On an ordinary Tuesday evening, I was walking through my apartment door when my mom called to tell me that my fifty-three-year-old dad had suddenly died from a heart attack. As my mom and I both wrestled to find words for the inexpressible, I stood in the entrance to the nursery for my unborn baby who would be thirty-eight weeks in just a handful of days. The sheer joy of my first year of marriage and my pure excitement over the birth of our first child gave way to shock and reeling emotion. Calvary had come to Bethlehem, and I didn’t know what to do.
Through the generosity of a dear friend and the providence of God, my husband and I were able to drive from our home in Alabama to Indiana for my dad’s funeral, despite my imminent due date. It was just under a year since our wedding, and I genuinely would have preferred physical torture to processing down the same aisle my dad had walked me down—this time standing behind my husband as he helped to carry my dad’s coffin. But despite my own sadness, I could feel my precious, innocent baby kicking me throughout the funeral Mass. The sweetness of new life was here at the tomb, even though I didn’t know what to do.
Eleven days after her grandfather’s death, on the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, our beautiful daughter made her entrance into the world. She took her sweet time—labor started early Thursday morning and she was born at 2:10 am on Saturday—but it was the most peaceful, calm labor I could have asked for. Our nurse’s name was Mary Elizabeth, which I thought was such a sweet reminder of Mary’s visitation; I prayed with a small crucifix that my husband now blesses the baby with every night; and labor was long enough that my mom was able to make it in time to help us through the most difficult parts and to see the birth of her granddaughter. Looking down and seeing the little girl I had already come to know and love over the last nine months is a memory that will stay with me forever. Her name, Alethea Rose, signifies that Truth himself, Jesus Christ, rose from the falsehood of death and promises to bring all lovers of truth, like my dad, to paradise with him.
Throughout this bleary-eyed experience of postpartum, I have wrestled with how to hold my greatest joy while simultaneously bearing my heaviest cross.
The events of my dad’s passing and my daughter’s birth are inseparable in my mind: The grief wouldn’t be as terrible if he had gotten to meet her, and her birth wouldn’t have been as beautiful if he hadn’t been interceding for us in eternity (given his full-time ministry in the pro-life movement and his own vocation helping my mom give birth to five girls, I think he knew more than most that birth is a sacred event). Throughout this bleary-eyed experience of postpartum, I have wrestled with how to hold my greatest joy while simultaneously bearing my heaviest cross.
T. S. Eliot gives some voice to my experience through his articulation of what Eliot scholars call the “birth-death paradox.” In “Journey of the Magi,” he writes,
were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
And in “A Song for Simeon,” he writes,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no tomorrow.
Christ’s birth brought unspeakable joy, yes, but it also brought with it the demands of discipleship, the call to encounter healing from the birth pangs of original sin only through the deep suffering that comes with conformity to the crucified one. We enter the fullness of life not only through the metaphorical death of baptism but also through the very real death that each of us will one day face. And there’s no amount of poetry that can sugarcoat the reality that death was not a part of God’s plan and that the consequences of our sin and fallenness really, really hurt.
Faith and hope are not electric blankets, as Flannery O’Connor would remind us. When I wake up in the middle of the night to nurse my baby, I fervently love her and the joy of motherhood while so heavily grieving my own daughterhood. I know that this experience isn’t unique to me: Lots of people become parents while grieving their own; laughter and joy even amidst the primal wounds of sin and death are just one of the many both/ands that we accept as Christians who “call this Friday good,” to quote Eliot once again. How does one live under the weight of the birth-death paradox? How does the human heart experience these extremes all at once?
Despite its overwhelm, this capacity of our hearts for the various extremities of love is a privilege of being a human person. It is a privilege and gift that the Church honors every August by dedicating the month to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. If there ever was a heart that knew rapturous joy, unimaginable sorrow, and how to hold these realities in tandem, it was Mary’s.
I think our beautiful artistic devotions to the holy hearts of Jesus and Mary sometimes leave us desensitized to the fact that these are real human hearts beating in heaven for love of the Father and with unspeakable love for each one of us. Mary’s heart was not actually crowned in roses and displayed on the Holy Family’s wall as decor. It was a physical heart shaped like yours and mine. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the heart represents the innermost chamber of the human person, the place of intellectual and emotional encounter with the Godhead who exceeds our loftiest thoughts and noblest feelings. There is no dichotomy between intellect and affectivity; rather, the person perceives the world with utmost integrity of body, mind, and soul—although Jesus’s and Mary’s hearts were the only ones to do so perfectly!
Luke’s Gospel repeatedly emphasizes the beauty of Mary’s heart and the riches therein. At the close of the Nativity narrative, we read, “But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart”; again, after Jesus is lost and found in the temple, Luke tells us, “His mother kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:19, 51). With these words, Luke draws our attention to the vastness of Mary’s heart. She does not ponder or experience mere facets of the mysteries of Christ’s life; rather, she allows herself to hold “all these things.”
That heart experienced the extremes of emotion with a beauty and poignancy that you and I can only imagine. My delight in my baby is only an inkling of the delight Mary experienced before her Son of God. Conversely, the sorrow I feel seeing my daughter in pain is nothing compared to the pain and tenderness Mary had for Jesus in all of his suffering, from his infant cries in Egypt to the totality of misery on Calvary.
If there ever was a heart that knew rapturous joy, unimaginable sorrow, and how to hold these realities in tandem, it was Mary’s.
Mary had a father whose death she would have mourned, as I do now. When I feel helpless before my mom’s loss of a spouse, I can recall that Mary lost Joseph and that she knows my mom’s pain and walks with her in a way that nobody else can. And before the brutal unfairness of my grandmother at her son’s burial, I can remember a far more unjust separation of mother and child at a tomb outside of Jerusalem.
Mary’s heart did not shy away from the extremes to which the Father called her. She held all that was said about her son, all of the love, all of the grief of understanding the words of the Old Testament prophets, of hearing Simeon’s prophecy, of losing her son for three days and knowing it was only a foretaste of the unfathomable loss she would suffer on Calvary.
And eventually, her heart held all the souls of Christendom. The Church has perennially spoken of Christ’s death as the birth of the Church, a birth in which Mary, Mother of the Church, had no small participation. When we ordinary mothers bring a child into the world, our bodies are stretched to their limits, even torn apart, so that our hearts can welcome our son or daughter into the world. We don’t know the details of Mary giving birth to the Savior; we don’t know what stretching and aching, if any, took place throughout her pregnancy. But we do know that Mary’s fiat—first spoken in Nazareth but then echoed in every moment of her life, most palpably at the foot of the cross—stretched her heart so wide that it found room for billions of sinful children across the centuries.
It is the stretching of this heart—this immaculate, feminine, thoroughly human heart—that we commemorate every August. In honoring Mary’s heart, we learn to reverence our own hearts and the hearts of those we encounter. Mary’s heart is a promise to those of us who hold “all these things” of joy and grief far less gracefully than she, a testament that Gabriel’s words, “Do not be afraid,” apply not only to her but to the many whose own thoughts, loves, and heartaches mystically participate in the paschal mystery of her son. Her promise to Venerable Lúcia dos Santos at Fatima is her promise to each one of us in this vale of tears: “I will be with you always, and my Immaculate Heart will be your comfort and the way which will lead you to God.” Before the most tender places in our hearts, she knows what to do, even when we do not; she walks with us in the paradox of birth and death.