"The Virgin Mary can test everyone's assumptions"

I rarely buy a newspaper, principally because I never sit down to read one. But I picked up a free copy of The Times before boarding my flight to New York at Heathrow airport yesterday. And I was glad I did.

Catherine Fox, a novelist brought up in the Baptist Tradition, wrote a very appropriate piece on Our Lady to coincide with the feast of the Assumption. She writes:

My understanding of Mary is more instinctive and visceral, coming through the experience of motherhood. My first brush with it came the Christmas after my first son was born. He was premature, and at four months old, still tiny. As the choir sang “Hush, do not wake the infant king. Soon will come sorrow with the morning, soon will come bitter grief and weeping: sing lullaby”, I found myself crying. Tears splashed on his head as I realised that for all the ferocity of maternal love, I could not protect him from bitter grief and weeping. Later, as he and then his younger brother were growing up, I could no longer bear the Passion narratives, and showed my sons up on the Good Friday March of Witness, weeping when the Gospel accounts, dulled by childhood familiarity, sprang hideously to life. Mary, at the foot of the Cross. How could she stand there? How could she stand anywhere else?

You can read it here. Why not leave a comment.