God consecrated the female body, not only the womb that would welcome the Incarnation, but the breasts that provided mother’s milk to the Messiah and her poor, postpartum body that rode a donkey into exile, emigrating to Egypt with a newborn, so far from her own mother and the comfort and companionship of her cousin Elizabeth. Consecrated, too, was the physical anxiety that drove the frenzied search for the boy who went missing in Jerusalem after the Passover; the gut-wrenching pain of people turning against her son, calling him crazy, plotting his demise and abandoning him in the hour of his death. Holy was the commitment standing on Calvary, drawing on a physical and emotional strength so intrinsic to who Mary was, that it seems to have been cellular, similar to the courage born in her marrow bone, to borrow an expression from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats:
She that sings a lasting song, Thinks in a marrow-bone.
Mary’s yes made her whole, a wholeness for which we all long.
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