That Time I Saw Jesus
He was at a bus stop, but I saw Mary first
One dark winter morning, several years ago, I was driving to work. I live in a rural area, but I was teaching at a school in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. Like many other mornings, I felt a bit stressed. Getting my own children out the door and then trying to get to my “duty station” by 7:45 AM was a regular source of anxiety.
Although painfully aware of the minutes ticking by on my dashboard clock, I was very careful as I drove. Particularly of day, I knew children might dart out from between cars, or a school bus might stop in front of me.
Driving down those tree-lined streets, I couldn't believe that they were the setting for the gunfire that caused us to go into frequent lockdowns at school. This is the paradox of downtown Wilmington: Everywhere you look, its current poverty contrasts with the time when dock workers, railroad employees, and teachers could build homes. The pretty cottages and mature landscaping, at first glance, belie the hard truths of the present. Many of my students’ parents worked two or even three low-wage jobs, and still barely scraped by.
That morning seemed no different from many others. As I drove closer to school, my concerns for my own children - my older son’s forgotten homework, my younger son’s recurrent ear infections- were pushed to the back of my mind. Concerns for my students crowded in. Would Dante’s mother be able to attend his IEP meeting? Was Kayla all right after her asthma attack?
As I stopped at an intersection, my gaze traveled to the right. It was an overcast winter morning, and the light was just coming up. My eyes fell on the bus stop at the corner. The knowledge that I was in Mary’s presence flashed into my mind a split second before I actually saw her. It was Mary who was standing at the bus stop. She appeared as a thin woman in a long coat. Her back was turned to me, and she seemed to shield her little boy from the wind. Jesus stood close to her legs. They waited patiently in the cold.
The path that I have walked in the Christian faith is long and convoluted. At one time, it was so important to me to be close to the chain of apostolic succession that I converted to Catholicism. Later, my heart was broken by stories of abuse at a Catholic orphanage, and I could not stand to attend mass. Now I see things more globally: The fraught story of the church as one long metaphor for our fallen world, a reminder of what can happen when we conflate human and divine authority.
The story of Jesus as a personal savior is beautiful, no doubt. Yet, we envision him in stained glass or marble. Our western tradition gives secondary importance to Mary and the generative, female side of creation. All the more reason their message to me that morning drove into my consciousness with riveting force: No matter how humble, every mother is Mary. And no matter how small, every child is Jesus.
