That tragic tension between surrender and disbelief that tries to hold on, mirrors all of us who are born reaching out for the food of intimacy and who die trying to lift our arms to embrace and be embraced by our mother who birthed us and our spiritual mother who rebirthed us into a new life in God. Mother. Food. Intimacy. The images of the Incarnation and the death of Jesus. Mary is there, his mother and ours. She is there in our beginning and in our end. And in her Assumption she, with the Father and the Son, is there in our final embrace of the intimacy we were born for. All of it in the Spirit, which overshadowed her and returned at Pentecost to overshadow the disciples and us in our Baptism and Confirmation, our new birth and new life of purpose in the Mystical Body of Christ. Mary. She is the one who is there when we are born and when we live and when we die. Mother. Mary. Intimate Presence. Pray for us “now and at the hour of our death.”
— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM
//Franciscan Media//