Tag: mother

Learning to live with doubt

I have been thinking of an imaginary epitaph for a stillborn child:

If I am so quickly done for –
What on earth was I begun for?

Even today, many women experience carrying a living child within them only to find it stillborn. If, as I believe, we each come into the world with a purpose, a life to be lived to the full, how do we explain this? And in the past, before the introduction of contraception, vast numbers of women would give birth to twelve or more children, many of whom were stillborn or who died at an early age. This is but one of many mysteries, and it is easy to become cynical and decide that life is ultimately meaningless. The Psalms express all this most vividly, being a record of the long years spent by the Israelites in foreign countries and in the desert, journeying towards the Promised Land. Even in their darkest moments, they are able to say, ‘Yes, though I walk through the valley of shadow and of death, thy rod and thy staff comfort me.’  And so we persevere with our meditation practice in an act of faith.

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The eternal mother

The story of Mary in the Gospels moves me by her sheer silence. When she and her husband take the baby to be blessed she is told that her heart will be broken. The next we know is that when Jesus is taken to Jerusalem for his bar mitzvah he is found talking theology with the scribes and, when rebuked by his mother, makes the enigmatic remark that he is about his Father’s business. We read how ‘Mary bore all these things in silence.’ For thirty years Jesus lived at home, as far as we know, until he discovered his vocation – why so late? – and left home to fulfill it. His mother then has to suffer being publicly rejected by him, ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’

Thereafter silence. At the end, when Jesus, weak from the loss of blood, is hoisted onto the cross, his feet and hands nailed to the wood, his cries of pain  echoing those of the hundreds of other crucified Jews around him, there she is, at the foot of his cross,  silently keeping watch over his last hours.

It is not surprising that subsequent generations projected onto Mary the archetype of the Eternal Mother, and that she has commanded such devotion over the centuries. As St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, ‘In danger, in doubt, or difficulties , think of Mary, call upon Mary.’

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