In our mother’s month

This is the month of our mothers, because it is our Mother’s month, she who is the Queen of our hearts, whose heart and body are without macula, free of the stain of the first sin. In the city where I study is the oldest known icon of Virgin and Child in the world, here on Rome’s Via Salaria, deep in Priscilla’s catacomb (“queen of catacombs!”, cry the early writers): here is the mother in this icon painted on the rock feeding her Divine Son.

Since the earliest Church, she has been revered as the greatest of the saints, because she — and she alone — had given birth to God who was also Man. I stood and looked up at this small icon one warm summer’s morning, wondering how many uncountable Christian faces had looked up at her before. The picture is simple, quite plain. A prophet stands to the left and points to the star above Our Lady’s head. The star marks her as the Virgin of virgins, the Queen of queens, the Mother of the Son. By 3rd century iconography, then, she was already the Woman of the Church, the Woman framed by the sun and the moon of St John’s Apocalypse. She is depicted here perhaps just a century after her Assumption into heaven; and this Assumption is the patronal feast of every believer in South Africa.

Who is this woman? She is every Christian’s model of total faithfulness, of awe-inspiring humility and overwhelming strength in the face of unspeakable suffering and great distress. She is the one who never leaves the foot of the Cross, who comforts and sustains the men the Lord chose as his own, even as they were afraid, and fled, doubting that the slaughtered Lamb of God could possibly be given back to them alive. But Mary waited with them, in deep faith, for her Son to be resurrected.

“Impossible!” modern man cries out. “No one can come back from the dead!” But the Woman says otherwise. She never leaves her Son’s side. And when his side is pierced, and life flows out from it, she receives that life with John the Beloved Apostle. Then she does not stay at the tomb but with the men who are his, his Apostles in the Upper Room. She is truly the Mother of the Church. She is strong where we are weak; she points to her Son’s strength, and offers it to us. And she offers us her Immaculate Heart, taking us through her heart to the wounded heart of God, her Son’s own Sacred Heart.

And when He returns to them, full of life, the Man who has passed beyond death, she is there, our mother, our sister, Zion’s daughter, the woman of the Apocalypse who has undone the knot of Eve’s transgression. And again when Jesus the Christ is taken from their sight into heaven in the cloud, and the Apostles are at a loss, staring up into the sky, the Mother once more takes care of them. We know this because she is there with them at the coming of the Holy Spirit’s fire on Pentecost morning.

When I was terribly sick once, lonely, delirious with fever, stuck out on a mission station in the hot tropics of our beloved continent, a quiet Polish nun came to my bed, brought me the simplest cup of tea without sugar, and something plain to eat. She didn’t know me (and I never learnt her name). She had simply heard I was bed-ridden. Burned into my memory is her simple gesture of love so typical of religious women in God’s holy pilgrim Church. Mary, Mother of the Church, must have accomplished similar gestures for the men who were her Son’s missionaries, the very ones who would go out to the ends of the earth to baptise in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. She remained mother to them even after her Son had risen to the Father’s right hand.

Our Mother is pure as driven snow, immaculate, the one who guarantees her Son’s humanity, she who is full of grace and full of love for us. Two weeks ago Benedict, our shepherd, consecrated all the priests of the world to the heart of the most Blessed Virgin of Fatima. And for every priest, every son of the Church who offers the sacrifice of love on the altar every day of his priestly life, it is deeply comforting, it gives us spiritual courage, to know that the father of the whole ecclesia — the pastor of Rome, bishop to the city and the universal flock — has this month entrusted every priest to the Blessed Mother.

The psalmist cries out in the 86th psalm: “O give your strength to your servant / and save your handmaid’s son”. Still within the octave of Pentecost, we can cry out, with the Blessed Mother: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of your Love! Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created; and you will renew the face of the earth”. Renew me and save me, the son of your handmaid, son of our most holy and beautiful Queen!