HIS MOTHER

 

“Jesus is on His feet again, once more he starts on His way.  As He lifts his bowed head and looks at the road He is to tread, He comes face to face with His mother.

It is not by chance that she meets Him at this  moment, just as He falls and struggles to His feet again.  She sees that which no one else in that crowd sees, the tiny child taking His first unsteady steps and falling on the garden path in Nazareth.  She is there beside Him, holding her breath, longing to put out her hands to hold Him, to prevent the fall, but she lets Him go alone, the little child whose independence she must respect, her Son who must learn to walk on His own feet, and to walk away from her.

For His mother, those first steps of the baby learning to walk were the first steps on the road to Calvary.  The “Word was made flesh,” her flesh.  God had taken

human nature, her human nature.  The way of the Cross had begun.  Already His face was set steadfastly toward Jerusalem.  It was for this journey that she had fashioned those blameless feet from her own flesh and blood.  

Seeing the first fall on the Via Crucis, His mother sees the first fall on the path in Nazareth.  Now as then she is silent; she holds back her hands as she did then.  His will is her will.  It was for this hour that she gave Him to the world, for this that He grew from the infant to the child, from the child to the man.

He goes on His way.  He passes her by.  This is something at the very heart of His suffering: that it must afflict her whom He loves; that because they both love, neither can spare the other.  He goes on His way to do His Father’s will."

Mary has given Him the precious blood that is to be shed.  It is to be shed in order that it may become the blood stream that is the life of every man who lives in Christ, the blood stream of the mystical body of Christ on Earth through all time, the lifeblood of the world flowing through the heart of humanity.  When Mary uttered her Fiat – “Be it done to me according to thy word” – when she conceived Christ and gave Him her own humanity, she made every mother to become a potential mother of Christ; every child who would come into this world, one who was to come to be a Christ to it.  “If anyone does the will of my Father who is in Heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

 Every woman who sees her child suffer, every woman who is separated from her child, every woman who must stand by helpless and see her child die, every woman who echoes the old cry, “Why, why, why my child?” has the answer from the mother of Christ.  She can look at the child through Mary’s eyes, she can know the answer with Mary’s mind, she can accept the suffering with Mary’s will, she can love Christ in her child with Mary’s heart – because Mary had made her a mother of Christ.  It is Christ who suffers in her child; it is His innocence redeeming the world, His love saving the world.  He too is about His Father’s business, the business of love."  (Caryll Houselander)

Art: Ang Kiukok- Philippines