If only, just once, we could see for who she is this window, and doorway, that is Mary the mother of Jesus. Because in our Blessed Mother, as in no other saint, we have a uniquely blessed human reminder. Like no other saint or even angel, she reminds that, whatever else the World pretends to be - however comforting, delighting, solacing, enticing - it is at bottom a harsh, bleak, unforgiving desert, second in its sheer poverty only to Hell. After all, look what it did to her Son.
We can also, if we grasp her life and her trust, see what the Church for all its failings has sometimes been, and in its soul always seeks to be: not just an oasis in our Modern deserts, but the one truly green and refreshing and fortifying hospice in all the universe. Or so at least it is, when her Son the Lamb is rightly perceived, trusted, embraced, rested in. Indeed, if she, of all human creatures, didn't know the very essence of what it is to trust - and rest - in her Son, would anyone else? Would St Peter or St Paul have known, during their lifetimes, necessarily any better? Or might this have been what Paul was ultimately referring to, when he spoke of being himself "in labor till Christ be formed in you?" To know Him, even as His own mother did.
Again, what the Church has been, and please God can yet be, even in this all-consuming desert of the 21st century.
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