Slaves of Love

This is actually the title of my sermon this Sunday, based on Romans 6:22. I will probably resist using this image in any parish publicity, however.

My favorite part of this image, by the way, is that in the three lower panels, the bra and panties have been shopped in.  There's another version floating around the webs without them, but we're a modest blog and will leave the fi-leaves be.

Wages of Sin

Well, this probably won't be the bulletin cover for Sunday's sermon on Romans 6:12-23.  But one might wish it were so!

Our Big Day

Jules Joseph Lebebvre

It comes but once a year, and we so often forget to mark it.  But today, 22 July, is the feast day of our patroness, St. Mary Magdalene.  (Technically, it is a Lesser Festival for us Lutherans, which places it below a Principal Festival and above a Commemoration.  But we digress.)

After Pompeo Batoni

As we have often said, and you have often heard, she was not a prostitute, nor was she Mary of Bethany, nor was she even a "sinner" except insofar as we are all sinners.  At least Scripture does not tell us so.  Nor, by the same standard, do we have reason to believe that she retired to a cave to live out a life of penitence, whether in Britain or France or anywhere else.  Even the story of the reddening egg (alas!) is pure myth.  (Much less the Da Vinci Code balderdash.)

Robert Lenz

A pity, really.  The legends of Mary Magdalene, in their full medieval glory, compose a treasury of beautiful and exotic speculation, adorned by a vast gallery of painting and sculpture.  They are adventurous, sexy, pious and at the same time just a little subversive.  For many people, it is these legends -- these exotic speculations -- that are the Magdalene's chief attraction.  (Here's an introduction).

Gregor Erhart

Mind you, the little that we actually learn from Scripture is interesting enough.  Jesus cast "seven devils" from her, she was part of the group of women who provided for the disciples out of their own living, and of the smaller group who had been "healed of evil spirits and infirmities."  Above all, she is the one figure placed by all of the four Evangelists at the empty Easter tomb.

The significance of this is hard to overstate.  Few figures are mentioned by name in all four gospels; not the Blessed Virgin, nor her husband, nor some of the Twelve.  It leads some scholars to speculate that the Magdalene, as perhaps also John the Baptist, may have been a spiritual leader of some independent authority, whose followers (and whose story) were gradually integrated into the master-narrative of the Jesus movement.  This may well be a feminist fantasy -- but it is no less plausible than her retirement to a Provencal cavern.

AA Ivanov

What we can rely on, however, is this:  that she was a central figure in the story of the Resurrection -- the first witness, and the first to carry the story.  The Orthodox are right to identify her as one of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, but this does not go nearly far enough.  She is rightly called Apostle to the Apostles, and -- although this is rarely mentioned -- a model for preachers, for all those who share the good news of the Resurrection, for all those who proclaim a Christianity with new life at its center.

Women of the Ekklesia

We meant to post this tidbit last week, but time permits us very little these days.  Still, while preparing our exegetical notes for Sunday's sermon, we spent some profitable hours with one of the Lord's many annoying injunctions.

Speaking of what his followers will be called to endure as the end draws closer, Jesus offers them the dubious solace that this will be their chance to offer "testimony," a word that is of course cognate with "martyrdom."  And of this testimony, he says:

So make up your minds not to prepare beforehand to defend yourselves. (St. Luke 21: 14)

This is, as we said, annoying, not least to those of us who spend much of our week preparing our own testimony of sorts, a "defense" or "apology" in the classical sense, not of ourselves but of Christ himself.  Is Jesus really demanding that we just wing it, week in and week out?  Some preachers think so, and perhaps they are correct.

In any case, this passage bears a little more attention.  In Greek, it reads:

qevte ou\n ejn tai'? kardivai? uJmw'n mh; promeleta'n ajpologhqh'nai,

The key words here -- promeletan apologethenai -- are, so a commentary told us, a technical expression from Athenian forensics, meaning specifically to memorize the speech with which one will defend a person in court or a proposition in debate.

Historically, memorization has been the mark of a skilled orator.  Cicero, we are told, spent many hours memorizing his speeches.  So have preachers through much of history, right up to the present.  (This was, for example, the custom of our own mentor Walter Kortrey).  For that matter, how many church members have been encouraged, in recent years, to memorize "an elevator speech," some sort of capsule account of their faith or the mission of their church.  (Nondenom here, Episcopal here, Orthodox here.  Oh, and atheist here). That Jesus recommends doing otherwise is noteworthy, but takes us into waters deeper than we choose to navigate just now.

