Mary's Lament

on mothering and letting go

I never would have believed it until it happened to me, but it’s true: Motherhood changes you.

In the arc of a lifetime, nine months doesn’t seem that long — less than a year.

But by the end of the third trimester, you’re carrying the weight equivalent of a gallon of milk in your protruding abdomen in which all of your organs have shifted and crowded together to make room for this temporary houseguest. No wonder your back hurts, your feet swell, and sleep is elusive.

Then there’s the labor . . . hours of your body wringing your uterus like a sponge to squeeze out a camel through the eye of a needle.

Finally the baby leaves your body. The cord is cut, and your belly deflates.

You think the work is over, but little do you know it’s only begun, for a piece of your heart now lives outside of your body. You’re now exposed and vulnerable in a way you never were before. Suddenly it occurs to you that this new life depends on you for her survival, yet she doesn’t come with an instruction manual.

Somehow you fumble your way to functioning, and you both survive the first day and the second and the third. You grow to learn what it takes to protect this little one, to provide for her needs, and just when you figure out how to protect and keep her safe, her ultimate well-being requires you to learn to surrender, to let go.

And isn’t that actually the hardest part of motherhood, the letting go?

I’ve been thinking about Mary, the mother of Jesus, through this Lenten season, how she might have experienced the last days of Jesus through her mother’s lens.

During Advent, we remember and celebrate Mary’s humble obedience, her overflow of praise and adoration that is the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). But I’m not sure we spend enough time honoring Mary’s courage in spite of the unknown and the fear she must’ve felt exposing her child-bearing state alongside a wild story of a holy conception. At best, she faced shaming her family and being outcast from the safety and protection of her family and home. At worst, she faced possible death.

I have to presume that her willing obedience came in spite of these realities, not in denial of their potential. Her decision to surrender to God’s call, then, is all the more admirable. And in her willingness, God descends on Mary with extra measures of his grace and power to plant the seed of Life within the temple of her body.

But then Mary has to go about the ordinary work of life . . . the meal preparation and water fetching, the sweeping and washing, the planning and preparing for a new life with Joseph and this miracle they’ve been entrusted to tend.

Until finally the first pains of childbirth strike, carrying with them a prophetic hint of the pain she’d later endure as a result of her obedient and ongoing surrender and the words of Simeon spoken over her in the temple just a short while later:

“. . . and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:35).

Eventually, like every mother before her and every mother after her, Mary’s body does what it is designed to do, expelling the very life she’d been given to protect into a world where anything can happen, where terror lurks and brokenness shatters and suffering threatens. Perhaps with a final scream of release, she delivers this Divine boy who would deliver the people from their sin.

This baby, Jesus, was both her son and her savior, her responsibility and her redemption, her heart and her healing.

In the calm following the storm, he lies in her arms, a visceral reminder that this Life was never hers to grasp, for even as he is adored and worshiped by a group of rag-tag shepherds and a trio of foreign kings, he is marked for death at his very birth.

Herod’s grasp for power and control eventually forces the newly-formed family to flee to Egypt, where once Israel suffered under bondage and oppression and now the new Israel - Jesus - is saved to free the people from their sins. How Mary’s heart must have pounded as she held Jesus close to her chest, running for our Life. At the same time, God must have stirred the angel’s words and the prophecies of Simeon and Anna that she’d pondered in her heart, giving her courage for the journey.

Mary must’ve continually returned to that posture of surrender, as mothers must, all through Jesus’s life — at the temple, as a carpenter’s apprentice, at the wedding miracle, as he traveled and taught — opening her hands over and over to release this piece of her heart that was never hers to grasp.

And ultimately her surrender paves the way for Jesus’s surrender.

I wonder if we spend enough time reflecting on what must have been Mary’s intense anguish, her overflow of grief and pain that I imagine was her lament as she watched her son suffer and die.

Did she see her son betrayed by the kiss of a friend or observe as he stood at trial or stand by as his captors mocked and whipped and spat upon him?

Did she know that he would eventually be led as a lamb to slaughter?

What was she thinking at the foot of the cross where her baby hung suffering?

How did grief wring her heart dry of tears and love, just like her body once labored to deliver this Savior into the world?

Just as Mary bore witness to the humble birth of God-with-us into the world at the foot of the manger, so she bears witness to his humiliating death at the foot of the cross.

Simeon’s prophetic words, spoken in the temple at the time of Jesus’s birth, must have echoed once again in Mary’s heart, piercing her own soul as the soldier plunged his sword into Jesus’s side, that piece of her heart given up for Love’s sake.

From behind her veil of sorrow,

did she strain to see the salvation Simeon perceived in the surrender?

did she dare to believe that this too was part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world?

did she know that the surrender is what would make her heart ultimately whole?

Like Mary, I squint to see beyond my own veil of sorrow on this Good Friday, holding questions without answers, faith without sight, and pain without relief.

But somehow, in spite of what I don’t know and can’t see, I too recall the refrain promising light and salvation and honor for all who dare to believe.

“Simeon cradled the baby in his arms and praised God and prophesied:

‘Lord and Master, I 
am your loving 
servant,
And now I can die 
content,
For you have fulfilled 
your promise to
me.
With my own eyes I 
have seen your 
word,
The Savior you sent into 
the world.
He will be glory for
your people Israel,
and the Revelation —
Light for all people everywhere!’”

Luke 2:28-31

And so I too surrender and dare to believe . . .

Until next time,

Kerry

Cover photo by Tomás Robertson on Unsplash