Behold Your Mother

IC XC
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NI KA

SOMETHING FR Vincent said in his homily last night… Jesus says to John, behold your mother. The Church has taught that at that moment Jesus was speaking to all of us, that Mary is our mother. But there’s more. For we are the Body of Christ, commanded to carry our cross. This cross is not something we are able to choose, it is handed to us as Jesus received his cross from Pilate. But if we carry a cross we must also be crucified – nailed to the cross in obedience, suffer and die for our own sins and the sins of the world. We carry a cross we may never recognize fully, knowing in part what it is, but not in its fullness until death reveals it to us. Marriage, Children, a job in the world, illness, grief, all woven together in a path that may bring us to salvation by God’s grace. So I may speak of a disordered sexuality, but I can’t know everything God has woven into these particular wood beams. I can only carry them until I am crucified with Christ that I may live, but not I, it is Christ living in me.

Mary weeps, too, at the foot of our Cross as we die. Behold, your mother.