Mary our Mother

A talk given to the Conference of Catholic Women, Ascension Church, Boca Raton, FL on May 17 2022

It's May and that means Mother's Day, and Mary, and May crownings.

Watching our parish First Communion class crowning the statue of Mary on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, I started thinking  about Mary, the mother of the little fully human, fully divine baby Jesus. As a fully human, fully divine six-week-old infant, he would have to all appearances been a normal six-week-old baby. Imagine the young mother, first on the road to Bethlehem, then giving birth away from home, then travelling to the Temple for the presentation, and finally fleeing to Egypt. She was likely away from her extended family and support system. And here is this little baby, a baby to all outward appearances just like any other little baby. He may have been a colicky baby; he may have been a happy baby. But even the happiest babies cry sometimes. Was Mary overwhelmed on the road by an infant who cried, and she didn't know why? “He can't be hungry, Joseph, I just fed him. And he's not wet; I just checked. Maybe he’s too warm; maybe he's too cold. I don't know what to do!” Mary, sinless herself, would not have lost patience, but that doesn’t mean that she never was frustrated by the challenges of being a young mother!

Mary was a mother just like any other mother. The problems she had with her young son would have been little problems. He was, after all,  fully divine as well as fully human, and incapable of sin. Yet we know that when he was twelve, he stayed behind in Jerusalem to preach the word of God. He unintentionally frightened Mary and Joseph by not being with the caravan. Of course, he wasn't disobeying his parents, it is unlikely that anybody ever thought to tell him that he could not stay behind in Jerusalem and preach. He thought he was doing the right thing; he believed he was following the will of the father and preaching the word. And the Bible tells us that when Mary and Joseph did reunite with him, he humbly returned with them to Nazareth, a loving and obedient son.

The nativity, the presentation in the temple, and the finding in the temple are the only stories we have of the life of Jesus before he begins his public life at about the age of thirty. What little stories we have, may have come down from Mary herself - Saint Luke's gospel specifically states that he writes from the words of eyewitnesses. There is a tradition, albeit unproven and at times out of favor, that Saint Luke interviewed Mary herself. If so, perhaps she did tell him more than the stories we have. But the purpose of the gospel isn't to show us the childhood of Christ. It isn't to show us what sort of parents Mary and Joseph were. No, the Bible is the story of salvation history.

But we cannot separate Mary from salvation history. When Gabriel appears to Mary and announces that she is to be the mother of the Lord, she asks how this can be. His explanation, that it will happen by the power of the Holy Spirit, must have been incomprehensible to Mary. But her quick Fiat belies her initial question. Her question seems not argumentative, as Zachariah’s had been, but born of surprise and incomprehension. Remember Gabriel didn't ask Mary if she wanted this; he told her.

Luke tells us that Mary verbalizes her consent to God’s will, saying “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” And just a few verses later, visiting Elizabeth, Mary speaks the Magnificat, beginning ““My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior. For he has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness; behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed...”

Mary did not know what lay ahead for herself and her son when she gave her Fiat, when she said the prophetic words “all ages will call me blessed.” As we seek to do God’s will in our own lives, we will not have the direct words of an angel to start us on our journey. We need to consciously pray for the grace to discern God’s will. May we find our path, and embrace it, with all its triumphs and all its suffering, with the same joy with which Mary faced her own difficult journey as Mother of God.