Moving is hard. Watching my wife and kids be uprooted is the hardest part. I’ve been impressed with the fortitude a silly, vibrant three-year-old can muster. But I’ve also seen a new melancholy: slumping posture, an empty gaze, and watery eyes, yielding the confession “I just miss our old house,” or “I’m worried the new family isn’t taking care of our house. And I miss Ms. Pam.” It’s hard not to feel we’ve failed our children—or each other.
We all want to provide comfortable homes and joyful lives for our families. We work to secure temporal necessities and comforts. We use created goods as gifts from God, means to show God’s love. But attachment to lower goods tends to excess, and loss can be salutary. Sadness brings wisdom (cf. Eccl 7:3). In loss, Christ draws near us, and we learn to seek him for consolation.
It’s harder to apply that lesson to others: I’d rather suffer than watch my family suffer. There’s a temptation to deprive them of sadness—if I could—and the wisdom and intimacy with Christ that sadness brings. Watching is its own necessary suffering.
But Mary also watches and so models for us what it means to fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ (Col 1:24). Mary, whose presence at the cross in Jesus’ hour was essential; whose offering of Jesus to the Father was foreshadowed in the Presentation and at Cana; who had to reconcile with her Son being about his Father’s business. Mary, whose heart is pierced for the body of Christ, watches with us.
