonized peoples like the Arabs or the Pacific Islanders — and I really know nothing about them — but I say, “Hey, they’re exotic, that’s cute, let’s build some hotels in their capital so we can look down on them from the top floor….” that’s bad fetishism. But if I am a citizen of America who knows nothing about my supposed Roman-Christian heritage, and I think, upon hearing the Ave Maria, “Mmmm, Latin, sounds pretentious and I like it”… that is just funny. Then we realize the laughably vain aspect of my infatuation with this song.

Back in Goldwin Smith, I knew none of this cynicism, and I listened to the Ave Maria unfold itself throughout the lobby. The drunken prayer — abomination of all abominations! — began:

Hail Mary, full of grace;

And blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus …

“Hail,” Wikipedia tells me, means “rejoice.” I looked around and there was Luisa, a just-graduated senior, who had heard the Glee Clubbers do this song a thousand times. Now it was her last time, and she was flat out bawling, barely managing to sing along. I knew she must know what it meant; she must be rejoicing like Mary somewhere underneath those tears.

And then her tears became mine. I felt like I could have been in the 1950s, the 1850s, or at the Nativity scene itself. Who even knew how old these alumni were? Maybe they knew the old savior himself.

… And the word was made flesh

And dwelt among us.

And I thought: you know what? To hell with doctrine! That is beautiful. Why do Jews and Muslims have to hate on the Jesus-concept so much? If the word of God dwells among people, who really cares whether it’s in flesh or paper?

Millions of little boys and girls around the world say this bedside prayer every night, feeling that they aren’t just Cabbage-Patch kids, but part of a Holy Family, Mother Mary and so on. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud’s Oedipus complex by arguing that we are not talking about a biological, literal father, but an idea of the father, a “Name-of-the-Father.” As it is with Lacan, so it ought to be with theology: to hell with taking stuff literally! That would be my thesis if I were the new, Jewish Martin Luther (feel the irony, people! He was a rabid anti-Semite!). I would go and nail it to the chapel door at Sage: taking stuff literally is overrated. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it causes quite a bit of disagreement and war.

So I like to think that the children at their bedsides say goodnight to their mothers, and then kneel and plead to a more universal, less literal, mother: the idea of the mother.

Holy Mary, mother of God,

Amen.

As for me, the Ave Maria, my favorite song, is decreed not to be mine; but it is the foreignness that rings so true, as if those pretty words have traveled to me from so far away that they still give off the faint smell of authenticity and truth.

Forgive me, Cornellians, for I have written on theology. Still, enjoy your weekends.

Amen.

Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com [1]. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.