(I wrote this piece for the September 2023 issue of Give Us This Day. With the kind permission of Liturgical Press I'm reprinting it here. I took the photo at the Stations of the Cross along the cloister walk walls of Holycross Abbey, a restored 12th c. Cistercian Abbey in County Tipperary, Ireland. It was established by the King of Limerick in 1182 A.D. Today Holycross is an active parish. If you're planning a trip to Ireland consider celebrating Sunday Mass there.)
Today’s Collect says God willed that Mary should stand close by the cross and share in the suffering of Christ. I would add that this divine will is another way of saying the name “Mother.” Mothers stand close to their suffering children and share in their suffering. This sharing is no mental exercise. The prophet Simeon tells Mary, “Your own soul a sword will pierce” (Luke 2:35). It is suffering in her pierced flesh, her torn flesh, her motherflesh.
Mary is usually shown bathed in heavenly light, no sign of vultures circling above her as she stands close by the cross. No acknowledgment that she is the mother of a wrongly convicted criminal who has been sentenced to a slow death, a public death, on land beyond the city walls. No acknowledgment that she can only watch him bleed and can do nothing to staunch the flow, bind the wounds. No acknowledgment that she will soon be a childless widow, and so, an outcast in first-century Judah.
We read of crowds following Jesus, but where now are the friends, the kinfolk, the disciples? Where is Peter, the rock? The adoring multitudes are gone. Only a few remain at the cross with Mary: her sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene, and the disciple John. Though who, in any time, in any place, comforts the mother at the place of execution, comforts the mother of the condemned at the moment of death? There is one, the suffering Jesus, who sees beyond his own suffering to his mother’s and even now acts to heal. He entrusts her to John, “Behold, your mother.”
Behold. See. This is another way of saying the name, “Jesus Christ,” the One who beholds, who sees, who numbers the hairs on our heads, who knows when the sparrow falls. Jesus the Christ shares his mother’s suffering in his pierced flesh, his torn flesh, his human flesh.
We pray today that we might participate “with the Virgin Mary in the Passion of Christ.” We must see Mary’s suffering and share it. And we must know that our suffering—all the ways our flesh is pierced and torn—is also seen, also known. Like Mary, with Mary, we are beheld by the Crucified and, like Mary, we are the beholden.
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