Looking for an extra-Biblical use of this term, we were directed by our lexicon to a play we have not previously encountered, by a playwright we thought we knew better.  Aristophanes' Women of the Assembly appears to be a bookend to his more famous Lysistrata.  Both are about women taking charge and upsetting the social order.  In Lysistrata, they withhold sex until their menfolk end an onerous war.  In Women of the Assembly, they go further, and take over the government itself.  They wear false beards, make pompous speeches, and eventually institute a regime of equal distribution and more-or-less-free love, in which men are free to sleep around, provided they sleep with ugly women before pretty ones.  It is all, apparently, a satire upon the excesses of this then-still-new Athenian idea called "democracy."

The phrase in question occurs at line 117, rendered freely here by G. Theodoridis:

Praxagora:  We can make excellent speeches exactly because we are women!  Better than any man can.  They say that buggered youths make splendid orators, don’t they? Now, do we women know about fucking or don’t we?  We’re naturals, right? 

First Woman:  Oh, I don’t know, really.  Lack of experience is a dreadful thing, you know.  I mean about speeches. 

Praxagora: But that’s precisely why we’re here, darling; to get ourselves all prepared with what we’re going to say in there. [προμελετήσωμεν ἁκεῖ δεῖ λέγειν.]  Now, put your beards on quickly and, those of you who are ready to speak go ahead and speak!

First Woman:  Ha!  We’re all ready Praxagora! Who among us is not an absolute specialist in the art of talking, ey? Fucking and talking! We’re brilliant!

Well.  That's ... politically incorrect.

Anyway, here are the women "getting themselves all prepared" as orators do.  Not to mention crossdressing and talking about sex, all of it funnier then than it might be now -- but it would still be pretty funny, if you played it right.  Aristophanes isn't especially nice to women, but then he isn't nice to men, either.  Or to Socrates.

One thing about this play that will resonate with readers now in a way it could not have with its original audience is the title.  In Greek it is Έκκλησιάζουσαι -- "Ekklesiazusae."  The word ekklesia, assembly, has been so taken over by the Christian community that it is a challenge for us now to read it any other way.  If we did not know that this was a play about women in government, we would translate its title as "The Church Ladies."

This, in turn, adds an interesting element to the scene in which the women practice their speeches.  When one of them swears "by Demeter and Persephone," the ringleader berates her for using the names of goddesses, which will give away their identities.  She corrects herself, and swears by Apollo instead.  The implication is that men default to a masculine image of the divine, women to a feminine one.

Is this true?  Probably not, in our time any more than in ancient Greece.  Yet it is not entirely untrue, either.  From the 1970s through the 1990s, there was a lively discussion within American Christianity about how we would speak of God.  This went far beyond merely changing a few pronouns and saying "Lord" less often.  Although it is hard to believe in retrospect, there were serious voices advocating, with some success, a radical restatement of the Trinitarian name -- formulations like "Mother, Lover and Friend" were thrown around freely.  Perhaps we lead a sheltered life, but it seems to us that the dust has largely settled.  If the textual editing of hymnals like ELW and The New Century Hymnal seems heavy-handed, it is worth reflecting that things might well have gone much further.

Not coincidentally, the decades during which God's gender was put up for grabs in the theological community were also the decades during which ordained women came to take a larger role in Protestant church life, and the pressure to ordain women in Roman Catholicism began to mount (at least in America).

We're not sure where to go with all this, except to point out that an ancient pagan playwright neatly predicted a curious development in modern Christianity.  We aren't sure how, if at all, we might bring this insight to bear on the passage from Luke 21.  On the other hand, three years will pass before that one comes around again on the guitar, so we have plenty of time.  Let us know if you think of anything.

Anglicans Pick Female Bishop ... in Ireland

As you know, the Church of England ordains women to the priesthood, but not, thus far, to the episcopate.  It's a testy situation among some of their faithful, who seem not grasp the concept of "in for a penny, in for a pound."

Their recalcitrance may get a little harder to maintain now that the [Anglican] Churches of Wales and Ireland have signaled that female bishops are jake with them, and that the C of I has has actually elected one to the post.

