The Joyful Widower

Today (May 3) is Good Friday on the Orthodox calendar. What better day to meditate on the Cross than this?

This year my heart is drawn to the Theotokos, the Mother of God. In particular, a reality that I should have seen years before, but I’d never connected the dots, nor heard anyone else do so, either.

Our Lady was a widow.

Pause for a moment and let that sink in, if you’d never realized that.

Hers was not a conventional widowhood, because hers had not been a conventional marriage. Joseph was a much older man, and the marriage was arranged as a means of providing the young orphaned Mary with shelter and protection. But even so I imagine she experienced many of the same aspects of grief that all widows experience. Sitting down to a table and looking at the empty place that had previously been occupied by someone you talked about the day with. Remembering conversations that will not be had again. Missing that one person who has just as many memories of your child growing up, and not being able to reminisce out loud about “that time when…”

I want to tread very carefully here. It can be too easy to let imagination go into mysteries and things that we can’t possible know, but I find myself on the edge of wonder as I ponder our Lady on Good Friday. Seeing her Son on the cross, knowing that He will die, and feeling that she will be alone in the world.

At the Annunciation she believed the word of the angel Gabriel, even while not knowing the particulars–she believed the truth about the Incarnation, even if she couldn’t imagine how it would come to be.

I hope I’m on safe ground, thinking that while standing at the foot of the cross that she had faith, like her forefather Abraham and yet even more so, that God would provide (Genesis 22:8), even as she suffered the torment of “a sword piercing her soul.” That she trusted in the goodness of God, not knowing particulars about how He would provide. Abraham’s son Isaac did not die, but her own Son was dying before her eyes.

I marvel at the goodness of the Lord, who, even from the cross, spoke to her the words, “woman, behold your son,” and to His disciple John, “behold your mother,” that in His goodness He would see to His mother’s needs, that He would not leave her alone and unprovided for.

A dear sister in Christ (my children’s godmother) shared with me the passage from Second Corinthians that she has carried with her for years: “Grace be to you and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.” (II Cor. 1:3-5). Though these words are from the pen of St. Paul, they could rest just as easily on the lips of the Theotokos, who knew more than anyone both the sufferings and the consolation of Christ, and who so readily shares with all the comfort wherewith she was comforted.

As I write this, it is Friday afternoon. Soon I shall stand in church for the services of Good Friday. I will weep with our Lady, and I pray that I will come to know her even more as a source of solace and strength.