I am moved by Mary. I’d not thought much about her for decades. Yes, somebody had to bear and deliver the Christ child. And then she makes the occasional cameo appearance in the Gospels. I’d visited and spoken in a few Catholic churches, and grumbled a little to myself that they might be overdoing her.

But it’s because of Catholic priests, writers, and friends that I started pondering Mary. Fitting: she, after all, was a ponderer (Luke 2:19). Faith and wisdom and hope are all about being still and pondering, and learning not to be dazzled by the sleek, agile, muscular, good-looking and successful people, but to be moved by the humble, the lowly, the holy, the nobodies who are simply available to God and life and so they love and carry on and suffer and find joy.

So like God, isn’t it, to find the way into our lives by a nobody in the middle of nowhere with no connections, influence or education. God loves, and Christ came for everybody. Had his mother been a queen or among the societal elite, wouldn’t the majority of the world either feel invalidated or (worse) or get drawn into fawning over the higher up celebrities the world already tells you to fawn over.

What name has been uttered more often than Mary? What human being has been re-presented in more statues, paintings, posters, stained glass, and jewelry? It’s fitting! – sort of. Mary herself would shun any and all attention. “She gloried neither in her virginity nor in her humility, but solely in God’s gracious regard. True humility does not even know that it is humble” (Martin Luther).

Artists in Western civilization have depicted her as very white, petite, with flawless complexion. I imagine her face as a bit worn and deeply tanned from spending her years outside and exposed to the elements (not to mention being a Semitic person!). I would guess she had wiry muscles from carrying water buckets from the well to her home. I see her less as sweet and serene and more as a bit tough, concerned, ready, not passive but bold – maybe like the “Migrant Mother” in Dorothea Lange’s iconic photo.

Mary was all about her boy. How hard was it for her the day he left their home in Nazareth? Not just their deep love for one another, but his work in his father’s business – and then he was striking out into a hostile world to try to change everything. Much too dangerous for her precious one. And if she feared the worst, her fears were realized. She was there in Jerusalem when he was arrested on trumped up charges, shamefully flogged, and then gruesomely crucified. How could she bear standing there watching her beloved’s beautiful, loving, faultless body tormented and writhing in pain? But how could she turn away? And come Easter morning, whom did Jesus visit first? And who was more ecstatic to see and speak with the resurrected Christ than his mother?

How fitting that so much music has gravitated toward her memory. Fitting – because she sang herself when pregnant with Jesus (Luke 1:39-55), and surely she sang to him, probably Psalms from memory, as he grew up. So the music: Ave Maria, Hail Mary (Elizabeth’s words in Luke 1:40, forever enshrined in the repetitions of the rosary). “Mary, Joseph, lend your aid” (which we discussed the other day). “Round yon virgin” – that holy circle that is the light of the world and the hope of eternity for us and all creation.

I’m fond of the way Amy Grant understood Mary’s inner struggle when she sang “I am frightened by the load I bear… Do you wonder as you watch my face if a wiser one should have had my place” – and then she pleads, “Hold me together… Help me be strong. Help me be. Help me.”

And Mary’s son’s name? Jesus? It means “Lord help.” We’ll speak of him on Monday.