Conversations with Mary, pt. 3

Shoved into mercy

This is part three of a four-part Advent series about Mary. Read the first two essays here and here.

We don’t know much about the life of Mary from scripture, but we do know she was prone to contemplation. She tended to store away scenes and conversations and meditate on them. When the angel Gabriel appeared and told her God was with her, she was troubled (a gentle word that I take to mean: bewildered, terrified) and she “pondered” his greeting. When the shepherds came to worship her newborn son, she stored away their words and “pondered them in her heart.”

I wonder: was this pondering the normal instinct of a parent, intuiting how quickly childhood unspools into adulthood? All parents probably do some version of this—the noticing and storing away of details about their child. They inhale the scent of their baby’s neck. They trace the small hills and inlets of shoulder blades and ears. They commit their child to memory even as the child changes so quickly that they have to constantly catalog and revise their memories.

Even before a child’s arrival, it seems instinctual to marvel at the way humans become who they are. The strangeness and novelty of pregnancy makes it a natural time for contemplation. During pregnancy I became acutely attuned to my body, intrigued by all of its physical and emotional and psychic shifts.

Every week I would open my app to read about the invisible developments inside me. I read that the embryo’s limbs were tiny buds, and that the neural tube had formed, and that the heart-which-was-not-yet-a-heart still beat over one hundred times a minute. I read that the liver had taken shape and that heart chambers had gathered into their tiny architecture. I read that the fetus had formed ears, which seemed like an early extravagance—shouldn’t that be one of the finishing touches, a kind of ta-da on top of all the essential systems? Early on, I learned, my daughter could discern sounds from within her lightless room. Maybe first she only noticed the movement of fluids, like an oceanic purr, but soon she heard voices from the exterior world. Eventually she recognized the most familiar ones, including my own.

Was Mary’s pondering the normal, parental kind—an attempt to preserve first the details of her pregnancy and then of her son’s infancy, knowing how quickly he’d morph into a rangy boy? Or did she know she would one day lose him? As her body grew with God, I imagine she felt a new mother’s desire to shelter her child. As she contemplated God-within-her, she must have been caught between two experiences: an urgency to protect her son, as well as the knowledge that her role was to give him away.

In the above image, artist Rodríguez Calero imagines a pregnant, Afro-Latina Mary. Her third-trimester belly is visible, and she has two pairs of arms that seem to contradict each other. With one pair, the left hand holds her abdomen protectively while the right gathers her veil around herself. But her other arms are open, the palms extended in an offering. As Victoria Emily Jones writes, “I see both Mary’s fear and her surrender in this image; her very human ‘What if I’m not ready for this?’ and her ‘Welcome; come, receive.’”

Calero’s pregnant Mary holds multiple experiences in one body. The image captures the tension she must have felt from pregnancy onward, which is the tension of parenthood writ large: the desire to shield her child, and the willingness to send her child into the world.

Parenting has the potential to tenderize us to the world’s needs. Now that I’m a mother, another parent’s grief is intensified tenfold, because I recognize the possibility of my own grief within it. I can intuit a measure of their love for their child and therefore a measure of their suffering. As I care for my own vulnerable child, I am also constantly invited to deepen my relationship and solidarity with others who are vulnerable. But I don’t have any satisfying answers for how I should expose my daughter to the world’s suffering. What increments of knowledge are appropriate at each age and stage of maturity? How do I show her the world as it is—generous and brutal, astonishing and wounded—and not the world as I wish it were?

Theologian Natalie Carnes speaks about parenthood as a “shove” into a new life of mercy. “That mercy can then open you into the suffering heart of the world,” she says. Parenting ought to make us quicker to extend care to others, even as we become more reliant on it ourselves, even as we care for someone completely dependent on us. But, Carnes adds, it can also cause us to retreat under the cover of self-protection. The temptation of bringing a vulnerable life into the world is to turn inward, and to view only our nuclear family as kin—and therefore our only responsibility.

For my daughter, I dream of creating a tapestry of interdependence that transcends the household unit—an extended family formed by friends, relatives, the local church, and neighbors. But to do this, I have to be willing to extend myself as family to others outside my home and those across the world. I have to be willing to see and tend to the suffering of others, rather than shield myself and my daughter from the sickness and pain outside our door.

When Mary and Joseph brought their infant son to the Temple to be circumcised, Mary was freshly postpartum. Still aching, her breasts leaking, stomach stretched and distended. At the Temple she passed Jesus into the arms of a devout man named Simeon, who blessed him. Then Simeon turned his attention to Mary. I imagine him handing back the baby to his mother as he spoke these words, tenderness in his eyes. I imagine her heart dropping and her insides freezing as he said: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

I can’t imagine hearing words like this at any point in my daughter’s life, but especially not in those early postpartum days when I felt both numb and tenderized, floating in a sea of adrenaline and shock, acutely aware of her fragility. Those were days in which a dismissive lactation consultant could reduce me to tears, and when everything felt like too much: too beautiful, too demanding, too taxing. All I wanted was to shelter my daughter, to keep her alive and warm and fed. And Mary, only days after the birth, is told that her son is destined for something enormous. Many will oppose him, and a sword will pierce her soul too.

In recent months I’ve started to think about Mary as a model for a different kind of parenting: one that is not insular and protective, but that reaches outward and blurs the boundary between relative and stranger so that everyone is considered kin. Her arms hold her child, but they also extend outward.

All the pondering she did leads me to believe that it wasn’t easy for her to accept her role, or her son’s role. I imagine she often felt hesitation and fear. And yet, she still opened her hands and sent Christ into the world, to enter its suffering and offer it mercy.