Go to Home Page
Intro Mary Garden
Mary's Month of May
John S. Stokes Jr.
The month of May, with its profusion of
blooms (in the northern hemisphere
temperate climes of Europe and America),
was adopted by the Church in the eighteenth
century as a celebration of the flowering
of Mary's maidenly spirituality - not
otherwise venerated as such in either the
Liturgy or the Mysteries of the Rosary.
The recentness of this dedication of
the flowers of May to Mary bespeaks the
long period of ripening in popular
devotion and in the mind of the Church of
the piety, poetry and art applying to
Mary the nature symbolism from the Old
Testament, first applied to her by the Church Fathers.
With its origins in Isaiah's prophecy of the Virgin birth of
the Messiah under the figure of the Blossoming Rod or Root of
Jesse, the flower symbolism of Mary was extended by the Church
Fathers, and in the the Liturgy, by applying to her the flower
figures of the Sapiential Books - Canticles, Wisdom, Proverbs and
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) - although this symbolism was initially
mostly verbal and poetic, rather than celebrated in nature
itself. (This, through understanding of the Rod of Jesse prophecy
was based on familiarity with nature and vineyards, in which the
grape vine, referred to, sends out new shoots from the higher
point of pruning, and not "miraculously" from the root, as with
the prophesied Rod of Jesse.)
In the medieval period, the rose was adopted as the flower
symbol of the Virgin Birth, as expressed in Dante's phrase, "The
Rose wherein the Divine Word was made flesh", and depicted in the
central rose windows of the great Gothic cathedrals - from which
came the Christmas Carol, "Lo How a Rose 'ere Blooming".
Also in the medieval period, when monasteries were the centers
of horticultural and agricultural knowledge, and with the spread of
the Franciscan love of nature, the actual flowers themselves, of the
fields, waysides and gardens, came to be seen as symbols of Mary,
the "Flower of flowers" (Chaucer) - leading to their incorporation
in the popular oral religious traditions of the countrysides of
Europe, and to their subsequent export and transferrence to the New
World, especially Latin America, by missionaries.
In Europe, for example, the strawberry was a symbol of Mary's
Virgin Fruitfulness through its bearing of fruit while still in
flower (and of her Perpetual Virginity through its continuing to
flower while in fruit).
Then, with the advent of printing, flower symbols from nature
- of the Immaculate Conception, the Annunciation, the Nativity and
other mysteries and events of Mary's life as the Mother of Jesus -
were included in books of religious devotion, such as sixteenth
century French books of hours, for meditation.
However, it awaited the eighteenth century's burgeoning of
Marian piety before May devotions to the overall flowering of
nature in her honor came to be widely adopted - as described in a
French book on the Madonna in Art:
"The winter of impiety began to yield under a new breath of
life. The cult of the Virgin was the first to feel the effect
of this reawakening.
"Everywhere it revived as though at the invitation of the
heavenly Spouse, repeating the sweet words of the holy
Canticle: 'Arise, my love, my dove, my beautiful one and
come. For the winter is past, the rains are over and done,
the flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning
has come and the voice of the turtle dove is heard.'
"All the ancient devotions to the Blessed Virgin reappeared
and new ones came to join them. Two, principally, gave a new
impetus to her cult: the Month of May, and Devotion to the
Immaculate Heart.
"The institution of the Month of May is perhaps new as a
custom, but, like all that is Catholic, it is ancient in its
spirit; and the words of the holy Canticle just quoted - and
which the Church has never ceased to apply to Mary - are
testimony of that ancient spirit which associates the
reawakening of grace with that of nature, and which opposes
the cult of purity to the seductions of creatures and to the
ferment of the senses.
"The Month of Mary is admirably placed at this climatic
period of the year as protection and antidote against the
malice of the serpent, according to the ancient doctrine of
the Church. Moreover, this correspondence of the springtime
in nature to that of grace in Mary is too true not to have
been sensed at all times, and there is an interesting
testimony of this in an old capitol in the ancient Abbey of
Cluny, bearing, in the middle of its aureole, the figure of
the Blessed Virgin, around which one reads this gracious
hexameter:
'Ver primos flores adducit honores.'
('Springtime's first flowers give thee honors.')
The absence of any previous appropriate liturgical
celebration of Mary's maidenly spirituality may have been
circumstantial, due to the lack of specific scriptural reference
to this period in her life. In any case, with the deepened
appreciation of the correspondences between the growth of plant
life and human spiritual growth, the springtime burgeoning of
plants and flowers in nature was turned to, in the absence of
specific scriptural mention, as a fitting and insightful
figurative or symbolical basis for celebrating the qualities of
this important maidenly period in the spiritual growth of Mary,
venerated as the Mystical Rose in the Litany of Loreto.
Thus, the growth and blooming of nature was so sanctified,
starting with the application to Mary by the Church Fathers of the
Old Testament nature figures, that nature itself became, as it were,
liturgical and theological, so that it was fitting to dedicate May's
entire month of spring growth and blooms to Mary in celebration of
her maidenly spiritual growth and flowering.
At the same time, there was another historical basis for
applying the Old Testament flower figures, and then all flowers,
to Mary, in that these figures were no doubt those that she
herself "heard and kept" from scripture in her meditation and
spiritual formation - in her hope that she might be the Virgin
chosen to bear the Messiah, according to the prophecy of Isaiah.
In his poem, "The May Magnificat", Gerard Manley Hopkins
writes:
"May is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why;
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season -
"Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?
. . . . . . . .
"Ask of her, that mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring? -
Growth in every thing -
. . . . . . . .
"All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.
"Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.
"Well but there was more than this:
Spring's universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.
. . . . . . . .
"This ecstacy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation."
Hopkins' choice of the title, "May Magnificat", turned out to
be prophetic in that the Feast of the Visitation (and Magnificat),
which was on August 22nd in his time, was changed, after Vatican
II, to May 31st - (the feast of Mary's Queenship then,
appropriately, being changed from May 31st to August 22nd,
following that of the Assumption in the 15th - thus better
ordering the sequence of the Marian feasts in the Marian
Liturgical Cycle).
In popular religious custom this ever enriching tradition of
honoring Mary with flowers, and especially with the flowers of the
month of May, is expressed in the lovely practice of parish May
processions with hymns, Rosary prayers and the crowning of Mary's
statues with floral wreaths. It is hoped that the practice of
cultivating and meditating on the symbolical Flowers of Our Lady
of medieval popular tradition in parish Mary Gardens will provide
ever deeper meaning for these May processions - in honor and
veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Mother of Jesus and
the Church, and as our ever mediating, nurturing, protecting and
guiding Spiritual Mother and Queen as we work and pray for the
culmination of Jesus' salvation and renewal of the world, and for
the building of God's Peaceable Kingdom of love, justice, mercy
and material sufficiency for all.
Copyright, Mary's Gardens, 1996
from the Marian Library web site:
Further background on Mary's Month of May
Some May Flowers (long - 18 photos)