Mother Mary at Christmas Time

’m a mother, so knowing that at minimum, a woman walked in a crowd, knowing that her flesh and blood was about to be put to death and humiliated for being exactly who he was, has me wondering about Mary as the season approaches.

Afterall, every mother knows it’s also “her” birthday on each of her delivery dates.

Jesus is a historical fact.

There was blood, shit, and piss. Mary likely could’ve used some stitches after birthing him. The guy at minimum, was a rock star because we’re still talking about him two thousand years later, set aside your beliefs about what his life meant.

He was gifted perspective, and he held his position through his looking glass so faithfully, he lived and died to keep seeing what he saw. He was unwilling to forsake his own vision.

What every self help junkie on the planet wants to get to, is the place where Jesus lived from. Of man, of God, both Jesus, and Christ, he made the world aware that he was aware of the consciousness that knew of itself as being in relationship. The third dot on the trinity. He was a man that understood his relationship to unity itself.

All the while, Mary spent a life receiving a son as a man, and giving him to the world as God. She saw him, see, and had her own relationship to his sight.

My fifteen year old son recently had a rare heart condition that could’ve killed him within a matter of hours.

Three weeks later, I gave birth to a gorgeous baby boy, that upon arrival, was, as I prayed for a week in a city sky rise over the heart of my eldest just three weeks before, looking a bit like we might not make it out alive, together.

It’s excruciating. This mothering thing. The overwhelming love, coupled with an unspoken grief of knowing that in an instant, the overwhelm of love could be the cause of an overwhelming pain, at love’s loss. A kind no mother could expect a full recovery from.

I release all four of my children out into a big, scary, uncertain world, everyday, and some nights, this fact, eats me alive.

I’ve prayed at the side of a son whom the doctors told me might need a heart transplant, and that he might not’ve made it through the night had just the right circumstances, not taken place.

I’ve watched my kids get bullied, bruised, rejected, neglected (sometimes by me), work around disabilities, and every time I do, it’s so easy to feel like the world is a crowd of people walking beside me, walking like nothing serious is happening, while my kid is being put on the cross of the human experience. All I want to do is save them.

Then Mary somehow enters me, and I’m curious about how she deals with such things.

I watched my son rise from his hospital bed a heart, forever changed.

As a woman, and as his mother, what that taught me was I needed to believe in my son in ways I had (possibly) previously forsaken him. I was guided to believe in his resurrection, more than I believed in the cross, and to believe in the man that walked there, as much as I did his bloodied feet.

I needed to believe in him, not his potential, or some idealized version of him, but Him. Who, and where he is.

I needed to believe in the fleshy part of him and the sovereignty of his will.

All of my children deserve my belief in their all, not merely their crucifixion, as I watch what feels like life putting them on a cross, as Mary was forced to watch.

Her lifelong medicine was that she believed in her son. She believed in Him so much, she offered him to the world.

From her own womb, she bled with him, and she trusted his word when he said that he would rise again. She believed in all of him, not parts of him, and not only parts that she thought the world would believe in too.

She totally, and completely, believed in Him.

Herein lies, how Mary, is teaching me how to be a mother, two thousand years and two decades later. She’s teaching me to believe in the birth, and the resurrection, with as much weight as the crucifixion.

This holiday season, mother to mother, I’d just like to wish Mary, a very big hug, and a very happy birthday.