A friend recently sent me a video from central Italy (recorded last year in safer times) where crowds gather in the town of Sulmona for their Easter celebrations, which include a small cadre of men carrying a statue of the Virgin, a familiar scene to anyone who has spent time in Europe. However, in this procession, she very suddenly sheds her black robes of grief through a secret system of wires, and sprints (via their shoulders) full-speed so that the statue of Mary can encounter that of the risen Christ. My wife’s hometown on the Spanish island of Mallorca has a similar tradition where the Virgin “jumps” three times when she meets her Son in the central plaza on Easter Sunday.
These manifestations of popular piety are rooted in an imaginative reflection on the quintessential Christian posture of Easter joy and an emblematic expression of it, which has firmly established roots.
Think, for example, of Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. There, the “First Contemplation of the Fourth Week” encourages the retreatant to reflect upon “the apparition of Christ our Lord to our Lady.” This moment, which undoubtedly occurred if the Resurrection took place as a historical event, is shrouded in silence and mystery in the official writings of the church. We see Jesus mystically encounter Mary Magdalen and Peter and John and countless others after he is raised up. He passes through locked doors, and cooks breakfast on a beach, and causes at least some of the dead to arise and walk around Jerusalem. He flattens former persecutors to the ground in the blinding light of conversion. But there is no scriptural account of the swords piercing Mary’s heart being sheathed in the moment when she irrevocably realizes the promises presaged in the Annunciation had been fulfilled.
Ignatius instructs us to place ourselves as witnesses to that scene, going so far as to encourage us to imagine Jesus’ trip from the tomb to the location where this meeting took place, perhaps in Mary’s house, even “her room, her oratory, etc.” His notes tell us to “consider the office of consoler that Christ our Lord exercises, and compare it with the way in which friends are wont to console one another.” Mary racing to Jesus to physically embrace the glory of the Resurrection manifested in his transformative suffering and wounds is perhaps among the original instances of the “culture of encounter” which Pope Francis regularly exhorts.
Whether we use Mary as the model, or the beloved disciple after first hearing word of the empty tomb, or Peter leaping from a still moving boat, Christians today are also called to “rush out” to experience the presence of the Lord in unexpected moments and startling locations. It is, after all, consistent with the image that Jesus uses to describe the transcendent love of God, who hurries to find a wandering sheep in danger or who as a metaphorical Father dashes out of the house impelled by the urgency of forgiveness to embrace the Prodigal Son even, it should be noted, before he has confessed his sins. The Christian life is best conceived as little more than finishing the race alongside the Lord, and receiving along with him the victor’s crown.
If Mary once hastened to her cousin Elizabeth while pregnant to proclaim the Life of God within her, we can assume all the more that she sprinted to clasp to her breast once more that Life after it had irreversibly conquered death. We ought to keep pace.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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