My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. ((Psalm 73:26))

I find in [Mary] the loneliness of love.⁴¹ The mother of Jesus was the bride of loneliness. Had her husband, Joseph, been spared to her through the years, it might have been very different with Mary. She might have turned to him when things were difficult. But Joseph died when Jesus was a boy, and Mary was left utterly alone, to love and ponder and be brokenhearted. Other mothers could compare experiences, but that was what Mary of Nazareth could not do. Even to her family she dare not turn for sympathy, for they thought [Jesus] was beside himself. Because Christ was unutterably wonderful, Mary was unutterably lonely, and she was lonely because she loved him so.

Every mother knows something of that loneliness, as childhood reaches to manhood or to womanhood. There comes a day when the most perfect mother has to make room for others in her son’s or daughter’s heart. And you have to multiply all that ten thousand times into the absorbing passion of the Son of God if you would understand the loneliness of Mary. Not to be able to blast and blight his slanderers when they said he had a devil and was mad—to be utterly powerless to keep him silent when every word was ringing out his death-knell—and then to stand at the cross and see him nailed there and hear the exceeding bitter cry he cried—could any loneliness be worse than that? Love is the secret of the sweetest song, and love is the fountain of the deepest loneliness. Sooner or later in this shadowed world a loving mother is a lonely mother. And it is when you remember Mary’s love for a Son who was as mysterious as God that you come to think of her, in all her glory, as perhaps the loneliest woman in the world. – George Morrison

 

From: Diana Wallis, Take Heart: Daily Devotions with the Church’s Great Preachers, (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2001), 49.