I WRITE this on 15 August, a day on which the hopes and fears of Ukraine, and many nations beyond it, are met in Anchorage, and in the conversations of the two “strong men” meeting there.
And yet this is also one of those days in the calendar when we remember Mary, a woman who, like so many others then as now, bore the appalling consequences of decisions made by men of power. She fled with her child as a refugee, she saw her son wrongfully arrested, beaten, and mocked by the occupying military force and then tortured to death on a public cross, in what was intended by the Romans to be shameful humiliation, but has, in fact, become the revelation of the full extent of God’s Love.
So, as the mighty meet to decide the fate of the weak, I find myself drawn again to the compassionate figure of Mary, not just in empathy with her own sufferings, direct and vicarious, but also because I believe that her compassion, the compassion so perfectly sculpted in Michelangelo’s Pietà, continues in and from heaven: that the compassion of Mary the Mother of God is still a force for good in the world.
This is not to settle or even take sides in the ongoing debate between the shivered shards of a once-united Church over the status of Mary, or the propriety of asking for her prayers. For me, the question of propriety is, at least for now, suspended by the power of poetry. The poet in me is devoted; the theologian in me may still have some catching up to do.
So, as I think of the soldiers who call for her protection or cry out for her pity, on both sides of the war in Ukraine, I, too, yearn towards her, and with her, towards heaven, from this, our exile. I think of her, watching her Son’s torment, still steadfast in agonised love, and I sense her solidarity with all the mothers who are currently compelled to feel such pain. I turn back to the sonnet that I wrote so many years ago, in my sequence on the Stations of the Cross, and read it, holding up, once more, all the grief-stricken, to be folded in the mantle of her prayer.
Jesus meets his mother
This darker path into the heart of pain
Was also hers whose love enfolded him
In flesh and wove him in her womb. Again
The sword is piercing. She, who cradled him
And gentled and protected her young son,
Must stand and watch the cruelty that mars
Her maiden making. Waves of pain that stun
And sicken pass across his face and hers
As their eyes meet. Now she enfolds the world
He loves in prayer; the mothers of the disappeared
Who know her pain, all bodies bowed and curled
In desperation on this road of tears,
All the grief-stricken in their last despair,
Are folded in the mantle of her prayer.
Malcolm Guite is keynote speaker at “Finding Inspiration in the Psalms”, on 2 October in York. churchtimes.co.uk/events
