It’s May. The month of blossoming, rebirth, fruition, new life. It’s the month of Mary.

It’s also the month in which my cousin Julie and her husband, Glen, expect their first child.

It seems fitting to expect a baby during May. And for me, it is a marvelous convergence to be awaiting a birth while reading Elizabeth A. Johnson’s book Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (Continuum, 2003). The two happenings in this month of May conspire to deepen my interest in, appreciation of and devotion to Mary, mother of Jesus, “Miriam of Nazareth,” as Johnson refers to her.

(Johnson quotes Karl Rahner, the Jesuit theologian, in reflecting on the custom in the western hemisphere of honoring Mary during the fertile month of May. ‘It is quite possible to say that when we are involved in our May devotions, we are engaged in a Christian understanding of the human situation,” Rahner wrote. “It is God’s word concerning us that we are there concerned with, a blessed and holy understanding of our own life.’ By honoring Mary we are ultimately saying something about ourselves, namely that God has addressed us with a word of grace and called us to discipleship.”)

My cousin Julie is a social worker in an urban children’s hospital. She is engaged daily with some of the most vulnerable in our society, walking with them in their suffering, illness and sometimes death. She knows what can go wrong for children and their families. She also knows the constant struggle for limited resources for many people in our health care system. Aware as she is of these realities, her choice to bear a child, to cooperate with nature and grace in bringing a new person into our family and our world is an act of courage and an act of love.

As Julie waits with a mix of eager excitement and apprehension for her child’s birth, she asks the eternal questions. What will happen? How will this work out? Who will this child be? Pondering Julie’s experience and reading Johnson’s scholarly work invite me to see Mary through a new lens.

Johnson meticulously reviews scholarship over the centuries about Mary and her role in the Church and in life. In addition she uses resources of more than 40 women theologians with new and different theological and cultural perspectives to propose a new understanding of Mary in our day.

A common view of Mary, “lovely Lady dressed in blue” and exalted above us all, is replaced with an image of a woman grounded in her first-century milieu, a woman living in an oppressed area, with deep roots in her culture and her faith. Here is a strong woman who, the Gospel of Luke tells us, dares to respond to the angelic messenger, with a question, “How can this be?”

Here is a woman of faith so fully aware of her relationship with God that she enters into dialogue, so that she can understand and cooperate more fully. She seems not to be a woman of passive submission, but rather a woman fully immersed in what it is to live, to love, to suffer. She acts as one who is truly filled with grace as she proclaims the glory of God and the overthrow of the powerful in favor of the meek and humble.

This view of Mary would seem to free her of her exalted image to become a woman for all of us who seek to live for God and aspire to bring about the reign of God in a needy and broken world.

Julie’s approach to her life and to impending motherhood seemed, at first, separate from the woman of Nazareth. In the Gospels, the humanness of it all might be more ascribed to Mary Magdalen, the woman of passion, generosity, deep friendship with Jesus, called to announce the Resurrection to the fearful disciples. But if we allow our own growth in awareness, assisted by the capabilities of research and scholarship, Mary, “Miriam of Nazareth,” takes her proper place as a model for our humanity, as one who leads us in the dance of life.

The way Mary lived her life in the presence of God makes me think of Julie and the strength she and all of us can draw from Mary, “… ‘truly our sister,’ who as a poor and humble woman fully shared our lot’” (Paul VI, Marialis Cultus, #56, quoted by Johnson, p. 134) and who brought forth our hope and salvation.