Through the kindness of a friend, I recently came across this lovely reflection on the Blessed Virgin Mary, which I hope you will enjoy.
I never met Mary until I was eleven years old traveling on a crowded train headed for Shanghai in a car so packed with people that my brother and I stood up all night. In the morning someone yielded their seat to me and I fell asleep instantly. I woke two or three hours later to find that I had been sleeping with my head on the shoulder of a young mother next to me. Knowing how tired I was, she had never moved all that time. I had never seen her before and I never saw her again, but years later in remembering this incident I began to have the strangest feeling that this young woman, this stranger, this lender of a shoulder, was actually Mary -the mother of God, the mother of us all, the one on whom we rest when we are too exhausted to go on. This was my introduction to Our Lady.
I met others who had met Mary - two Unitarians, one of whom chose to enter the ministry after a long meditation before her statue. The second was a colleague who worked as a chaplain at a Catholic hospital. Exhausted one night she entered the hospital chapel and dropped into a pew. She then looked up and saw Mary looking down at her from a fresco on the wall. My friend looked at the Lady as if seeing an old friend and thought, “She’s seen it all. She’s seen everything, and there she is - for me.” In describing this she told me, “When you’re as tired as I was, you don’t need an idea. You need a face.”
You know, when soldiers are wounded or dying on the battle field, whatever be their nation, tell me, whom do they call for? Their mother, and Mary is the mother of all mothers.
The gospels describe her as one who listens without question to the the angel Gabriel. And when she has heard the angel’s charge, Mary does not say “Yeah, right.” She says to the angel “Let it be done to me according to thy word.” And thus she says to God, “Thy will be done.”
It’s not surprising that Our Lord who learned to pray from his mother taught his disciples to pray “Thy will be done.” It’s not surprising that in the Garden he prayed, “Not my will but thine be done.”It’s not surprising there that we repeat this petition when we say the Our Father. For who is the Holy Mother but one whose prayer has been and is and always will be, “Thy will be done?”
She who prays this prayer is the one who bears Christ. She carried him in her womb. She carried him in her arms. She carried him in her teaching. And once he left her home she followed him and carried her in her heart.
-preached at All Saints Episcopal Church in Dorchester on the feast of the Assumption, 2010 by Reverend Carl Scovel
