Nothing in the Gospel says she was sweeping, but for as long as I can remember, I have imagined it that way. Probably, an artistic rendering of the Annunciation first put this idea in my head. Whatever its origin, I can’t shake the sure sense that Mary was sweeping when the angel Gabriel disturbed her work with his grand announcement. And so, whenever I sweep (it seems like several dozen times a day), I think about Mary.
If an angel had visited me when I was Mary’s age, he’d likely have found me with my nose in a book. I burrowed away for hours most days, hiding from a traumatic childhood and lost in a world of literature where everything (mostly) turned out fine by the end of the story. That sense of narrative was well imbued as I entered my adult years. I fully expected I’d reached the “happily ever after” part as soon as I exchanged wedding vows. I learned that life is hard, and it tends to offer us one challenge after another — one invitation after another to cooperate with grace to live God’s plan, even when it all seems impossible.
Mary knew scripture. She was deeply connected to the story of the God of Israel. But she could not have possibly known her part in the story. She did not know that she was the apex of femininity in God’s story of salvation. All she knew was she loved her Lord and he was asking the impossible of her and promising that it was possible.
She assented to carry the Messiah (Lk 1:31), not knowing how that could come to be, but having some sense of the consequences of being found inexplicably pregnant while betrothed to an esteemed man. For all the Christmas songs and soft oil renderings of Madonna and child, we know that from the moment she gave her fiat to the moment of sorrow at the foot of the cross, there was suffering.
Leaning on a broom and looking in wonder at the angel, she didn’t entertain all the ifs, ands and buts. She did ask how this could be, and when he answered cryptically, she gave her full assent to this astonishing plan, acknowledging only that she was the servant of the Lord. That was enough. Whether sweeping the floor or carrying God in her very person or standing at the foot of a horrific instrument of torture watching her beloved child suffer, she’s all in for God.
As my children grow up, one of the most difficult truths I have to impart is that I can’t promise that everything is going to be okay — ever — in this world. The hardest moment of parenting might be that moment when I look at a tear-stained face and acknowledge that this is no longer a child who thinks life is a fairytale, but a young adult with a dawning realization that life is a series of challenges that each demand an assent of will and an act of faith. They recognize that the world is broken, and they are sons and daughters of Eve.
I can offer them the hope of heaven, but I can’t tell them that once they hurdle whatever the present challenge is, life will be easy, or even easier than it is right now. I’ve seen too many serious situations arise too often, one right after another, to allow myself to offer that false hope.
Instead, I offer to my children — to the children of Eve — Mary, a humble servant who received Our Lord into herself and then spent her lifetime clinging to the promises of God, treasuring them in her heart. She did not know how this story would go; she could not skip to the back of the book and read the ending when the tension in the middle was building unbearably. Instead, she moved from one plot twist to the next, quietly contemplating at every turn (see Lk 2:19 and 2:51).
Mary held the treasure Our Lord offered her at the Annunciation in her heart. She was the keeper of the story of Jesus’ childhood. She was the one who knows the continuum of his life on earth from beginning to end. She stayed with the apostles after he died and she prayed with them, faithfully imparting the story entrusted to her.
And so, the girl with the broom becomes the mother of the church — the mother of us all, the keeper of the story, the one who brushes away the hair stuck to our tear-soaked cheeks and acknowledges that all is not a fairytale here, but that there is more — so much more.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
