Holy Saturday

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Mary and Us

The distinguished Paraguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, in one of his short, short-stories writes:

        Oriol Vall, who works with newborns at a hospital in Barcelona, says that the first
        human gesture is the embrace. After coming into the world, at the beginning of their
        days, babies wave their arms as if seeking someone. Other doctors, who work with

        people who already lived their lives, says that the aged, at the end of their days, die

        trying to raise their arms.

The baby’s tiny hands and arms wave, trying to find the intimate food of mother’s breast. Years later dying hands and arms reach out for the intimate food of embrace. Baby Jesus’s tiny arms and hands waving, reaching instinctively for his mother Mary’s breast.

The dying man Jesus, his hands nailed to the wood of a cross, unable to reach out for his Father in Heaven or to his mother standing beneath, his body hanging helpless in agony. Mary in the end holding his lifeless body in her lap, her left hand, in Michelangelo’s Pietá, stretched out in humble submission to the Father, “Be it done unto me according to your word”; her right hand holding her dead son, her fingers sunk deep in his flesh in a gesture saying “No, not this, not my son.”

That tragic tension between surrender and disbelief that tries to hold on, mirrors all of us who are born reaching out for the food of intimacy and who die trying to lift our arms to embrace and be embraced by our mother who birthed us and our spiritual mother who rebirthed us into a new life in God. Mother. Food. Intimacy. The images of the Incarnation and the death of Jesus. Mary is there, his mother and ours. She is there in our beginning and in our end. And in her Assumption she, with the Father and the Son, is there in our final embrace of the intimacy we were born for.

All of it in the Spirit which overshadowed her and returned at Pentecost to over- shadow the disciples and us in our Baptism and Confirmation, our new birth and new life of purpose in the Mystical Body of Christ. Mary. She is the one who is there when we are born and when we live and when we die. Mother. Mary. Intimate Presence. Pray for us “now and at the hour of our death.”

Fr. Murray Bodo, OFM