“Our spirit, the spirit of the Society, do you know where you can find it? For me, I find it entirely in the house of Nazareth.”
“Mary on earth led a life like that of all of us, filled with familial cares and labours”.
“Mary lived on earth” – not in the clouds.
She lived “a life like any one of ours”.
That means, a life like that of her neighbours. She drank water from the same well, gleaning grain in the fields. She sat down in the cool shade of the same yard. She also returned home tired in the evening, after gleaning in the fields.
And one day she heard the comment: “Mary, your hair is beginning to turn white”. So she, too, looked at herself in the well, and felt a moment of acute nostalgia, like women throughout the world when they notice that their youth is beginning to fade.
But we are not finished being surprised.
Learning that Mary’s life, like ours, was “filled with family cares and tasks” makes her so much a sharer in human weariness as to allow us to glimpse the fact that our daily chores are not, perhaps, as ordinary as we had thought.
Yes, she also had her problems: of health, money, relationships, adaptation.
Who knows how often she came home from doing the washing with a headache, or lost in her thoughts because, for several days, Joseph was receiving fewer and fewer clients at his workshop?
Who knows at how many doors she had to knock seeking a few days work for Jesus during the olive harvest?
A life like all our lives.
Like all wives, she will have had those moments of crisis with her husband, taciturn as he was, whose silences she did not always understand.
Like all mothers, she will have watched over the tumultuous stages of her son’s adolescence, experiencing both fear and hope.
Like all women, she will have suffered misunderstanding, even from the two who were her nearest and dearest on earth.
She will have been anxious not to let them down, or of not being quite adequate for her role.
And, having washed with her tears the pain of a deep solitude, she will ultimately have found, in sharing prayer together, the happiness of a communion transcending the human condition.
(…) Holy Mary, woman of everyday life, help us to understand that the most profound chapter in theology is not the one that places you at the centre of spirituality, liturgy, dogma or art; but the one that positions you within the house of Nazareth.
There, among the pots and spinning wheels, among tears and prayers, among the balls of wool and the Scripture scrolls, you experienced, in the simple depths of your being as a woman, joys free of malice, bitterness without despair and departures without homecomings.
Holy Mary, woman of every day, free us from nostalgia for the grand epic, and teach us to consider our daily lives as the workplace within which the history of salvation is built up.
Free us from our fears, so that we can experience, like you, abandonment to Gold’s will in the monotony of time and in the slow passing of the hours.
– Tonino Bello
From: “Journey with Colin A doorway to the Marist Project Nazareth”