Sneaky reference

She had accompanied the glory.  She had been with him in the unsurpassable intimacy of the pregnancy and the birth, an intimacy that none other could ever know. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

- Charles A. Miles, In the Garden 

I completely missed the allusion to this hymn on my first couple readings of this book.  Maybe someone who has sung this song their whole life rather than the relatively few times I have might have gotten it right away. 

There are a pair of truths here that are mysterious in their contradiction and harmony.  It is true that Mary shared an intimacy with Jesus that is distinctive from what any other may experience with him.  It is also true that no mother, no matter how much she may have experienced maternal intimacy with her own children, has done so with God in the same way that Mary did, and this truth is a thing good for us to marvel over for a while. 

Yet while Mary's intimate relationship with Jesus is the unique result of their mother/son relationship, it is likewise true that no one else can ever know the intimate relationship that each of us are called into in and with him.  Rather than lament that we cannot know Jesus in the same way Mary did - which is not Fr. Neuhaus' point at all - we should immerse ourselves in the intimate relationship with Jesus which is uniquely ours to enter into.  No matter how close another person may be with me and how close that person may be with Jesus, neither of us can have the same relationship with him.  Each person's relationship with God in Christ is different, is unique, because we are each different and unique and God responds to each of us uniquely.  While it is true in one sense that God loves all of us "the same," that is, that God loves no one more or less deeply or greatly than any other, it is also true that he loves each of us as he loves no other, for love is always rooted in the unique characteristics of each lover and each beloved.

Pondering the significance of "Woman, there is your son . . . There is your mother" also means recognizing that the beloved disciple was not Mary's child in the same physical way in which Jesus was, nor are we. But thinking of all the implications that this makes in our relationship with mother whom we gain when we accept Jesus as our brother, and in our relationship with Jesus, and in our resulting familial relationships with each other, is making my under-rested brain hurt, so perhaps I shall return to this later.

Or perhaps it may be best for the reader to consider the implications for themselves.