Assumed

(I’ve known for a few weeks that my blog was changing addresses and moving to Patheos. I just didn’t know when it would be. It seems fitting for it to be the Feast of the Assumption when I would be assumed into what a dear friend calls “the Blorg.”)

It doesn’t seem that long ago, although I suppose it must have been, that I struggled with my relationship with the Blessed Mother. Living in heavily Protestant Oklahoma had made me uncomfortable with even the idea of a relationship with her. The beauty and comfort I had found in images of Mary when I was a girl had become a sore spot by my late teens and early twenties. Mary was the Achilles heel of my poorly catechized faith, and when I felt as though I had been beaten up enough, I walked away from her.

It wasn’t long after that that I left the Catholic Church completely. The life I led was contrary to every moral lesson I had been taught, and there was no longer comfort there for me. I would drive blocks out of my way to avoid driving past the parish nearest to our house. Its statue of Mary in the garden made me squirm in discomfort, and I wanted nothing to do with her. Her outstretched hands didn’t seem at all welcoming to me. They were, to me, the empty hands of a mother whose child had slipped away, and what kind of mother lost her children?

In the years that followed, crisis after crisis would shove me to my knees until I cried out to God, My Father, to help me. Battle sore and weary, I returned to the faith of my youth, but my relationship with her was nonexistent. The other young Catholic moms I knew got together weekly to pray the rosary, and while they regularly invited me, I always found reasons to not attend. The criticisms of my Protestant friends from the past were still fresh in my ears. I wanted to follow Christ, and I didn’t need Mary for that.

Eventually there came a day when my Protestant neighbor complimented me on being the only “Christian Catholic” she’d ever met, because I didn’t fall for that “Mary and the saints crap.” She assuredly stated that “we had only to believe in Jesus and imitate Him in all things” to be saved.

My breathe stopped, and my heart pounded in my ears, All things I was supposed to imitate Him in all things…..but I knew that I wasn’t. Christ had turned for comfort to the one person I worked so hard to ignore.

Mary was his mother. Somewhere along the line, I had forgotten that. She wasn’t just a plaster statue of unattainable perfection. She was a real woman, and He was really her beloved Son. She was a mother, just like me.

When He was hurt and crying, it was to her arms that He ran. Would that tiny perfect boy have gone anywhere else? She would have scooped him into her embrace and kissed the pain and tears away, and he would have rested, curled safely in her arms.

This is what the Protestant naysayers of my younger years had missed….she was not just some surreally perfect image of woman, she was a flesh and blood mother. She kissed scraped knees, quieted nightmares, and comforted hurt feelings. He found the same innocent comfort and safety in her presence that my own children now find in mine.

You see, Catholics know that there is nothing extraordinarily miraculous about resting in Mary. We find in her the completely ordinary miracle of the calming presence of motherhood. It is easy to get caught up in the splendor of her as Theotokos, the Mother of God, and to forget that is also just a simple woman who loves her children…..and that we are the fortunate ones who can rest in her arms and call her Mother.