The Rev. Pat Storey of Derry will become the new Bishop of Meath and Kildare.  According to the Guardian, she is 53, was ordained in 1997, has two grown children and is married to a priest.

We extend our deepest condolences to the Bishop-Elect Storey and her family.

Condolences to the New Bishop

The Rev. Elizabeth Eaton, Bishop of the ELCA's North East Ohio Synod, has been elected presiding bishop on the fifth ballot.  She will replace the Rev. Mark Hanson, who has served in that capacity for twelve years, and who was one of the candidates this year as well.  Eaton will be the first woman to hold the post.

Many readers will know more about the events of the day than does poor Father Anonymous, who has been busy unpacking boxes in the Specus Pecuniarum.  It was surely an exciting election.  The day that Stephen Bouman unseated James Sudbrock for the episcopacy of metropolitan New York remains one of the most memorable, and harrowing, experiences of our ecclesiastical life.  This will no doubt be as memorable for many of you.

We know little about Bishop Eaton.  Months ago, we very seriously considered a call to a splendid congregation in her synod, and although her name came up rarely, it was then spoken with warmth.  We came away with the sense that she was popular and distinctly liberal.

Truth be told, we know little enough about Bishop Hanson.  We met him once, for about five minutes, in his office.  He was wearing a gray striped suit that looked ghastly with his clericals.  He seemed earnest and distracted.  Come to think of it, that is how his tenure as PB has impressed us:  earnest but distracted.  He has stood up for all the things his church wants him to stand up for, especially the left-leaning ones.  He has given sober sermons and seemed like a decent fellow.

To our way of thinking, however, Hanson's signature achievement is the restructuring of the ELCA's churchwide organization.  Managing decline is neither sexy nor popular, but it is what mainline leaders are often called to do lately, and when the time came, Hanson was forthright about it.  Not everybody would have been.

And if it seems to you that we are removed from all this, not just geographically but emotionally, then you are correct.  A turn of events that would once have excited us very much indeed, and provoked days of armchair analysis, seems at present mildly interesting.  Less pressing, certainly, than the young mother struggling with cancer in our congregation, or even the nice couple wooed away by the  predatory NALC pastor down the street.  Always local, we seem to be entering a stage of life that is truly and deeply parochial.

Still, we can't help noticing this sort of dumb paragraph in a news report by Sarah Pulliam Bailey, who writes for RNS and GetReligion, and really should know better:

Eaton joins Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who in 2006 became the first woman to lead a church in the worldwide Anglican Communion. The two churches share a full communion agreement that allows shared clergy and joint ministry.

It's not wrong, mind you.  But it certainly is strange; Anglicans and Episcopalians have nothing to do with this.  A better paragraph might have read:

Eaton joins Church of Norway Presiding Bishop Helga Haugland Byfuglien [EDIT:  and Canadian National Bishop Susan Johnson] on the very short list of Lutheran national primates who are women.  Bishop Margot Kaessman, leader of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) resigned her post in 2010 after a DUI arrest.  Although Lutherans began to ordain women in the mid-20th century (1948 in Denmark, 1958 in Sweden, 1961 in Norway, 1970 in the US), it was only in 1992 that Maria Jepsen was chosen to be the first female Lutheran bishop, serving the see of Hamburg in the North Elbian Landeskirche.

Anyway.  We extend our deepest sympathies to Bishop Eaton and her family, and assure them all of our fervent prayers in the coming six years.

Decent Obscurity

Did you know the ELCA had a gay bishop?  Openly gay, we mean?  We didn't.  Somebody really ought to talk about this sort of thing.  Also, we've got an American Indian bishop.  Same guy!

When the Episcopalians elect a gay bishop, the media (and the Africans) have a collective seizure.  Here?  Not so much.  Alas, we Lutherans -- despite outnumbering the PECUSA by a significant margin -- are doomed to live in shadows.

Anyway:  the Rev. R. Guy Erwin was elected bishop by the Southwest California Synod.

Bishop-elect Erwin teaches theology at California Lutheran University.  He is also Native American, another first for the ELCA, although one likely to attract less attention.  This makes us rather sad, as there are lots and lots of gay Lutherans, but comparatively few Osage ones.

We wish Erwin and his synod God's blessings.

Lots More Naked Ladies

The Atlantic has posted many pictures of Femen-associated protesters in Europe, walking the streets topless in solidarity with Aminah Tyler.  Big, glamorous pictures.

