Fr. Louis Perroy
His Mother’s Heart
is Pierced
Behold His Mother! We cherish memories of our friends and memories of our mothers but a mother’s memory in all that relates to her child is more tenacious. It reaches back to the child’s first days and only to the mother is it given to find in the son grown to manhood the ingenuous look of the babe she held in her arms. Nor does she forget with what a combination of travail and rapture she brought that frail life into the world. Mothers would keep their children always little, always in their arms, always dependent upon their tender care. But the march of time hurries the sons from that sweet shelter out into the battle of life; and all that is left the mother is the land of memory, wherein she dwells upon the enchanted scenes of childhood.
Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart
Nor did Mary escape the sweet tyranny of motherhood. In the livid, blood-stained figure of her beloved Son, in the outraged and distorted features of the Victim hanging on the cross, she still saw the winsome face of the Child of Bethlehem and Nazareth. But Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart. (Luke 2:19) Often indeed, in hours of grief and tears, our sorrow is made more poignant by the memory of lost happiness, until the contrast between the sunshine of other days and the lowering clouds of the present makes the heart sick with inexpressible longing.
Bethlehem with its terraced vineyards and olive groves, the stable where Christ was born, the shepherds kneeling in wonder and adoration around the manger, the effulgence of the angels chanting and hovering over the Divine Infant wrapped in swaddling clothes— all were visions of lost happiness to Mary. The same sad memory recalled the flight from Herod’s cruelty, the setting out, in arms, in the dead of night at a word from Joseph, to take the road to exile across the trackless wastes of the desert. The tranquil and amber Nile, the pyramids, the mocking sphinx, the rigid obelisk, and the crouching gods in the dusky temples, were all as so many shifting scenes in this Mother’s memory. But Mary could bend over the sleeping face of her Child; to possess Him was happiness; hardship and exile were forgotten while she held her God in her arms.
Mothers would keep their children always little, always in their arms, always dependent upon their tender care…
The Child grew in grace and years; she remembered the first lisping of those lips that on Calvary were smeared with blood and the froth of death, she recalled with what sweetness they had formed the name of Mary! Exile ceases to be exile when the soul possesses Jesus. Mary clung always to her quiet happiness in the safety of the desert; she left it but to follow the road that led up to Calvary, where she stood contrasting in her breaking heart the happiness of those far-off days with the agony of the present.
She saw Nazareth, and their humble dwelling; the workshop, and the Child at play in the sweet scented shavings—all the beauty of their obscure lives. How often we realize our happiness only when it is gone from us! Then came the death of the foster father, leaving the Mother and Son alone. In the sweet intimacy of those succeeding years the Child became a Youth. With what emotion the Mother noted the growing gravity and deepening thoughtfulness of His face. When He was a Child, she had kissed and fondled Him; a few years later and He had become her inspiration; His lips and eyes spoke and she listened and sat at His feet in the dusk to drink in His words. She had chosen the better part.
But the march of time hurries the sons from that sweet shelter out into the battle of life…
Those about her had ever been ignorant of the great and joyous mystery of her life with her Son. Her relations, her nephews, even her friends seemed not to realize what manner of Child, of Youth, of Man, they had among them. But what matter, since she know, and in her loving motherheart jealously guarded the knowledge she alone possessed. This ineffable felicity had lasted for nearly thirty It had been all too short!
Then, one evening Jesus had told her that they must part. On the morrow He went away. The Mother gazed through blinding tears at the retreating form of her beloved Son on the Galilean highway, setting out alone. He had not yet called His Apostles and she could not follow Him alone.
His great mission absorbed the Messias. His face, burned by the sun and worn with fatigue, became graver and athwart the brow she had kissed the Mother discerned the shadow of the cross. Then came the day when she stood in the shadow of that cross—not a vision but a hard reality!
How vividly the scenes of the past flitted through Mary’s memory in the presence of the ghastly actuality. Anguish tore at her heart; her arms reached toward her Son; groping for support in her failing strength she encountered only the cross—everywhere, the cross on which Jesus was dying.
To cling to the cross that crushes us; to lean on it in hours of faintness and weariness; to be bathed in the blood of Jesus, and mingle with it our own; to have no confidant other than the God who strikes, and to stand valiant under the blows, like the Mother of Sorrows, is to imitate the Mother who gave her Son for our redemption.
O Holy Mary, my mother,
into your blessed trust and custody,
and into the care of your mercy
I this day, every day, and in the hour of
my death, commend my soul and
my body. To you I commit all my
anxieties and miseries, my life
and the end of my life, that by your
most holy intercession and by your
merits all my actions may be directed
and disposed according to your will
and that of your Son. Amen.
