‘May is Mary’s month’. So begins one of my favourite poems by the Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, The May Magnificat. Another, much longer poem, equally lovely, is his ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe’. Yet I came very late to Our Lady. When I was baptised as a student, the priest commented that I had a very suitable name. My life-long atheist mother would not have been pleased, and I did not convey the priest’s comments to her! I grew up without May processions, crowning of statues, Victorian hymns to Our Lady (I still can’t sing some of them seriously) or the rosary, and I have a kind of distant relationship with her even after an adult lifetime in the Church, 25 years of being connected with the diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes, years of voluntary working in the Baths in Lourdes – plenty of opportunity there for reciting the rosary!
Others find it meaningful that I was baptised and made my First Holy Communion on December 8th – I, however, do not seem to have realised at the time the significance of the Feast, which was in Scotland a Holy Day of Obligation in those days. Whilst I carry a rosary in my handbag, and have certainly been known to reach for it when visiting the extremely sick in hospital, and above all when facing brain surgery myself, it is still not really my favourite form of prayer. I am also a one-shrine woman – Lourdes, for various reasons, became ‘my’ place, but I have no desire to go to any other shrine, and even in Lourdes it is the Eucharist I find central. That is probably entirely o.k. with Our Lady, whose apparitions do not draw us to herself, but to her Son.
So I began to wonder who Mary is for me, what she has to say to me once you get past the unlikely externals – the blue frock, the white skin, the blue eyes, the awful simpering facial expression on so many statues. I actually possess a lovely, simple terracotta statue of Our Lady, though every year in Lourdes I intend to buy one of the statues which glow in the dark and which I feel might one day bring me immense comfort in terminal illness.
Mary, an ordinary woman leading an ordinary life in a village of no importance. Mary the Jewish mother – certainly not Catholic! Mary who must surely have a background, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews. And friends. She is daughter, sister, friend, cousin, aunt, granddaughter. Mary, the one who gets on with a life which involved housework and motherhood, a life full of unexciting things, one day much like the next. She shared her laughter and smiles, her conversations and worries with what these days would be considered a tiny number of people. Can we imagine her on Facebook?
We know from the Gospels that she was a woman who prayed, otherwise how could she have responded to the Angel as she did? Her days, however, were, as far as we know, subsequently free of Important Conversations with Angels. Like all of us, she had to hang in there, hoping, praying, trusting, even when faced with the appalling death of her son. We are told she pondered all these things in her heart – that sounds very like Lectio Divina. We could see her as a model. Do I identify with this Mary, Mary of the ordinary life lived with a prayerful heart? Does she help me see that in fact most people do not have a very exciting life, but that I am called to live the life I have, now, today, where I have ended up, from within a relationship with the God who loves me? Mary is a gift to us in her faith, her thoughtful but clearly trusting response to God. She is a gift to Benedictines in her humility. To be humble is not to think yourself worthless, of no value – how could that be true when I am precious in God’s eyes, made in his image? When Our Lady surrendered to the future God had in store for her, she did it with confidence. God needed her for his plan. God needs each one of us for his plan, where we are today, in our relationships, our work, in all the situations of our lives.
Just writing this has made me think I need to nurture my relationship with Our Lady. The day after my mother died, still an atheist at 98, I went to Mass and knew suddenly, unexpectedly, and with total certainty that Our Lady was now looking after her. That is a blessing. And for my own funeral I have asked for ‘Mary Immaculate, Star of the Morning’ as the final hymn! I like to have things sorted in advance!
May Mary pray for us all, now in the midst of our ordinary lives, and at the hour of our death.
Mary Cockroft
Oblate of Stanbrook Abbey
