The Reed of God

John Donne on the Virgin Mary for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (from "A Litanie"):

For that faire blessed Mother-maid,

Whose flesh redeem'd us; That she-Cherubin,

Which unlock'd Paradise, and made

One claime for innocence, and disseiz'd sinne,

Whose wombe was a strange heav'n, for there

God cloath'd himselfe, and grew,

Our zealous thankes wee poure. As her deeds were

Our helpes, so are her prayers; nor can she sue

In vaine, who hath such titles unto you.

This little poem is rich--it captures Mary's universal expression of woman-hood, as she was the woman who was both virgin and mother. It expresses her (even bodily) participation in the redemption itself. It describes her as a woman-angel (how wonderful, given Aquinas's description [simplified in My Way of Life] of the angels as "neither old or young, sick or healthy, men or women, infants or ancients, tall or short, fat or thin; they are the bright flames of life, unflickering, unfading, indestructible, flames that are fed by nothing but God."). She unlocked Paradise (which had been locked through the sin of Eve) with the unlocking of her womb. She diseased sin; this is a beautiful irony--the thing that is a disease to us (sin), she cured by diseasing it (this brings to mind lines from Eliot's Four Quartets: "Our only health is the disease / If we obey the dying nurse / Whose constant care is not to please / But to remind of our, and Adam's curse, / And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse."). Her womb was a strange heaven (for it held God, as heaven holds God), for there God clothed Himself (He clothed Himself with human flesh; His act of clothing Himself actually meant He made Himself naked, like a baby. Philippians 2:5-8 says, "Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.") And notice the last word of the poem: "you," referring to God, to whom the prayer is being prayed and to whom Mary inevitably points. And all that from an Anglican!

The question, then: Mary was preserved from all actual sin. Could she have chosen to sin?