As we come closer to the end of Advent and the arrival of Jesus at Christmas, our attention naturally turns toward his mother, Mary. During our Adult Education sessions this season, we’ve explored the history of Mary, and the many devotions that have developed around her. In my research for the classes, I was intrigued to learn of an ancient legend about Mary that I never knew.
According to this apocryphal story, as a young girl Mary was accomplished in weaving well beyond her years. She was chosen along with six other virgins to spend her childhood in the Jerusalem Temple in order to weave the veil of the Temple. Because she was also the chosen one of God to bear the Christ child, she was visited daily, and even fed, by angels! Mary particularly worked with the purple and the scarlet thread, and when she was sent home to Nazareth to spin them, the angel Gabriel appeared to announce her special role as the mother of Jesus.
The details of the legend vary, but the significance of Mary spinning and weaving the purple and scarlet thread has ancient associations with royalty and divinity. In addition, there is a resonance in her weaving the veil of the Temple, which hung in front of the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies. Only the High Priest would go past the veil, and then only once a year. But now her very body would become a sanctuary for the divine, and become the means through which God enters our world in a new way, in the flesh of Jesus. Finally, we remember what would happen to the veil that Mary had such a crucial role in weaving − at Jesus’ death on the cross, the Temple veil was torn in two. In that symbolic act, there is the new understanding that there is nothing that truly separates us from God.
Yes, this story is “just” a non-scriptural legend, and we have no way of knowing how many grains of truth it might contain. But as a weaver in a former life, I love the image of Mary working on a loom, creating something beautiful for God, as a prelude to birthing the Christ child for us all. May she inspire all the creative births that we may have gestating inside us in the coming new year!
12th century Greek manuscript. Annunciation at the Spring. Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos (Paris, BnF, MS gr. 1208, fol https://ima.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/bgmparis1208.159v.jpg
