Ave Maria

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the time of our death. Amen.

I have been thinking about you lately, Mary. I can’t think of God, or scarcely of Jesus, but I have been thinking about you. I think you have spent a long time reaping that promise, that all generations will call you blessed, but I’m not so sure. Have we overestimated your serenity? The sweet, somber Madonna faces on a thousand crystalline icons, is that really you? Maybe in the angel’s presence you were shy and sweet, but I have seen your way as a way of shaking fists, of tears and groanings, of weary questioning. Did you rage against God in your secret heart while the baby grew, wondering what all of this must be for and why you of all people couldn’t be told? Of course you were honored, as much as you could understand yourself to be, but you couldn’t have really understood who the child was that you were bearing in your weary body, who added sighs to your days and aches to your young back. Your cheeks still burned with shame to hear them whisper about your supposed indiscretion, to see the questions in your wounded fiancé’s eyes. Didn’t you question, why me? Why do I have to carry this without you?

Did you cry at night when you thought no one else could hear you, wondering why God’s blessings made you cursed in the eyes of everyone else you had ever loved? Were you overwhelmed by the mysteries, the thousand questions that you wanted to ask but had no voice for? But perhaps you were brave and you railed against the stars and the Presence and the Absence and the sky, and it is only our memory that has made you docile and silent. “Be it unto me as you have said.” Did you regret those words as the moment of complicity, a quick concession that put the heart-piercing sword in his hand?

But your sorrow made you holy, and you grew with him, fierce and strong and as hard as the packed-dirt roads you walked along with him, rediscovering every day with growing amazement that you had birthed no ordinary baby. Once you were transformed by a long, dusty road of hardship you led them all, for centuries you have been adored by thousands who want to learn what you learned, learn what you would have given your eye-teeth to know all the way back on that joyful-dark night when you held fearfully in your arms this one that you and God had brought into the world.

O, pray for me, Mary. Pray that I could stay the course, that I would not regret my moment of complicity with the will of God. Pray that at the end of all this travailing, I too will be able to bring to life something wonderful.