Calling on the name of Mary, our mother, is invoking one who loves with a mother’s love and to invoke the intercession of someone familiar with every grief and fear we can know in our lives.
The relative silence of Mary in the Gospels, surpassed only by that of St. Joseph, is something I think about a lot. Mary is frequently recounted as pondering the awesome weight of the mystery of salvation, and her seemingly impossible place within its plan, in the stillness of her heart.
If you read it a certain way, it almost sounds placid, though I am sure the reality was anything but that for a young, unwed mother seeing angels, or a widow witnessing the torture and death of her only child.
I try to resist inventing my own character of Mary in my mind. I try instead to think of her, our mother, as I have come to know her through periods of prayer and particular pleas I have made for her aid. Such moments are more often anguished than placid, though often silent.
But in that silence I have had — according to the very real limits of my spiritual imagination — fleeting instances in which I have met she who loves me as she loved her son.
Seeing it phrased this way in today's issue of The Pillar hit me with a jolt: she and I have something very much in common, and that unfolds all kinds of feels.
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