Reed of God ~ The Lost Child

The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, stained glass by Mary Lowndes,
after William Holman Hunt

When my youngest daughter was a child, she used to ask me why The Finding in the Temple was a mystery. I never had a very good answer to that question. Then the first page of this chapter made it clear to me. Why was it that Jesus let his mother think that He was lost?

Why did Christ treat Our Lady in this way?

Well, that is a mystery indeed.

We all lose our children in some way. As they grow up we lose those lovely, cuddly babies who teach us things about love and fear that we never understood before. We lose those hysterically funny three year olds, masters of comedy and philosophy both. We lose those wonder-filled early school aged children. We lose them for a time, or maybe for the rest of our lives, when some tragedy, physical or emotional, separates us. And, Miss Houselander explains, Mary suffers the loss of her son so that she can share this with us. She, the perfect model of her Son, undergoes a purification she does not need.

But during her whole life she accepted everything which in our case is a necessary purification but in her case was the proof that she loved us with Christ's love.

And she did not suffer only the loss of a child, she suffered the loss of God, and as Miss Houselander says:

Everyone experiences this loss of the Divine Child. Everyone knows it in different ways, and in different degrees.

Mary experienced this not only when Jesus was lost at the age of twelve, but at times throughout her life when He was traveling and preaching and she did not know where He was. She suffered His loss at the foot of the cross, and yet again when He ascended into Heaven. And so, when He seems so very far away from us, we know that she has been there before us. As she trusted Him completely in this darkness, she can teach us to trust Him likewise.

This is going to be the last post in this series this year. I may finish up the book at some other time, maybe in Lent. I'm sure next week will be too busy for me to write much and probably too busy for anyone else to read.

All of the posts in this series can be found by clicking HERE.
Unfortunately they are in reverse order, so you have to scroll down to get to the beginning.

AMDG