Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, January 1, 2023
Nm 6:22-27, Gal 4:4-7, Lk 2:16-21
“Oh, your poor mother!”
I can’t count the times I’ve heard that whenever I told someone I’m the oldest of the six male offspring of Dr. Bill and Nurse Julie Zapcic.
Six boys. No girls.
A new brother every year or so, with — sadly — a couple of pregnancies lost to miscarriages.
And an uncle — a bruncle — my dad’s then-teenage brother, whom my dad moved in with us for Richard’s last two years of high school, his four years of college and a bit longer for grad school and the early part of his career.
There was enough noise in our 1950s-era development split-level to drown out the roar of the cars on the Garden State Parkway behind the hill that ate half of our Lincroft backyard.
“Oh, your poor mother!” they say. And I — and all of my brothers and our uncle — simply reply, “She loved it!”
A mother’s bond with her children is deep, rich, many-layered, much-forgiving and everlasting. In a big family, Mom has to maintain overall order and evenly apply discipline while forging individual relationships with her kids, so each can maximize their particular potential. Or peculiar potential, as the case may be.
In a smaller family or a single-child home like that of the Holy Family, the mother invariably dotes a bit more on her ducklings, doling out a bit more of the sugar that makes life’s bitter medicine go down.
In every family, large or small, when an old-school dad would play the stern “Father Knows Best,” his better half would show who had the real wisdom.
… even if the paternal parent did get top billing (which, fortunately, is far less the case today).
I know a mother’s job is challenging.
I know this not because I ever was — or ever could be — a mother, but because my career in daily journalism had me working nights and weekends for 27 years, many of them when our daughter and son were school-aged and beyond. My incredibly hard-working wife, who had a day-job career of her own, and still does, made sure that our kids’ ears were washed and their prayers were said and, oh yeah, that they were fed. She tucked them in and listened to how their days went and sacrificed her own sleep.
And in so, so many ways, she absorbed the daily bumps and bruises from the kids and made them her own. Bumps and bruises that befell them because we taught our children to be themselves: creative, thoughtful, kind in the face of meanness.
Like Mary, she kept these things in her heart.
I know a mother’s job is challenging.
Mom left her beloved nursing after she and Dad were married, even though she could have served as the nurse in his private practice. (They met in the operating room; he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, surgical masks and all.) She transformed her nursing skills into nurturing skills and used her Depression-era childhood memories to wring every cent out of a dollar.
Each day after we got home from school, she listened to reports of bullying and ridicule and ways in which any of us were pushed around verbally or, occasionally, physically, and she responded in all the ways she could. Sometimes, all she could do was absorb the pain and let her son(s) know she cared deeply.
Like Mary, she kept these things in her heart.
Neither my wife nor my mother faced the staggering challenges Mary did. Thank God, though, they followed Mary’s example.
Mary’s improbable example.
Two thousand years ago, this newly betrothed teenage villager was called blessed by a stranger in a dazzling white garment. The man who showed up out of nowhere turned out not to be a man but instead an angel, and he told her that, if it was OK with her, in nine months she’d be the mother of Emmanuel.
And she said yes.
And then for the next three-and-a-half decades, she cared for Jesus, made sure he was taught the Law and the Prophets as well as a trade, and watched him fulfill his destiny even as she was no doubt often puzzled by what he did and why he did it.
She watched him die the cruelest death imaginable, condemned as a criminal though she knew he was the most innocent man who ever lived.
She held his limp body before he was laid in a borrowed tomb.
And because she kept all these things in her heart all these years, she came to realize the full scope of what she agreed to.
What an incredible gift to all of humankind!
God gave us our mothers because their hearts were big enough to hold the joys and sorrows and triumphs and failures of their children’s lives.
God gave us our Blessed Mother Mary because her heart was — and always will be — the biggest of them all.
