“I will put enmity between you and the
woman.” We rightly festoon Our Lady with
terms like gentle, loving, merciful, and sorrowful. Dom Augustine Delatte writes of Mary’s “heroic
docility”. And these are all beautiful signs
of her perfect love for us. But how do
we reconcile such titles with a word like enmity? The word suggests a blood feud—even hatred.
I teach at a boys’ school in St. Louis
Missouri, and when I read this passage to my students, they latched right onto
it. Mary is no wimp. Her immaculate Conception guarantees that she will hate evil—and
hate it with a perfect hate. She stares
down Satan himself. In ancient Greece,
the early Christians use to depict Mary with the same iconography as Athena
Parthenos, the warrior goddess of wisdom, bearing the storm shield and shaking her
spear at evil. Mary goes to war for us. And Satan is terrified!
A few summers ago, when I went home
to visit my family, we watched a really awful movie starring Macaulay Culkin
called “The Good Son.” Surprisingly, it
turned out to be a movie about a really bad son. In fact, this particular son was a homicidal
maniac; and at the end of the movie, his mother ends up holding him by his hand
off the edge of a cliff. In her other
hand is someone else’s son who is not a homicidal maniac and is in fact quite a
nice kid. She can’t hold on to them
both. So she has to make a decision.
After the movie, I turned to my
mother and asked her, “If it was Dad and I hanging off that cliff, which would
you choose?” Without hesitation, she
said. Oh, YOU!” What really surprised me
was that she didn’t have to think about the answer. “I would choose my children,” she said, “over
anything and anyone in the world.”
So I’ve done a sort of informal
survey over the past few years, and you know what? I have never met a mom who
would answer otherwise. I’ve never met a
mom who even hesitated with her answer.
That is a terrible—a, terrifying—kind of love.
There’s a painting in my home in an
out-of-the-way spot in back of the house, that my mother did when I was a
child. My mother is a professional
artist. It was Halloween, and my sister
and I went trick-or-treating, and some of the bullies on our block stole our
candy. I was thirty-five years old—no
just joking, I was eight, my sister was six.
Anyhow, my mother is an artist, and a few days later, she went into the
studio and painted this picture of us.
It’s a dark painting of my sister and me in our Halloween costumes
walking through a forest. In back of us,
hanging from the trees are all those bullies.
Dead. Suspended by their necks.
That is a terrifying kind of
love. And while it may surprise my
students to hear that a mother could have such deep and violent emotions, I’ll
bet it doesn’t surprise their moms at all.
A mother understands this formidable bond between mothers and sons. This is why the most powerful prayer in the
world is that of a mother for her child.
All we sons can do is be grateful and try to respect it. Try to respect them.
The love of a mother for her son,
after all, is an icon of God’s love for us. It’s not a perfect icon—and that’s
why we pray to God as Father. His is a
more detached sort of love. And that’s a theological/exegetical issue I would
have to explain in another sermon. Suffice to say that this love—this
formidable love, this fearsome love…a love so powerful that Satan himself
trembles in its presence—this love of a mother for her son… Mary has this love
for us: her adopted sons and daughters! And precisely because she is The Immaculate
Conception, she loves us with a purity and intensity that even our own earthly
mothers cannot hope to rival. Mother
Mary, Conceived without sin, pray for us.
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