This morning as I sat in my usual spot, drinking my coffee and watching the light change on the oak outside, the sun struck the olive wood carving of Mary adoring the baby Jesus. And I thought how similar the feeling it evokes in me is to the feeling I have when I gaze at the pietà - Mary cradling the crucified Jesus.
The overwhelming love I sense in these images gets me every time. Maybe it’s because this is love I can see and understand. I cannot see an image of God cradling Jesus in this way. But the love I see in these images of Mary holding Jesus at the beginning and end of his life witnesses to the love God has for us all.
This tenderness. The hopes and dreams at life’s beginning. The love that sustains us and strengthens us. The love that, at the end, holds us close.
Dare we imagine ourselves being cradled in this way? Loved this way?
On this Good Friday, we remember Jesus, crucified. Mary held his lifeless body before it was taken from her and buried. We know, though, that Jesus remained tenderly cradled in God’s infinite and everlasting arms of love, in that moment and in all the moments before and after.
We too live and move and have our being in God’s love. And when we die, we are still held tightly in that love.
Mary accepted God’s invitation to bear God’s own self into the world. The fullness of God’s love, to be poured out into this world. That love never let her go. Even in her grief and pain, that love held her as she held the broken body of her son. That love holds us, too, through all of our joys and griefs. May we see it in Mary’s eyes and know it to be true.