Kids Nativity. Photo: Studio-Annika I’ve been a granny for 21 months. My grandson calls me MorMor which is a tradition we’ve taken from the Danish side of my family. It means Mother’s Mother. While looking after him I find myself thinking about Jesus at the same age, and naturally about his mother. And also about Joseph who, in today’s rather awkward jargon, would be called ‘the secondary care-giver’.
In Bethlehem Mary was without her female family and friends. Their shelter was so unsatisfactory that Luke says it didn’t count as lodging. Even if, in fact, Joseph’s female relations in the town made sure young Mary didn’t deliver alone, she must have been scared. As I was, as all first-time mothers are – even with the best modern medical care.
We must assume Joseph would have removed himself from the birthing scene, as was the custom. Gone off perhaps for a glass of wine with his extended family, or simply taken a long walk under the night stars? One was exceptionally bright!
Miracles
I know there’s a long-held tradition that being without sin Mary was spared the pain of childbirth. But Jesus was without sin and not spared the agony of crucifixion. As a grown man Jesus took the agony of childbirth as a given, using it as an analogy for how the disciples would feel when he left them. Surely it doesn’t help us to make Mary or Jesus different from us in their degree of humanity? Conversely it helps me to imagine that Mary and her son share the suffering of the thousands of women giving birth in war zones as they deliver their babies without medical help, in cars, in tents in overcrowded shelters.
Babies cry as soon as they’re born. They breathe before the cord is cut. For the first minutes outside the womb they are still one with the mother, being nurtured with her body and blood. The significance of this image of Mary requires some thought. It’s different from the breast-feeding Madonnas. At the birth Mary literally gave us the body and blood of Jesus. Modern biology now tells us that for the first few months babies continue to believe they share their body with the mother. A breastfeeding mother passes two billion stem cells to her baby daily through her milk. These cells create new tissue and repair damaged tissue. Another miracle of creation. Another miracle of being fully human. An extraordinary insight into the early months of Jesus’s life.
The shepherds seem to have got there pretty quickly. So, no time for quiet parent-child bonding like today. They were suitable first visitors though, I’d say, completely used to birthing their animals and watching lambs suckle.
My tears prick at the image of this little boy, without the language to express his emotions, being frightened by an incomprehensible knowingness of
his own torture
to come”
The first three years we now know are the most important in creating neural pathways. My own Mother’s Mother wrote a book in her 80s imagining Jesus’s missing years. Although she admitted she was not maternal towards her own children, she has imagined most tenderly the early years of Jesus or Jeshu as she calls him. In one incident, older girls who are playing with him make little Jeshu a king and put a crown of flowers on his head. (He’s known to love flowers.) But he pulls the crown off, as if stung, and runs crying to his mother.
‘Do you think the crown could have hurt him?’ one of his playmates asks Mary. ‘Some of the stalks might have been a bit prickly…’
My tears prick at the image of this little boy, without the language to express his emotions, being frightened by an incomprehensible knowingness of his own torture to come.
Childhood
He would have spent most of his early years amongst the female members of his family, and he never lost his ease with women. As a toddler on the streets of Nazareth, I wonder how he felt when he first saw human suffering? As a young child, my son was terrified of drunks and clowns and Father Christmas. I can imagine Mary trying to reassure Jesus. Did she tell him, as I told my little one, ‘It’s just an ordinary man who needs our prayers’? Did she give alms with her son at her side beginning to wonder how he could help? Children have an innate sense of fairness. It must have been all the more acute for the young child Jesus.
Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you”
For my grandmother, young Jesus has a fleeting awareness of his Father in Heaven. In her book he is questioning his teachers long before his visit to the Temple aged twelve. As Mary and Joseph retraced their steps to Jerusalem to find him, did they view their panic as the beginning of the suffering blind Simeon had spoken of that first time they’d taken Jesus to the Temple? Jesus might only have been a month old back then, but Simeon had been very clear what was in store for them as a family. ‘He has been sent as a sign from God, but many will oppose him… And a sword will pierce your very soul.’
One August bank holiday we lost my 7-year old step-son on the cliffs of Aberystwyth. We called out the Coast Guard, and volunteers scoured the coastal paths. He was lost for three hours not three days. It pierced our souls. ‘Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you’ – is a huge understatement.
Inspiration
We’re not told any details about Jesus’s three days in the Temple – where he slept, who took him in. But we get the point of the story. It was a sign that he was filled with the Spirit. He was ‘sitting among the teachers… everyone was amazed at his understanding and at his answers.’ Luke doesn’t seem to think Mary and Joseph understood their son’s reply, but they must have. Mary would surely have explored the words of the Angel Gabriel and the prophecies of Simeon and Anna, if not with ‘Granny Annie’, then certainly with Cousin Elizabeth?
After this we’re told Jesus went home and was obedient. For my grandmother, he’s an eager student of the Torah but a reluctant carpenter’s apprentice – much happier as a part-time shepherd boy like his ancestor David. Whatever work he undertook for his family he would have gone on questioning injustice and arrogance. His later hostility to the Pharisees and Sadducees for example was based on experience.
His mother may be almost silent in the Gospels, but that’s an editorial decision. Of course, mother and son would have talked. At Cana she knew his time had come, even if he didn’t. As soon as she said to the servants ‘Do whatever he tells you,’ Jesus got up and did as his mother had asked. It’s an interesting detail too that after the feast, with both of them struggling we imagine with the significance of this first miracle, he invites some of his disciples back home… to get to know his mother. Tradition says that his step-father Joseph had died by then.
I now have a new way to explain Mary’s importance. She is our role model for parenthood- the humanly messy and humanly miraculous labour of selfless love which lasts a lifetime”
My girl child has been fortunate to have her own child. My second husband and I are now united with her and her partner and his parents in the miracle of parenting. It’s one of the greatest human acts – a labour of selfless love that lasts a lifetime. Of course we get it wrong but it helps to see it as a daily reminder that the giving of love is Jesus’s calling: not the avoidance of sin, or the rehearsal of dogma, but the trying to do something infinitely good.
Pope Francis speaks of Mary as a role model who guarded Jesus’s health and helped him grow, face life and be free. I wonder why it’s taken me until now, as a grandmother, to meditate upon Mary the mother of a newborn, the mother of a toddler, and the mother of a teenager. Non-Catholics often ask me about the Catholic dedication to Mary which they view suspiciously. But having thought more about Jesus as a small child perhaps I now have a new way to explain Mary’s importance. She is our role model for parenthood- the humanly messy and humanly miraculous labour of selfless love which lasts a lifetime.