Second Reading: Mary Reflects. By Rosemary Power
Sometimes it’s easier to tell it the other way the last things first, the first last. of how we lost him and found him and lost him again but kept looking and found him again, for a time.
There were hard times with a growing boy – after the tears, the tears- the child with stars in his yesand flame lighting his heart in a wind that rushed like a storm from the hills or flowed like a tide and stilled with his loving, loving without smothering, always there, shared, clearand just that bit ahead of where we were, the youth of today! Seeking and sharing, and breaking our hearts as he learnt this is how villages work and the big world as well. Be gentle as God, but as wise, wise without years.
After all that had been: all the miles, the wiles of mercenary men who seeing us stretched, stretched us for refuge in the desert of our hopes. We snatched at small kindness – a cup of cold water on the predatory route of refugees and strangers the world over. And we swore we’d raise our child different, with God’s word in his ear, a temple in his heart, from the start A place apart.
And then, when all seemed settled, he’d be off again upon that father’s business. We’d brought him safe to the banquet of the poor and there was no way back Jerusalem, our hope, made desert, the shepherd followed the sheep into that wilderness where the wild beasts ravaged him and angels watched. Sometimes kindness says stay away. I waited there all day And two days more. As ever.
We longed for Messiah to come with a sword and the power to drive our oppressors, the greedy, the evil and the vile and found a child willing to hold the earth’s pain in his hands. We’d prayed for a temple again and found God had chosen our time and the cruel and the brave and entered our world with a temple of fleshwhere the veil would be torn and we’d meet face to fact. We found him at last, in the place where, years before, we’d dedicated our firstborn. He came back, mild as ever, and grew in the workshop of his world.
