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The Immaculate Heart Revealed “Son, why have you done this to us?”
Three days she walks the ways of searching. What an eternity of time for memories to flood in! Memories of an angel, a pregnancy, a birth; memories of Isaiah’s words: “The Virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel”; memories of nursing her Child with a love never known before. Still earlier memories: kneeling on cold earth ceaselessly pleading heaven to send his Messiah, send him to the womb of some worthy virgin somewhere among her people. Send their Savior! Memories of Elizabeth, prophet, aware of the Child in her womb, though no telltale signs informed her. Memories of her fiancé Joseph’s shock as signs of pregnancy appeared. Memories of his first stirrings in her womb, his Savior’s Heart beating there beneath her own pulsing Heart, stirrings that awakened wondrous longing to see him and feel him in her arms. Now love present sweeps all past thoughts away. “Where can he be?” she and Joseph ask each other, and wrack their brains searching out avenues to explore. If you think the valiant woman doesn’t weep, look again and see tears come unbidden; see a young Mother, body and soul immaculate and fair, still glistening from the touch of God’s creative hand, a frail young woman with a Son, Heart full of all the treasured memories of a mother’s heart and a mother’s grief. The more they search, the more anxiety and longing flood in, until she cries to the Father, a living Song of Songs, “Have you seen him whom my heart loves?”
“Son, why have you done this to us?” Can we, too, not offer you an answer to your question, Mary our Mother? Is it not so that you will come to understand us, your sinful children? Is it not so that you will learn to grieve with us when we lose our Savior by neglect of prayer, and worse, by sin? Is it not to move your Heart to pray for us to escape our hells of loneliness and find reunion with our Lord and Savior? Is it not so that your life may teach us what we too must learn? That the Lord’s ways are mysterious and who can trace their hidden pattern until they are consummated? That we must learn from you to trust, learn to say: “He who has not spared his own Son, but has delivered him up for us, how can it be that with him we have not received all things?” (Rm 8:32). That though we are not able to suppress all fear and anxiety and doubt and dread, these too, 0 Lord, are human things you use to bring us the more to you, for “We know that all things work for good for those who love God” (Rm 8:28). Suffering can seem so useless in us, but you, our Virgin Mother, teach us that it serves the same purpose it did in And so, instructed by your Immaculate Heart, 0 Virgin Mother of God, we too keep these things in our hearts. And as you came at length, through prayer and life, to understand Jesus’ answer to your question, teach us to understand it through our prayer and our lives, so we may become one heart with your Heart and his Heart divine. From Homilies on The Heart of Jesus and the Apostleship of Prayer by Rev. Herbert F. Smith, S.J. |
Everything about Mary in this deeply moving event calls to mind the lovely little girl spotted in an airport with the words emblazoned across her blouse, “Made for love.” On entering Mary’s Heart as she suffers through these three days, we find her living out her love as memory, as present devotion, and as inexpressible longing. 
Now they come to the Temple, and Lo! he bursts upon their sight, untroubled and engaged in calm words as though the world were not all turmoil for three long days! “Son, why have you done this to us?” The words burst out unbidden. How could you, who are more myself than I, you, Life drawn from my flesh and my womb, sharer of my joys and sorrows and all else how be so unconcerned when we have been so long lost to one another!
you. As an oyster covers an irritant within its shell with self-protective layers until a pearl forms, you learned to enclose your sufferings in abandonment to divine providence, and in adoration of the wisdom of God that rules the world. And so you produced your life of faithfulness, the Pearl of Great Price so loved and admired by the whole world that all generations will call you blessed.
