Amid so much toxicity, we find ourselves in desperate need of an antidote. Today, on this Feast of Mary, Mother of God, I submit that it is she, our Queen, who is the antidote.
By Samantha Stephenson
Crisis Magazine
January 2, 2026
With every new year comes a rush of cleanses and detoxes and protocols, all aimed at turning over a new leaf. We want to wash away the old and embrace the new start represented by the turning of the calendar.
We don't just fear toxins in our bodies. We are cautious about the spiritual toxins poisoning our souls and our relationships. We worry about toxic masculinity, toxic feminism, toxic femininity, toxic culture-even toxic online Catholicism. Something is deeply amiss, and the only fitting way we can describe it is by using the language of poison.
Amid so much toxicity, we find ourselves in desperate need of an antidote. Today, on this Feast of Mary, Mother of God, I submit that it is she, our Queen, who is the antidote. Her example is the remedy we need to clear the poisons from our systems, and we need no other resolutions this year but to cling more closely to Mary, who mothers us all.
"You will be like God" (Genesis 3:5). These words of the serpent to Eve, mother of all the living, echo in our hearts today. We live in a culture that feeds us a falsely empowering narrative: that we can be whatever we wish to be. The world tells us to seek happiness in whatever way we define it, that any road can lead to happiness if we believe it will. Our society faces depression and anxiety at skyrocketing levels, much of which can be traced back to this narrative that tells us if we are not happy, it is up to us to find what will fill us. As our attempts fail, we are left pursuing dream after dream until our failed attempts leave us despondent. We are unhappy, and it is our own failings that have made us that way. The pressure to fulfill oneself mounts; it is an anxiety we were not made to bear.
We have a brokenness that needs healing: a fundamental lack of trust that what God offers us is truly good. As Edith Stein puts it, we all have something of Eve in us, and it is up to us to find our way to Mary. If we are to dismantle the misperceptions and flat-out lies our culture promotes, to rediscover the beauty of God's plan for marriage and the family, we must return to the central truth that God is God and we are not. If we can recover a sense of reverence for the giftedness of our existence, we can assume a posture of humility and seek to understand the wisdom in the way that God has made the world.
Much of the struggle we have in understanding and embracing God's plan for marriage, fertility, and the family stems from this original struggle. The Father of Lies has no new tricks; we find the same lies eating away at us beneath the surface today as led our first parents astray. We reject the sovereignty of God and refuse to live according to our nature; we prefer to be gods ourselves. This fundamental refusal to be creatures permeates our thinking and cripples our will. Unpacking these lies allows us to let go of the fear and anxiety that keep us trapped in mistrust of the God who has given us everything.
The serpent's words to Eve form the central lie that leads us all not just to eternal death but to living our lives as those who are dead already. We have inherited the original sin of our first parents, and we continue to feast on a diet that fails to satisfy and leaves us empty. We need the bread of life Himself: the way, the truth, and the life.
We have been designed for happiness. That is why our inmost being whispers to us that it exists. That is why we go to such lengths to chase it. The problem is that God did not intend for us to design our own plan for happiness. We are not made for just any road or destination. We are made for Heaven, and God has given us the gift of the Church's moral teachings as a GPS to guide us along the right route. There may be some wiggle room on whether we take the freeway or the scenic route, but there are definitely wrong routes that lead us far from where we wish to go. And there is only one destination that will satisfy us. It is when we fail to recognize this, when we decide to go it alone, that we find ourselves utterly lost.
Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He has promised us, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:30), and yet so many of us remain suspicious. We like to pick and choose those teachings by which we abide. Like our first parents, we accept what appeals to us about our Faith and remain wary of all else. As G.K. Chesterton observes, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried."
Which is it ? Is it easy, as Jesus promises, or difficult, as Chesterton observed ? Paradoxically, it is both. Once lived, the Christian way of life, a life of sanctity on the long road to holiness, is a road of joy. Whatever obstacles are encountered along the way, we surmount them with a lightness that buoys our journey because we are filled with the fuel we were made for: the fuel of love that ignites to combust and impel us along the way.
Our difficulty lies in the will. We prefer comfort to almost all else and would rather sit by the roadside and allow the inertia of ease to keep us frozen there, where we never enter the real adventure of life. Or if we do enter that adventure, we choose to fill ourselves with the wrong kind of fuel. We let anger and vice isolate us and erode our connections so that we make our pilgrimage alone, blind to the road we ought to take.
This lie that we will be like God is the poison that feeds so many other lies, all designed to keep us on the roadside, off route, or fueling up with what blinds and imprisons us. Each lie is a barrier; if we are willing to dismantle these lies, we can progress to sainthood with joy-unburdened, as Jesus describes it. Real freedom is not choosing anything at all, but rather, that which leads to the highest good.
Like Eve, we suffer from a fundamental mistrust of God's promises to us; we refuse to be who God made us to be, always on the lookout for something better. Satan capitalizes on this weakness by whispering to us promises of his own. His path is seductive and his burden difficult to perceive-until we find ourselves crushed beneath that burden, unable to pave our own path out.
We have a champion. Far from being crushed by the burden of sin, Mary has crushed Satan beneath her heel (see Genesis 3:15). In her humble trust and obedience, she makes up for what Eve lacks. As mothers, we must first embrace Mary's example and live in this obedience ourselves. Only then can we live as (and equip our children to live as) witnesses of the joy of the Christian life—and radiate that joy to others through our spiritual motherhood.
Modeling ourselves after Mary is urgent in our "you do you" society that denies the reality that our bodies are meant to signify, defines female empowerment as sexual promiscuity and the right to exterminate our children within us like unwanted pests, and denigrates traditional cultural roles of women without stopping to ask what wisdom these might have held. Men, too, have much to learn from Mary's posture of humility and docility to the Holy Spirit.
Our societal view of "progress" is narrow, encouraging only those behaviors that knock down the walls of the past rather than attempting to glean wisdom by understanding why they were constructed. The fact is that we have much to learn about who we are and how we are meant to live from those who have gone before us, and in particular those whose lives honored the God who made them.
In forgetting who is sovereign, society has taken the wrong road. We have followed Eve, seeing ourselves as merely first among the animals, putting our will above all else. What a tragedy, when we are made for so much more. Now more than ever, we need to cling to Mary's fiat, recognizing that she crushes Satan's head not by force but by deference to the will of God.
We need to learn to live by and embrace every single one of the teachings of our Holy Mother the Church—and to do so with joy. We may struggle greatly with this. But it is in our "yes" even in the midst of struggle, in our assent despite our reservations, that we are able to be fully receptive to the wonders God holds for us. When we say "yes" to our loving Father, our good King, when we rightly acknowledge His authority, then we surrender the power we have tried to grasp, power that we are not made to wield. Can we trust God enough to let Him be God?
In following Christ's words and example, we discover the truth of who we are and reach the pinnacle of who we were made to be—not gods ourselves, as the ancient deception claims, but creatures, sons and daughters thoroughly conformed to God's will.
And whom do we have as the perfect model of this radical obedience ? The woman who thwarted Satan in her "yes" and, in doing so, became the Mother of God. Let us reclaim our own "yes" to motherhood as we echo Mary's fearless words: "May it be done unto me according to your word" (Luke 1:38).
This essay draws on material from my earlier book, Reclaiming Motherhood from a Culture Gone Mad (rights reverted), and has been revised and updated for Crisis readers.