Ave Maria, Pietà

 Elizabeth practically shouted her own version of the Ave Maria when Mary came to visit: “Blessed are you among women!”

This is how we want to see you: Blessed, exalted, favored, chosen. We clothe your images in the finest fabrics and lace. We dress you in gold and silver. We want you to be the epitome of strength, beauty and serenity for us.

But we forget the elder Simeon’s blessing. He said a sword would pierce your soul. We forget your utter terror when Herod’s soldiers came looking for your baby; they slaughtered so many children. We forget the horrors of gathering your newborn in the dark of night in a desperate escape. We forget the fear of crossing borders into an alien country, of becoming refugees, strangers in a strange land. We forget your years of wandering furtively over Egyptian countryside, struggling with language and laws, all the while seeking shelter and food.

We forget the panic your felt when Jesus went missing for three days, missing in a large anonymous crowd, missing somewhere in the tense urban streets and alleys of Jerusalem.

We forget the apparent rejection by Jesus himself when you and your other children came to talk with him. “Who is my mother?” he said. That must have hurt. Then pointing to the crowd, he added,

“These are my mother and my siblings. Those who do the will of God, they are my family.” Was this a sword that sword pierced your soul?

We forget the agony of watching helplessly by as your child was arrested by brutal guards, tried in a sham show trial, and scourged in a public setting while crowds jeered and mocked.

We forget your nausea when your son staggered beneath the weight of his cross on the road to Golgotha. We forget, Mary, that you watched life ebb from the very body you brought forth from your own.

We forget how, as the sun descended, you accompanied his broken body to a borrowed tomb. We forget the heavy rock that barred you from giving even a farewell kiss to your beloved child.

Perhaps you knew an even greater pain through all of this.

Judith Dupré once wrote,

“We cannot know the inner recesses of another person’s soul... As parents or caregivers, we plan, hope, and nurture, but the day comes when our children let go of our hands. (They) venture forth into the world to taste it on their own terms, and that world – their world – is not ours to know…”

Did you know this child? Really know him? Do any of us ever really know the “other”, even when the “other” is our own child?

Clara Park had an autistic daughter. She described her this way:

“She moved among us every day - among us, but not of us... She existed among us, (but) she had her own being elsewhere…”

So too, Mary, you were called to trust the ways of a child who was yours and not yours… who drew his being from you, and but from somewhere else as well.

Finally, Mary, we forget the survivor’s pain you bear.

The Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote that “the path of the dead is in the living.” Regardless of how we read scripture, or what we believe, your life went on. These swords pierced your heart. These memories left deep sorrows in you.

For all these reasons we say to you most tenderly, “Hall Mary, Pietà, May God be with You.”

The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1898.

©Budd Friend-Jones

December 11, 2022

Mayflower Church

Minneapolis, Minnesota