By Barb Arland-Fye
Editor
“Station 13: Jesus is taken down,” I prayed aloud during Stations of the Cross last Friday night at Our Lady of the River Catholic Church in LeClaire. “Yes, my Mass is complete, but not my mother’s and not yours, my other self. My mother must still cradle in her arms the lifeless son she bore …”
This passage from Clarence Enzler’s “Everyone’s Way of the Cross,” evoked for me images of The Pietà, especially the replica in the Pietà Chapel on Calvary Hill in St. Donatus, Iowa and of my motherhood journey.
When our sons Colin and Patrick were children, my husband Steve and I took them to St. Donatus, where we walked the Way of the Cross up to the tiny chapel and looked inside (we couldn’t walk inside). I gazed at the replica of Mary cradling the lifeless body of her beloved son in her lap. In this quiet place, Mary seemed to be reflecting on what it meant to let go of her beloved son so that he could bring us salvation and life everlasting.
A lump formed in my throat; sadness mingled with gratitude. … This Pietà evoked profound feelings of love and sorrow in me. At that moment, as the mother of young sons, I felt total kinship with Mary, a mother who loved her child to the core of her being. For the first time, I embraced Mary’s full humanity. The memory comes to mind each time I pray the 13th Station of the Cross or see an image of the Pietà.
Popes in my lifetime have written eloquently about Mary, many of whom had a deep devotion to the Mother of God. Pope St. John Paul II, in his encyclical “Redemptoris Mater” made this observation about Simeon’s words to Mary during the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple:
“They tell her of the actual historical situation in which the Son is to accomplish his mission, namely, in misunderstanding and sorrow.” The announcement “confirms her faith in the accomplishment of the divine promises of salvation” but also “reveals to her that she will have to live her obedience of faith in suffering, at the side of the suffering Savior, and that her motherhood will be mysterious and sorrowful.”
Jesus entrusts humanity to his mother as she stood at the foot of the Cross, the pope said, which gives me comfort and hope. The Church “sees Mary maternally present and sharing in the many complicated problems which today beset the lives of individuals, families and nations; she sees her helping the Christian people in the constant struggle between good and evil, to ensure that it ‘does not fall,’ or, if it has fallen, that it ‘rises again.’”
Coincidentally, Pope St. John Paul II gave this encyclical at St. Peter’s Basilica on March 25, 1987, the day on which I gave birth to my first-born son, Colin.
All of us, mothers and everyone else, will experience grief as we part from those we love, just as Mary did. However, Enzler reminds us that a “multitude of souls were saved by Mary’s sharing” in Jesus’ Calvary.
(Contact Barb Arland-Fye at arland-fye@davenportdiocese.org)
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