The comments posted below the pictures are also worth a quick read.  One reader, man, points out rather angrily that many women feel liberated by Islam, rather than oppressed.  This is absolutely true, and the reasons are pretty well known.  Modest dress, for example, makes objectification more difficult.  But the follow-up comments poke holes in his argument, pointing out that nobody objects to a woman wearing a veil if she chooses.  The problem is that some women are not given any choice in this or in many more serious matters.

For non-Muslims trying to understand this particular argument, it may be helpful to consider analogies to the Hebrew scriptures.  Much of what we find there, when read against the prevailing legal codes of the ancient Near East, marks a significant advance for the dignity and autonomy of women.  For example, Moses permits the daughters of Zelophehad to inherit and own property, a subject that remained iffy in Western law right into the modern era.  Even the less obviously appealing purity legislation, such as the command to leave the camp when you are menstruating, may be subjected to this sort of re-interpretation.  (For that matter, so may the Christian practice of "churching" women after childbirth.  Some people regard it as an unpleasant suggestion that parturition has somehow defiled a new mother; others see it as a loving ritual of welcome back into the community after a life-changing personal transition.)

Among the problems, of course, is that we no longer live in the ancient Near East, nor in medieval Europe nor 17th-century Persia.  Times have changed.  It is no longer particularly radical to "allow" women to own property.  In matters of dress, there is a new understanding that not judging women (or harassing them) because of their appearance is a man's responsibility, no matter what they may or may not be wearing.  And so forth, through a long list of questions, as small as the right to wear a scarf and as large as the right to leave the house without being raped.

Traditional religions are wise and right and often justified when they excavate the "liberationist" elements of their teaching.  The mistake is to insist upon the letter at the expense of the spirit.  Ultimately, the decision to bare one's breast or cover one's head must rest with the owner of the breast and head.  Society may have a legitimate interest in the matter -- no public nudity, San Franciscans! -- but it does not have the final say.

"Lesbian Nuns Puking Nails"

A Renaissance bishop casting out demons.  Image stolen from Al Mohler, of all people.

That is the least forgettable image in a Prospect review of Brian Levack's new book, The Devil Within, a history of demonic possession, and exorcism therefrom, in the Christian West.

The real takeaway, however, is this thought:

Like witch-burning, demonic possession feels “medieval” in our contemporary imagination but it didn’t actually happen with any regularity in the medieval period. Rather, Levack shows how demonology persisted into the era of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, when one thinks of science and rationality beginning to shine light on the darkness.

Just so.  We're well acquainted with the history of witch trials, which were in fact discouraged by Church law from antiquity through the late Middle Ages, and only came into their own during the period of the Renaissance and Reformation.   (Much of our time in college was taken up with this stuff, which helps to explain why we are unemployed today).

The natural conclusion, and one much in vogue among witchcraft scholars in the 1980s, is that witch trials arose out of a pervasive anxiety connected to destabilizing social change.  This change is not merely the rise of Humanism and Protestantism, although those were indeed destabilizing, but also changes in the age of marriage and the number of unmarried women, as well as changes resulting from the first hints of capitalism and a rising middle class.  Like fundamentalism today, it was a reactionary movement passing itself off as a conservative one, even though it did not seek to conserve a genuine heritage.

To extend the study beyond witchcraft (about which Levack has written a previous book) to possession and exorcism is one of those brilliant ideas that seems obvious after somebody else thinks of it.  One principal difference appears to be that, while witch trials were spread fairly evenly over Roman Catholics and Protestants on the continent -- having been rare in Britain -- exorcism is said to have been principally a Roman Catholic affair.

As reported in the review, Levack takes a different tack, less sociological and more anthropological.  He describes possession and exorcism as public rituals that express the needs and beliefs of the surrounding culture, in the same sense that a coronation does or, more aptly, a modern politician's drama of sin and repentance.  This sounds extremely promising.

We are a little uncertain about some of the specifics, however -- but this may have less to do with Levack's scholarship than with the limitations of the reviewer, a grad student named Josephine Livingstone.  At one point, having described the public, practically festival, exorcisms typical of the 17th century, she says blithely, "But we all know what goes on in a Catholic exorcism," and lists as her authorities a string of Hollywood movies.  It is not clear whether Levack imagines that movies are a good guide to historical practices or Livingstone does, but in either case the idea is mistaken.

