November – December
These are months of remembering
the dead and a mother’s love
DURING this season, Mother Mary would have carried, formed and nourished Jesus for nine months in her womb. How much of her very being would have been invisible in him? Working, eating, sleeping, Mary was forming Jesus’ body from her own – his features, his limbs and his divine power. Did he have her coloring, her eyes, her smile, her way of walking? Would the neighbors have said: “For sure, that is Mary’ boy – just look at the freckles on his nose?”.
Holding him and gazing at him with tender power she sowed the seeds of an immense courage in his heart. Was it through his mother that he experienced the security, intimacy and tender feminine energy that empowered his divine ministry? And at the last moment on the cross, bereft and hopeless, did his desperate eyes catch the quiet intensity in his mother’s uplifted face, and did those memories once again burn through his despair and bless his breaking heart?
The theologian, Elizabeth Johnson wrote: “Under the blood-smeared cross she rocked his mangled bones, remembering him, moaning, “This is my body, my blood”.
During these days of November and December, many of us will have memories that bless and burn. An Australian broadcaster, Clive James, wrote: “Even as my cancer ushers me towards ‘life’s departure lounge’ and burned by my vision of a world that shone and sentenced to Life by way of starting to say goodbye, now I am weak. The sky is overcast here in the English autumn, but my mind basks in the light I never left behind”.
Another theologian wrote: “Once a woman has carried her baby inside her body for nine months and brought it forth through the pain of childbirth she knows something about mystery, about miracles, and about transformation that men will never know”.
The theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, tried to describe this human divine dynamism when he wrote: “After a mother has smiled for a long time at her child, the child will begin to smile back. She has awakened love in its heart and in this awakening love, she awakens also recognition”.
He believes that an infant’s journey into human awareness depended on the beckoning, beguiling, voice of the mother, easing the child into self-hood, lessening the shadows of the abyss that trap in inarticulate darkness. Co-creating life with God, there is a sense in which you could say a mother’s role is eternal, because what she is, and what she does, will never die.
As with all mothers Mary would have carried, formed and nourished Jesus for nine months in her womb. How much of her very being would have been visible in him?
And how much are mothers aware of the divine mystery they incarnate in their offspring?
(for your comment email: nolvanvugt@gmail.com)
