Pesame a la Virgen
or, women shouldn’t have to be so strong all the time
This Pesame was first given at the Church of St. Francis Xavier on Good Friday in April 2023.
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home. (Jn 19:26-27)
Hail, Mary – full of grace. Behold, there you are standing at the foot of the cross, with Jesus until the end. There you are, full of grace – a strong woman.
Your fortitude is an example for us – there and then just as here and now, women need to be strong to move through this world. It takes chutzpah and grit for women to just be, when so much has been taken away from us by church, state, and society.
We create, we carry, we deliver, we accomplish, even as we struggle to have our lives, leadership, and labor be treated with equal dignity and worth as those of men. Our values and our voices, attached always to our gender, do not hold equal gravitas – and still we mentor and speak, we write and we teach.
Our choices about our bodies and our babies are latticed with judgement and red tape instead of support and respect – and yet we love and we mother, we protect and we nurture anyway.
Our pronouns are deemed unfit to attach to the name of God and yet our faith fuels our Church, a church that can’t fully flourish without our prayer and wisdom and the work of our hands.
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Hail, Mary – full of grace. Behold, there you are standing at the foot of the cross, with Jesus until the end. There you are, full of grace – a strong woman, lacerated by the trauma of watching on powerlessly as your son is stripped and bloodied and tortured and killed.
Women know that same truth that Jesus accepted – to be faithful to the person God created you to be, to adhere firmly to the path God has co-created with you, is to expose yourself to violence.
On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we celebrate your encounter with the Divine and your choice to gestate and mother the Son of God. Women are not routinely offered that same respect. Our communion of saints is full of examples of women – St. Lucy, St. Agatha, St. Cecilia – who were killed for discerning their own authentic calling from God instead of marrying princes and kings. Too trusting of their own priesthood. Their way is the way of the cross.
So too is the path of many women after them. Women who are killed for wanting too much – desires as simple as an education, or the ability to walk around alone and carefree at night. Women who are desperate to be free from abusive partners, who would rather they die than regain their autonomy. Women who are condemned for being women the wrong way – lesbian women, bisexual women, transgender women. Our lives, which are full of faith seeking understanding, are dismissed instead as theory and disorder – cloaking our existence with discrimination, dehumanization, and the shadow of death.
Mary, your suffering should invoke in us an outpouring of compassion, but too often we opt instead to valorize your pain, glorifying it as some essential part of womanhood. Part and parcel of the narrow set of predetermined roles patriarchy tries to groom us into, assuring sweetly that choosing the right roles will afford us – separate, yes – but equal say and regard in life, church, society. Some roles are oversexualized, and some are de-sexed. Some are implicitly loathed – the hag, the feminazi, the whore. Some are explicitly adored – the caregiver, the virgin, the mother.
But fitting in to what patriarchy thinks is being a woman the “right” way is not the same as carrying power. Ultimately that praise is not a protective barrier, it is dependent and conditional. Apply some pressure it crumbles like soft clay – and then there we are, on this desolate hill, covered with the dust left behind by the disinterested crowd, standing at the foot of the cross, unable to save our children.
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Hail, Mary – full of grace. Behold, there you are standing at the foot of the cross, with Jesus until the end. The Gospel does not record a word of what you felt or thought or said and so we guess at your sorrow, we guess at your suffering, your self-sacrifice. There you are, full of grace – a strong woman.
But women shouldn’t have to be so strong all the time.
Women shouldn’t have to steel themselves for the possibility of sexual harassment just to get out of the house. We shouldn’t have to work more and harder only to be compensated less. Disabled women shouldn’t need to persist and persist and persist just to be treated right by the people who are supposed to care for them and included in the world everyone else enjoys. Black and brown women shouldn’t have to hide our anger about being overworked, overpoliced, doubly objectified, doubly marginalized.
What is it that Zora Neale Hurston said? “If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” A world that fetishizes our unending strength and resilience ultimately coats us with a thick tar of silence.
What else did you feel, Mary – standing on Gethsemane, on the worst day of your life? Did you faint? Did you scream? Did it all feel numb and unreal? Did time slow down, or quickly fragment away? Did you clutch your sister’s hands for the strength to bring yourself from one breath to the next? Did you grasp at your Son, your baby boy, until your clothes were covered with mud and blood? Were you hysterical with tears? Were you filled with a hot rage?
Jesus looked down from the cross at us, his beloved disciples, and called on us to behold you – our mother. Behold, and take you into our home. I want to lay you down in a cool and comfortable room. I want to wipe your face, bring you a hearty meal and water, and sing you to sleep.
When you awake, I want people to actually listen to you. I want them to recognize that you’re a person. I want people to know how hard you work, and respect what you do. I want your body to be loved, and I want you to be seen as more than just a body. I want people to know the whole of you, the parts that are beyond your marriage, your virginity, and your motherhood. I want to give you your son back. I want people to trust that you know what you’re doing. I want them to learn from you. I want your life to be filled with your heart’s desires. I want you to be safe. I want you to crumble gracelessly to pieces – no longer needing to be so strong all the time.
I am so sorry that things are not like this. I am so sorry we’re not quite home yet. We still must journey a long way.
May your Son bless us and guide us on that path. Inspire us with clarity, instill in us courage, and ignite in us with anger. For us to fulfil the promise we made as his disciples, we have to love you, we have to truly love you. As our love for you grows ever more perfect, so too will our love for women – trans women, disabled women, Black and brown women, queer women, all women. A love that is not possessive, but rather a love that is full of care, respect, and trust – a love that sets us free. The liberation of women is the kingdom of God.