Indeed, Livingstone has a great deal to say about horror movies.  She believes that Levack has handed her the key to understanding, say, Children of the Corn and other "psychological dramas that go heavy on the religion and that feature supernatural children."  This seems unlikely.

More problematic still is this paragraph:

Levack explains [the rise of exorcism in the 16th and 17th centuries] by highlighting the rise of nominalism in the early 15th century, the view that “an inscrutable, arbitrary God might give the devil great latitude in the world for reasons unknown to humankind.” Popular apocalyptic thought—the strong suspicion that the final battle between good and evil was under way—made possession seem reasonable, even expected. The devil (or his attendant demons) taking control of your body was like the forces of evil saving seats at the cinema by putting coats on them.

Really?  Is that what nominalism was?  Because we were fairly convinced that it was, and remains, the philosophical rejection of Platonic universals, pioneered in the fourteenth century by William of Ockham.  While we do not doubt that somebody with a New Historicist bent might capably bring together nominalism, theodicy, and apocalypticism, they are not related in any immediately obvious or intuitive fashion.  As it stands, this paragraph is gibberish.

Nonetheless, this book sounds extremely interesting, not only to medievalists and but to anybody with an interest in the ways that a society in turmoil creates public rituals.

(On the) Download

The guys at TorrentFreak did a little checking and discovered what kind of pornography gets downloaded at the  Vatican. (Gawker has, of course, more data on specific titles.  Also links to Fleshbot's NSFW details.)

This sort of story, prurient and tacky, only exists because it sounds so naughty -- Celibate priests watch porn!  Ooooh!  It's really just a modern, and tamer, version of the hundreds of old books dedicated to "revelations" concerning the sex lives of people who aren't supposed to have sex.  (Compare it to Charles Chiniquy's Fifty Years in the Church of Rome and The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional, or to Maria Monk's fraudulent Awful Disclosures.)

What is more interesting to us than the sexy bits, though, is that these are illegal downloads.

In fact, TorrentFreak makes the same point.  Their lede is about a parish priest in Ireland who drops by his local video store to rent old movies, and mentions having seen a number of pictures that he has seen a number of new ones lately -- nothing racy, just new.  He mention several films that haven't been released locally, or on DVD -- Les Miserables, Django Unchained, and Lincoln -- and reveals that he's seen them as part of a "film club" at the local monastery.

In other words, the priest and the monks are stealing intellectual property.

We claim no moral high ground here, mind you.  After three years in Romania, which must be the torrent capital of the planet, our already-blase attitude toward illegal downloads has grown even blase-ier.  We don't do it ourselves, because of a few vestigial moral qualms but principally because we are bad at the technical stuff, but we have no doubt watched hours and hours of TV and movies downloaded illegally by other people.  So we are guilty.

But how guilty?  The laws governing intellectual property are a mess.  They disagree from one nation to the next, and from one form of property to another.  America, in particular, has jiggered them to give creators ever-longer and ever-broader rights.

This lead to every sort of anomaly:  sixty-three years after the death of its author, Tarzan of the Apes is a novel in the public domain; "Tarzan," however, is a protected trademark, so good luck writing your own sequel.  The story of Winnie-the-Pooh has become the permanent property of Walt Disney, which has turned Pooh and Tigger into superhero detectives, and replaced Christopher Robin with a little American girl.

In Eastern Europe, piracy is rife.  On the other hand, legally downloading an episode of Mad Men is quite a challenge for those of us unfamiliar with the world of proxies and anonymizers -- it can be done, but even so you have to lie about who and where you are.  Once you lie, you may as well steal.  As The Economist argued years ago, studios are so frightened of losing money from piracy that they have simply abandoned markets like Romania -- in which piracy then becomes the norm.

So, yeah, the priest in Ireland shouldn't have pirated Django.  And somebody at the Vatican should get his wrists slapped, except that he'd probably like that.  But, for us, the real question is how conscience and law will interact in the coming age of freely available "paid" media.

John Donne and the Preaching Women

Donne posed in his winding sheet

In 1630, Easter fell -- as it does this year -- on 31 March.  So it was that, one year to the day before his death, John Donne mounted the pulpit at St. Paul's Cathedral to preach.

