Hail Mary, Pietà

 When Elizabeth greeted Mary, she practically shouted her own version of the Ave Maria: “Blessed are you among women!” This is how we want to see her: Blessed, exalted, favored, chosen.  We dress her images in the finest gold, silver, fabrics and lace. She is the epitome of strength, beauty, and serenity.

We forget the elder Simeon’s blessing and prediction that a sword would pierce her soul. We forget the terror she must have felt when Herod’s soldiers came looking for her child, slaughtering so many children as they did so. 

We forget the horrors of this young mother who gathered up her newborn child in the middle of the night, her desperate flight across borders into an alien country, her becoming a refugee, a stranger in a strange land. We forget that, for years, she wondered furtively over Egyptian roads and countryside, struggling with language and laws, all the while seeking shelter and food.

We forget the panic she must have felt when Jesus went missing for three days, missing in a large anonymous crowd, missing somewhere in the tense urban streets and back alleys of Jerusalem; no one knew where he might have gone.

Hail Mary? We forget the apparent rejection by Jesus himself when she and her other children came to talk with him. “Who is my mother?” he said. Then, pointing to the crowd, he said, “These are my mother and my siblings. Those who do the will of God, they are my family.” Did this sword pierce her soul?

We forget her agony as she helplessly witnessed her child's arrest by brutal Roman guards, his trial in a sham court, and his scourging in a public setting while the crowds jeered and mocked. We forget her despair as Jesus staggered under the weight of his cross on the road to Golgotha. We forget, finally, that she watched life ebb from his suffering body, the same body she brought forth from her own.

Hail Mary? We forget that, as the sun descended in the sky, she accompanied his broken body to a borrowed tomb. We forget the heavy rock that barred her from giving a farewell kiss to her beloved child.

Alas! An even greater pain may have penetrated her soul. 

Did she ever know this child? This child who lived in two realities simultaneously? Do we ever really know the “other,” even when the “other” is our own child? 

Judith Dupré writes,

“We cannot know the inner recesses of another person’s soul, those mysterious gulfs that mark the inevitable distance between individuals. As parents or caregivers, we plan, hope, and nurture, but the day comes when our children let go of our hands and venture forth into the world to taste it on their own terms, and that world—their world—is not ours to know…”

Clara Park tells of her relationship with her autistic daughter:

“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, was Mary called to trust the ways of a child who was hers, but not hers… who drew his being from her and from somewhere else beyond her understanding.

Finally, we forget the survivor’s pain. “The path of the dead is in the living,” wrote Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. Regardless of how we read scripture or what we believe, these memories would never go away. These sorrows persisted within her.

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

©Gilbert Friend-Jones