“It was a few months after the birth of Matthew that I kept thinking of a well-known quotation from Elizabeth Stone, one I’d heard years before becoming a mom: ‘Making the decision to have a child — it is momentous. Â It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.’ Bingo, I thought as I toted Matthew around in his infant seat. Â That’s exactly how it feels. Â Matthew is outside of me now, in that big scary world, and that is a very vulnerable place for a heart to be.
One day I thought back to those pictures of Mary’s immaculate heart. Â For the first time ever, that image made perfect sense to me. Â Like me, Mary was a mom. Â Like me, she had a beloved child who was out there in the world, where any number of things could assail him. Â Like me, she must have felt as though the dearest, most vital part of her — her very heart — was exposed and vulnerable.
Once I made that connection, I could no longer dismiss those images as creepy or perplexing. Â I realized they were, in fact, a perfect way of showing how visceral this maternal-love thing really is. Â It’s not just something you feel in your head or in your soul. Â It’s in your very organs, in every cell of your body, in the mechanisms that make you tick. Like any other mom, Mary felt that love, in all its exhilarating and terrifying depth.”
— from Random MOMents of Grace: Experiencing God in the Adventures of Motherhood (Loyola Press, 2013)