Donne preached on Matthew 28:6 -- He is not here; he is risen.  Come and see the place where he lay.  The sermon, which runs to 24 pages the standard edition, must have taken more than an hour to preach.  It is loaded with Donne's customary intellectual theatrics, his rhetorical devices, his references to Fathers and Reformers, his bits of theological speculation.  But, for all of that, it is one of his more accessible sermons -- not easy reading for us today, but not hard, either.  It is well worth the effort.

He begins with the myrrh-bearers, the women at the tomb, and the angels who greeted them:

... Angelicall women and Euangelicall Angels: Angels made Euangelists to preach the Gospell  of the Resurrection, and women made Angels so as Iohn Baptist is called an Angel, and so as the seven bishops are called Angels:  that is, Instructors of the Church and ... messengers, publishers of the greatest mysteries of our religion

Johanna, wife of Chusa, by Egino Weinert

He digs right into to what would have seemed a paradox in those days:  women as preachers. He begins by rebutting many of the foolish ideas about women spread by the "petulancy" of men (such as that women have no souls, or are not created in the image of God), and sings at length the praises of good women, both in Scripture and in history.

Concerning Mary Magdalene, he wonders aloud why tradition has accused her of prostitution, when the Bible does not; of Chusa's wife Johanna, he calls her a "Pope Joan," superior to Peter.  Above all, he praises the women for their devotion:

Beloved, true devotion is a serious, a sedulous, an impatient thing.  He that said in the Gospell "I fast twice a week," was but a Pharisee; he that can reckon his devout actions is no better.  He that can tell how often he hath thought upon God today hath not thought upon him often enough.   

It is S. Augustine's holy circle: to pray that we may heare sermons profitably, and to heare sermons that we learn to pray acceptably.  Devotion is no Marginall note, no interlineary glosse, no parenthesis that may be left out; it is no occasionall thing, no conditionall thing --  "I will goe if  I like the preacher, if the place, if the company, if the weather" -- but it is of the body of the text, and layes upon us an obligation of fervour and of continuance.  This we have in this example of these not only Euangelicall but Euangelisticall (preaching) women ...

There's much more to this sermon, which could easily be mined by students of Renaissance sexual polemic.  People often make the mistake of separating "Jack" Donne from "Dean" Donne, the young rake from the old priest.  Donne encouraged this, but we should not be fooled.  His earliest writing was about sex and religion; so too was his latest.  From the beginning to the end, Donne was fascinated by women and by God.

He was also fascinated by death, and there is plenty of that in his Easter sermon.  Winding-sheets make their almost inevitable appearance, and so do church-bells:

There is our comfort, collected from this surrexit, "he is risen," equivalent to the discomfort of the non est hic, "he is not here," that this his rising declares him to be the Son of God,  who therefore can, and will, and to be that Jesus, an actuall redeemer, and therefore hath already raised us.   

To what?  To that renovation, to that new creation, which is so excellently expressed by Severianus:  ... "the whole frame and course of nature is changed" ... the grave now, since Christ's Resurrection and ours in him, does not bury the dead man, but death himself.   

My Bell tolls for death and my Bell rings out for death and not for me that dye;  for I live, even in death; but death dies in me, and hath no more power over me.

There is much more to this sermon; our preacher is not -- ahem -- done yet.  He has a story about  a West Indian king, some gentle poking of fun at both transubstantiation and ubiquity, citations from Luther on marriage and Calvin on several things, and for all we know hidden references to alchemy and politics.

But let's leave it here for now, as we admire and try to emulate the sedulous devotion of the preaching women, and remind ourselves and those around us of the promise implicit in Easter Sunday:  the new creation, by which we live even in death, and death has no more power over us.

Our First Centerfold!

What, you thought we were joking?

According to an old legend, after she was done with her other activities (being possessed, being exorcised, abandoning prostitution, bearing myrrh, proclaiming the Resurrection, and evangelizing Provence -- nice work if you can get it), St. Mary Magdalene retired to a cave in Sainte-Baume and led a life of contemplation.  (Valerie Barrow has pictures of the cave).

Mind you, this painting by Jules Joseph Lefebvre doesn't look as though it is set in a cave, nor does Mary look especially contemplative.  Or maybe she does, in much the way that Bernini's St Teresa does.  Contemplating, ahem, holy ecstasy.

Anyway, all good centerfolds also have a back page: