archives

Mary Our Mother

We are people who highly value a mother who suffered for us.

But Mary is a mother who suffered for us.

Therefore, we are people who highly value Mary.

As a young seminarian I spent a few summer vacations as an elevator operator in the Maternity Pavilion of a large New York hospital. Aside from conveying visitors, doctors and nurses to various floors, I had the privilege of conveying many expectant mothers from the ward floors to the delivery room floor. Whenever the buzzer in the elevator sounded three times, I proceeded immediately to the specified floor. As I proceeded to the delivery room floor, I always noticed the silence that prevailed in the car. The nurses and their aides would wheel a stretcher into the car. The gay chatter of the nurses of other moments was subdued to an occasional and excited whisper, my own whistling was stifled by a lump in my throat. On the stretcher lay a mother about to bring another person into the world. Her face expressed deep suffering and anxiety, sweat rolled from her forehead into her already sweat-soaked hair. Her body writhed with pain; her moaning and uplifted hands pleaded for relief.

The story is not new and its meaning never loses its freshness. What a mother first suffers for her child is ever a cause of wonderment – something which stirs even the coldest heart. The pains of childbirth are a mother’s testimony of her love for her children. A child’s greatest reproach in life is to have spurned a mother’s love, for her love has given him life. He lives because a mother has suffered to bring him into the world.

We call the Blessed Virgin “Our Mother,” and rightly so, for Mary is that. Yet, in times of discouragement, hardship, or temptation, we may realize or value little a sentiment we grasp with an iron hold in times of fervor. Yes, we may even doubt that Mary is our mother. True, we have the statement of Christ to St. John and we have a vague notion of Mary as the mother of the Mystical Body. But in times of discouragement and worry, we need this vague knowledge clothed in concrete terms; we need to picture Mary somewhat like our own good earthly mothers. And this is possible without any lessening of the exalted dignity of the Mother of God.

True, Mary neither begot us nor physically nurtured us. Her claim to be our mother and our claim to be her sons and daughters are wound up in the Mystery of the Incarnation. As a result of the Incarnation Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, is the First-Born of many who, thanks to the merits of Christ’s passion and death, will have or already have become Children of God. Because she is the mother of the First-Born, because she brought the God-Man into the world, because she gave birth to Christ in order that He might make us Sons and Daughters of His Heavenly Father, through terrible suffering and death, Mary is our mother. She is our mother in a spiritual sense and to beget us as spiritual Sons and Daughters of God, she paid the price any mother pays to beget a son or daughter. The suffering Mary endured to beget us was not chiefly physical – rather mental. The suffering Mary endured to beget us did not last for hours – rather for thirty-three years. The suffering Mary underwent to beget us began at the moment of the Conception of Jesus in her womb and ended as the darkness and rumbling of the earth announced to Jerusalem that the Son of God was dead.

Picture to yourself a mother in the hard days of the depression say in 1931 or 1932. She calls her unemployed husband aside and says, “John, I didn’t tell you before this time but little Eddie is a marked boy. He’s going to go through life helping others and in return receive nothing but insults and abuse. He’s going to die in a Communistic prison camp in Korea.” Picture to yourself the grief and sorrow that such a mother would experience at the many departures of the child to school in the morning, at seeing him play in the streets with the other boys, while mending his clothes or glancing at his across the dinner table, at graduating from grade school and high school, at the very thought of him or mention of his name. Then, thank God that He has spared any mother such a trial. Any mother? Any mother but His Own?

Yes, Mary knew all that would befall her Son at the moment and even before she conceived Him. Picture any number of circumstances in our life that could break a mother’s heart and you have still not begun to understand the sorrow Mary experienced – for no man has ever suffered what her Son has suffered.  When the Archangel Gabriel asked Mary if she would be the mother of God, Mary realized the dignity and the tremendous suffering she would assume. Mary said, “Fiat,” “YES.” Fiat, to the childbirth in a cold animal shelter, to the flight into Egypt, to the loss of Jesus in the Temple, Fiat to the tempting of Christ in the desert by Satan, to the insults the Pharisees hurled at Christ, to the ingratitude the blind, crippled and hungry returned to their benefactor. Fiat, to Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial. Fiat, to the mock trial before Pilate, to the scourging and crowning with thorns, to the humiliating tramp through Jerusalem with a cross, to the jeers of the Jews and the bad thief. Fiat, to the consummatum est of Golgotha.

It was a Fiat, not made once at Nazareth to an Archangel. A fiat renewed, with all its pain, every time she looked at, thought about or heard about her Son. It was a fiat repeated millions of times throughout the course of thirty-three years. It was a Fiat which could just as easily have not been made. But she did make it knowing that there would be no Christ, no Jesus, no Messiah, no God-Man to bring about our Redemption, if she said “No.”

Because Mary did not say, “No,” to God, Christ was born. Because Mary did not say, “NO,” we merited through Christ to be Sons and Daughters of God. Because Mary said, “Yes,” we know that our discouragement and difficulties can be changed into acts of love. Mary’s acceptance of the suffering any mother experiences when a child of hers suffers expressed her love for God and for us. As Mary willed to be the mother of a Son who would suffer for us, she consented not only to the birth of a Son according to the Flesh but to the birth of many sons and daughters according to the Spirit. She proved for thirty-three years that she is our mother. Let’s not spurn her love. Let’s not be reproached for ingratitude to the mother who gave us eternal life.