At Jesus' presentation, Simeon tells Mary that a sword shall pierce her own soul, a prophecy about her grief in seeing her son die on the cross. And when Jesus was 12 and lost and then found at the temple we are told that Mary kept all these things in her heart. We see her at the foot of the cross with Jesus giving her to John and him taking her into his home. What grief she must have born at that moment. And then we also see her with the other apostles at Pentecost after Jesus had risen from the dead and had sent the Holy Spirit to descend on that gathering.
In between the crucifixion and Pentecost, we see Jesus greeting and surprising various women and apostles and followers and their great excitement and fear and confusion and joy. But what about what must have been the most heartbreaking and tears-inducing, joyful and eucatastrophic reunion in all of history between a mother and her son? Could we even bear the emotional storm of what it must have been like for Mary to be reunited with her gloriously risen son whom she had so mourned as though with a sword through her heart seeing him tortured and killed on the cross? Surely this is the Lord of the Rings Field of Cormallen-like joyful scene of all time that anyone would long to read of?
And yet we are not told of it in Scripture. How could it have possibly been left out? Could words have even described it? But could words even describe the Resurrection either? And of course we aren't told about it directly -- only sort of the after-effects and the results. Perhaps it was too glorious for us to gaze upon even in a written description? In any case, we are left to wonder and to praise and embrace it "after the fact".
And I suspect something similar must be the case with the meeting of Mary and her risen son. We can only appreciate how emotional it must have been by simply reading that she was there with the apostles at Pentecost and knowing that it must have taken place sometime before with us getting to be privy to the details.
Many Protestant’s objections to the Catholic practices of honouring Mary stem from what they say is her seeming absence, to a large degree, in Scripture. There are many answers to this objection, but the one that has struck me so powerfully and emotionally last evening in our Easter Vigil Mass was that if this incredible mother-son reunion after the most excruciating circumstances of his death and her grief has been denied us when so many other emotional and moving scenes were included in the narrative, there must be something so intimate, so loving, and so personal that it was not to be recorded.
And I think anyone who knows what true family intimacy is like can relate to this. There are things that simply cannot be effectively shared with the "outside world". They can only be shared by bringing that outside world in to become part of the family. Only then will it make any sense and have the value it was meant to have. Scott Hahn in his book about Mary in the Catholic Church, Hail, Holy Queen writes that a home needs to have a mother to make a home feel like home. And Mary is that Mother to the Church. In one of my favourite lines of his, he says that churches that do not honour Mary as their mother seem more like bachelor pads than homes.
If Scripture doesn't show us "much" of Mary (though what we do see is always so intense and holy -- "full of Grace"), perhaps it is because we need, instead, to bring her into our hearts and homes through the Church by making it our Home. It is there that we will see and ltruly love her as the mother of our Lord.
--Stanley
