Sufferings in the flight to Egypt, Mary: Day 226

Sufferings in the flight to Egypt

In an age of fast and comfortable travel, we may forget just how difficult the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt would have been. St. Alphonsus provides details.

Anyone can imagine what Mary must have suffered on the journey to Egypt. The distance was great. Most authors agree that it was three hundred miles, so that it was a journey of upwards of thirty days. The road was, according to St. Bonaventure’s description of it, “rough, unknown, and rarely trav- eled.” It was in the winter season, so they had to travel in snow, rain, and wind, through rough and dirty roads. Mary was then about fifteen years of age—a delicate young woman, unaccustomed to such journeys. They had no one to serve them. As St. Peter Chrysologus says, “Joseph and Mary had no male or female servants; they were themselves both masters and servants.”

O God, what a touching sight must it have been to have beheld that tender virgin, with her newborn Babe in her arms, wandering through the world! “But how,” asks St. Bonaventure, “did they obtain their food? Where did they sleep at night? How were they lodged?” What can they have eaten but a piece of hard bread, either brought by St. Joseph or begged as alms? Where can they have slept on such a road (especially on the two hundred miles of desert, where there were neither houses nor inns, as authors relate), unless they slept on the sand or under a tree in a wood, exposed to the air and the dangers of robbers and wild beasts, with which Egypt abounded? Had anyone met them, the three greatest persons in the world, he would have thought them to be three poor wandering beggars. —St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Glories of Mary

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .
When I think of the Holy Family’s miserable condition as they journeyed to Egypt, does it make me feel more compassion for the hungry and homeless people of my day? What might Mary want me to do for them?

CLOSING PRAYER
From a prayer of Blessed Pope Paul VI: Look down with maternal clemency, most Blessed Virgin, upon all your children. Heed the anguish of so many people, fathers and mothers of families who are uncertain about their future and beset by hardships and cares.

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