Cradled in the Stillness

During lent two years ago, I heard Puthen Pana sung in Malayalam. The melody stirred something deep within me, echoing childhood evenings when my grandmother sang it on our verandah (porch) in Kerala. Drawn back into its beauty, I looked up the English translation, and came to know that it was written by a German Jesuit missionary, Arnos Pathiri. He wrote the poem in 14 padams (stages), tracing the life of Jesus Christ from the Annunciation to Crucifixion. In fact, the 12^th padam is very much popular during Holy Week in Kerala that moms often sang it at their home after the Good Friday service. It portrays Mary’s lament at the foot of the Cross, a mother’s helpless cry over her lifeless Son:

Listening to this hymn makes me not only feel Mary’s grief, but also the profound emptiness of the womb that once bore the Savior. Her arms cradled Him in death just as once her womb had cradled Him in life. Often, I pray the rosary on my way home from work and sometimes have a habit of wrapping the rosary around my hands, caressing the beads as though caressing my own empty womb. In those moments, I pray for all women carrying life, longing for life, or grieving its loss. I think about the woman in my own life starting from my mom who lost her two-year old daughter, and my grandmother who waited 10 years for her son, my dad, to be born. Her steadfast prayer during that time, the rosary she said every day, and the way she lead our family in evening prayer in India remain in my mind. In their stories, I see reflections of Mary, whose womb once led Christ and the emptiness she must have felt at His death. I thought, too, of Mary Magdalene, whose grief came not from motherhood but losing the Lord who had restored her life.

Just last month, I had a dream that a woman was standing before the empty tomb of Jesus. Her face was filled with sorrow, her posture bent in grief. Suddenly, a little boy ran towards her, joyfully shouting, “The LORD IS RISEN!” I woke up with a heart full of joy and profound stillness, and I wrote everything down to bring it to prayer.

A few weeks later, I attended a silent retreat at the Ignatius Center focused on the very theme of Mary Magdalene. At first, I was terrified because I was traveling to a place I have never been before and unsure of what the silence might reveal. But I experienced a stillness unlike anything I had known before. It felt like returning to the silence of the womb, hidden yet held, vulnerable yet surrounded by love. It felt as though Jesus was drawing me into that moment, into a place beyond time and where stillness met longing.

Like Mother Mary grieving her Son, I felt Mary Magdalene’s anguish standing in front of the empty tomb and her mere hopelessness of not knowing where Jesus was. This was the man who had seen her, loved her, and restored her when her life had been broken.

It was a beautiful weekend in the outskirts of Atlanta. There were many times I was sitting out in the woods, and I felt embraced by nature and my creator, allowing me to let go of anything that was weighing me down. At one session, we were guided through a movement activity by a Yoga Director, but wove together Ignatian spirituality and theology. Each movement became a prayer invitation to Jesus, allowing him into my body and release any tension. One elderly woman even shared with me that her husband died last year, and she carried so much bitterness toward God. But this retreat helped her finally towards her healing journey.

This past week, as the Church celebrated the Assumption of Mary, I contemplated on her journey from the womb that bore the Savior, to the sorrow of the tomb, and to the glory of heaven. Her story is not only Christ’s but also ours. It is narrates the story of passing through grief into joy, silence into song, death into life.