My Sister's Pietà

by Mariann Hughes

I get horrified stares whenever I sheepishly admit that I never had any sort of particular devotion to Mary as a teenager.

“Why not?” many ask. “She was perfect; she was everything a woman should be. Modest. Pure. Devout. Meek. Obedient. Charitable. Who could not love Mary?”

I think the reason, in my immature outlook, was simple. Mary emulated everything I was not.

Picture-Perfect Life?

I wouldn’t say that I was jealous of Mary, but I definitely thought she had it easy. She was free from original sin! She was perfect! How hard can life be when you’re perfect? She was God’s favored, the mother of His Son. Of course she had a foot in the door when it came to eternal happiness.

It wasn’t until suffering hit close to home that I realized that God did not spare her pain just because she was the Mother of His Son. And I began to realize just how much she identifies with—and embraces—our far-from-perfect situation.

Death and Suffering

I was curled up on my futon last September, a carefree college student indulging in a microwave dinner and a chick flick. When I received a phone call from my older sister, I automatically assumed it was to proclaim the joyful tidings of my nephew’s birth.

It was not. I didn’t need the words she finally choked out to tell me that her unborn son, Hunter, had died the day before he was to come into the world. Her tears were enough.

I was filled with anger. I didn’t understand why my nephew should die, or why my sister should be going through such pain. Didn’t God care about a mother’s heart?

I flew home for the funeral. I walked into the church, waiting to see the anger, frustration, despair, maybe even the guilt that I imagined would be written on my sister’s face.

Instead, I saw the Pietà.

Not So Picture-Perfect

The Pietà tells better than so many other pieces of traditional art the hard and eloquent story of Mary’s love as a mother. It gently emphasizes the strength, the tenderness, the devotion that laid the foundation of Mary’s life as mother, while still showing the gruesome side of her ordeal. It depicts the suffering; it does not water down the sacrifice.

In some traditional art, the crucifixion scene is often surrounded by an aura of eye-pleasing piety. But, honestly, a woman holding her dead son’s body is not really aesthetically pleasing.

The tableau that the jeering crowd looked upon that Friday was most human, not poetically surreal. Mary was not clothed beautifully in white and blue raiment. She was not girlish with large, tear-filled, but beautifully blue, eyes. There was no halo surrounding her head. Most people probably saw a work-hardened, plain Jewish woman with an average education, shabbily dressed, brokenly weeping in the dirt on blood-stained ground.

The crucifixion was not glamorous; it was not inspirational. It was a scene that an average person today would probably find emotionally disturbing.

But even in the midst of that gruesome scene, I think Mary must have looked the way my sister did. My sister’s hand rested softly on the baby’s little body in the small casket, her profuse tears falling onto her husband’s shoulder. But there was no anger, no despair. Even when she wept the hardest there was a quiet dignity, a soft peace that was puzzling because it was so unusual amid such obvious suffering.

“Behold your mother . . . ”

In her eulogy before the Mass of the Angels, my sister told the crowd she didn’t understand why God took her son, but she knew there was a greater purpose than she was capable of understanding. She told them there was a reason for it, and she was entrusting Hunter to His care.

The church was completely quiet. I felt my own mother, sitting next to me, crying at the sight of her daughter saying “yes,” her “fiat” to God. When the casket was pushed down the aisle after Mass, my sister followed close behind. Although she was crying heavily, she did not lose her composure or her strength. She sat in her wheelchair, quietly weeping, calmly praying.

It was at this moment that finally, though unconsciously, for the first time I understood what Mary went through for her children, we the human race.

Not only did she resign herself to her son’s death—she deliberately put herself and her heart on the line for us. She knew that it was we sinners who would kill her Son, but she believed so firmly in her Son’s mission that she loved His murderers even while she saw Him breathe His last.

“Behold your mother.” How many of us would cringe at the thought of being a mother to a race whose sins had nailed a most precious child to a cross? But Mary never faltered, never wavered. She accepted the challenge graciously, willingly, happily.

“Behold the handmaid . . . ”

I wonder if Mary saw ahead thirty-some years when she said “yes” to the angel. Did she have any clue about the hardships awaiting her? Simeon was to tell her some months later that a sword of sorrow would pierce her heart. But did she know how hard life would be at the moment of the Annunciation?

My guess is “no.” I think the Annunciation was quiet, peaceful, joyful. Mary joyfully said “yes” to God’s will, just as my sister and her husband at the altar joyfully said “yes” to accept whatever God sent them, for better for worse. There was only love, freely given, and the vow to stand by the other person, come what may, even death.

Mariann Hughes is the editorial assistant for Emmaus Road Publishing. She graduated in 2007 with her undergraduate degree in communications from Franciscan University of Steubenville.

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