…the time came for her to have her child,
and she gave birth to a son… Luke 2:6,7
One has to think of him as her son:
looking very like her,
with her walk, her gestures, her patterns of thought,
many of her tastes
and then remember
that this is not some fine mask for another being within,
but the human cast of his very self.
She gave him the humanity that was his;
a humanity including her kind of feeling for him.
…this Yeshua, this peasant, this child of this Mary.
Fed when he needed feeding,
taught when he needed teaching,
pushed and held back when he needed them both.
His strength and his weakness,
his haunting peculiarity
and his rough and sweat-stained familiarity
bound up inextricably, forever with her own.
∼ Peter Steele SJ
Let us pray:
God our beloved,
born of a woman’s body,
you came that we might look upon you,
and handle you with our own hands.
May we so cherish one another in our bodies
that we may also be touched by you;
through the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, Amen.
∼ Janet Morley: All Desires Known p.6
