Grieving Mothers

Mathilde Roussel Giraudy "lifes of grass"

The pastor’s Mothers’ Day homily was masterful…but in the end, he was just a guy, well-honed logic too dull to cut through the binding cord of loss.

The Opera Turandot was written by Giacomo Puccini – up to the first few lines of the final duet, when the composer died of a heart attack while being treated for throat cancer.  The pastor, a lover of Italian Opera, waxed romantic, inspired by the idea that Puccini’s students completed the work he had begun, allowing it to become one of the world’s greatest and most often-performed operatic works.  In the same way, he said, that God’s saving work is to be completed by the Church, a mother takes God’s miracle of conception and completes it by nurturing it with her own life.

Wow.  I imagined myself shouting “Bravo!” at the end of his homily, as one might do at la Scala in Milan, where Turandot was debuted.  How elegantly he had touched each mother’s heart, ennobling them with the holiness of their charge, to bring God’s work to fruition.  I did not shout.  This was, after all, not an opera hall, but a typically conservative church.  But I did hold on to that glow of appreciation for the composition and delivery of his homily.  Mother completes the unfinished work of God.  Wow.

Then I saw Sarah at the other end of our pew, and tears came to my eyes.  She had lost her son a year ago.  God’s miracle of conception entrusted to her for completion….  I thought of the burden of maternity, of carrying out the work that God has begun in creating a life, and tears flowed
as Sally’s reddened eyes brought to mind Kathy’s sister, who has lost both of her children, and three other women who have lost sons in their youth.

Turandot was the name of a princess whose heart had been hardened by abuse in her youth.  Any man who wished to marry her would need to correctly answer three riddles, knowing that if he failed, he would die.

The prince who came forward just as the previous suitor was being executed did indeed answer the three riddles posed to him by Turandot:

What is born at each sunset and dies at each dawn?  “Hope.”

What flickers warm and red like fire but is not flame? “Blood.”

What is the ice that makes you burn?  “It is you,Turandot!”

The Gospel, which found little reference in the pastor’s homily, was about a couple of guys trying to make sense of Jesus’ death by argument and logic.  They were so taken up by the senselessness of it that they failed to recognize the risen Jesus who had fallen into stride with them on the road.  Their heads were so busy that they did not feel their hearts burning for the nearness of Jesus, their lost love and quenched hope.

Sarah’s loss of her son is a riddle to me, and Kathy’s sister’s and the other three mothers’.  I try to get my mind around it, and all that comes is tears.  In the night of my unknowing, though, I do feel hope.  I hope for these grieving mothers that they can believe that the seed that has fallen so prematurely into the ground does indeed germinate, does indeed bring life and sustenance to the hungry world, even if in some way that is beyond our logic and argument.  I do hope that they can feel in the pumping of their own blood the unquenchable fire of life that is passed on and on and on.  But even as the Prince answers the last riddle, one last barrier to their marriage is put forth, and their life together is saved not by male logic, but by female sacrifice.  Liu, the prince’s female servant, accepts death rather than divulging the secret that would doom the prince. 

Having cast off the useless tools of argument and logic, I look to the pumping of my own heart and the hope that occurs to me in the night of my unknowing as I look across the pew and beyond our own happy lives at the grieving of these five mothers who have lost children, even as we continue to delight in our own.  This hope yields an image that seems to cauterize this wound in me, the image of a five sheaves of wheat, still green and blowing in the wind, with seven grains missing. 

Next: seven grains self-seeding