Mary: The Quintessence of Womanhood and the Transformative Power of a Free ‘Yes’
Mary the Mother
Mary the Woman par excellence, who was able to say to the world with her few dialogues and silences, recorded in the Gospels: ‘This is me! I am a mother: the distinctiveness of women and the strength of their battles for self-determination with a ‘yes’ that revolutionised the course of history. She did not go astray and bend to the will of the world and did so in a context in which the proposal was something else, indeed there was no proposal at all for a woman.
Mary, the specific of woman: being a free gift to life in a yes that had no taste of constraint. Hers was a free ‘yes’: Here I am! An ‘here I am’ that was a novelty at that moment in history.
Mary, she chose freely and no one had to tell her what she could not but had to do. She pronounced her yes in the knowledge of the burden her choice would bring: for that yes at that time one could have been stoned to death. The instinct to motherhood is not for all, but the instinct to freedom is for all.
Mary, God’s proposal to her was unusual and her choice out of the chorus, she would have given birth to Life and, to a man who would not even be the father, the burden of supporting her according to a higher Will, that of the true Father of her child.
Mary, a yes to a life conceived outside the rules of a law-abiding world; a yes to a Son who would not always consider her a mother, but a woman. A yes that carried within itself all the weight of a love accepted, given and offered. Probably she too would have laid her hand on her belly acclaiming that ‘How is it possible? How is it possible to be bearers of life and bearers of so much love?”
Mary, the mother icon of all mothers, of all those who choose to conceive a child, to welcome it, to give it to life and, along the roads of this life, to let it go.
Mary, Mother of a son who was different in the eyes of all, a son rejected by his own people, but chosen by her with astonishing courage, decided which side of history to take, decided to continue to learn from her Son by always remaining at his side even in the hardest and most questionable choices.
Mary, the woman of listening, a listening that enabled her to become the woman God had created and reserved for Himself, a listening that made her understand how to be in a relationship that continually changes, evolves and gives itself in reciprocity, whose greatest gesture is that of a life given.
Mary, the woman whose motherhood reached its peak beneath the Cross when, losing her Son, she accepted a universal motherhood.
Laura Lapiccola