A mother’s heart
She rushed close enough to the cross to hear his voice. In his strained voice she heard faint reminders of the infant who babbled nonsense at her breast. Reminders of the little boy chanting the Psalms, and the young man whose voice cracked for months every time he called her “Mother’. Like John, she knew his chest carried the roar of thunder in it, a roll and a crack of life at the sight of injustice. But it was his laughter she loved the most. She carried the sound of it wound up in her hair, beneath her nailbeds, in her skin.
Mary couldn’t turn away from his agony, and she tried to grasp it and carry it the way she carried his laughter. She tried to catch his eyes, to cradle them with hers, just as her arms had held him all those years ago. Perhaps the words of her song, the Magnificat, rose to the surface in those moments before he died. A flash of angelic light, a promise, a path she submitted to without knowing what it would cost her. Her son. Her sorrow. Her Savior.
He bled and her eyes avoided the thorns and nails—she’d patched up a lifetime of scraped knees and smashed thumbs, and she’d felt every one of them. Mothers carry more than their children’s laughter, they carry their wounds as if the wound was their own. This felt like more than she could hold in her body.
A son’s Love
Jesus knew her every thought and feeling. He knew her in a way other sons never know their mothers. Her motivations, her dark thoughts, her fears, her passion. He knew it all, and while she carried him, he carried her too.
Saint Augustine, a prodigal son whose mother wept for his conversion, wrote of his mother’s relationship with God, “How could this vision come to her unless ‘your ears were close to her heart?’ You are good and all-powerful, caring for each one of us as though the only one in your care, and yet for all as for each individual.”
A good father
God’s ears were close to the heart of Mary, just as his ears were close to the heart of Saint Augustine’s mother, Monica. His ear is close to your heart too. As we approach the cross with Mary, let’s remember that the depth of Jesus’ love for his mother did not transcend his love for us. Today, as we journey to resurrection, consider what it means for God to care you as if you were the only one in his care.
A prayer:
Lord, you know the intimate and exquisite pain of a mother’s broken heart. You know because you experienced the anguish of releasing your son to a harsh and inhospitable world. A world that did not receive him. Like Mary, we carry flesh and spirit wounds of our own. But you see us. Bend your ear close to our hearts. Take what is torn apart and suture it together with love.
*Click here to read Day One: John the Beloved.
[…] Click here to read Day Two: Mother Mary. […]