Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
Who’s your Mary?
For years, mine looked like the one who stood in the dining room nook in my childhood home, a sort of Lladro knockoff with a blue cloak and a halo. My parents weren’t the churchgoing type, but family lore has it that when Mary’s halo got broken off, Mom cried and Dad yelled at my sisters and brother 
and me. The Mary of my childhood was like that statue before the halo-breaking incident: perfect, beautiful, porcelain, distant.
My Mary started changing when I saw The Passion of the Christ and could not take my eyes off Maia Morgenstern. Her Mary was fearless, pushing and shoving, never taking her eyes off her son as he carried that cross, knowing the one thing she could offer him was her presence, no matter how painful it was for her to be there. I began to see Mary as a fearless middle-aged lioness of a mother of Jesus; not so much for me, but for her son, whom I also was growing to love.
Today, my Mary is a young woman or girl from humble beginnings, one who was whispered about by those in her village, one who heard strange messages, not all of them happy, from a variety of God’s messengers: the angel Gabriel. Her relative Elizabeth. Simeon, when Jesus was presented at the temple. My Mary doesn’t congratulate herself or protest that she’s not worthy or ask for copious details or run out and dissect what she’s heard with her husband or five best friends. No, this Mary ponders the words in her heart. She tries to understand—and, it seems, whether she does or doesn’t, carries on, confident in whatever the path the Lord has set her upon. She’s here. She’s near. She’s flesh and blood. Her humanness is nearly as breathtaking as her faith.
Hail, Mary, full of grace, indeed.
