About forty-five years ago, my mother took my sister Molly, age five, and my brother Matt, aged three, into Little Folks clothes store at the mall in Quincy, IL. When they went to the fitting room, all three of them couldn’t fit in it because it was little—Little Folks.
So, Matt sat at a small picnic table outside the room and played with stuffed animals. Then he got confused. He saw a mother and daughter walk out of the store, and thinking they were his own mother and sister, he followed them out into the mall. He walked behind them for a while until he realized they were the wrong people. In the meantime, my mother opened the fitting room door to find Matt gone.
So, put yourself in a mother’s shoes. What do you do? Your child is not in the store, so you venture out into the mall. Your eyes dart around, and then you start walking very fast up and down the mall with your five-year-old daughter hanging on. Someone calls mall security. Then concerned people start helping you. But your son cannot be found. Anxiety turns to dread, and there’s a knot in your stomach. It all starts to become surreal, like a bad dream.
Up to this point, my mother was putting on a brave front, keeping a stiff upper lip—until she called my father at work. It was when she heard her husband’s voice that she finally lost it and started crying. “What’s wrong?” my father asked. And my mother had to answer, “I lost Matt.”
A short while after my mother’s phone call to my father, some people walked into Kmart, which was across the road from the mall. They told the Kmart workers that a very small boy was trying to cross the busy, four-lane intersection of 36th and Broadway. You see, Matt had got it in his head that his mother and sister had left the mall for home. So, he thought he would too. He left the mall and started walking home—as if he knew where home was.
Some man, thinking Matt had been in Kmart, coaxed my brother into his car and took him to Kmart, where a cashier there, a friend of my sister’s, recognized Matt. She said, “You’re a Drew!”
So, my brother Matt was found and was home in time for supper. We laughed and joked around the supper table like we usually did, but then my cool-headed father finally decompressed. After having a chance to sit back and reflect on what happened that afternoon, he got serious, and the laughing and joking stopped. He made a short speech which I remember nothing of, except the last sentence. I really only remember any of this because it was the only time in my life that I saw tears in my father’s eyes. With a bewildered look on his face, he ended his little speech, saying, “I almost lost my son today.”
Throughout our childhood, my mother and father would frequently lead us in praying the Rosary. The fifth Joyful Mystery is the Finding of Jesus in the Temple. Sometimes, when my brother Matt would be nodding off around the fifth Joyful Mystery, my father would say, “The fifth Joyful Mystery is the—Finding of Matt at Kmart!” And Matt would snap to attention.
Mary and Joseph lost Jesus for three days. Can you imagine? God gave them His Son, and they lost Him! And when they found Him, what was Christ’s opening line in the Gospel of Luke? He told His parents that they should have known where to look. That was not a wise-crack, but a reminder of what the Angel Gabriel told the Virgin: “The Holy Spirit will come over you for this boy is the Son of God.” So, yes, the Son of God would be found in the House of God.
The Virgin Mary was sinless. But she was also a mother. She experienced heartache and fear, just like any other mother. And these three days of heartache and fear at the loss of her son were training. A priest once wrote that all mothers must be trained to bear crosses. Mary’s three days of searching for her son would be a preparation for another three-day event, when her son would be hung and entombed—only to be found three days later.
We do not worship our Blessed Mother as if she is a goddess. No, she is a creature, just like us, in all things but sin. But that one thing is a pretty big thing. So, we honor this chosen vessel, this ark of the covenant, and we go to her for heavenly intercession.
And here is another pretty big thing: The Virgin Mary and her Son obeyed and subordinated themselves to St Joseph, the foster father of Christ and guardian of the Holy Family. Why did the Mother of God and the Son of God do such a thing? Why did they humble themselves? It is quite simple: God wished to show us how a Christian family works. That is why He gave us the Holy Family.
Christ did not just drop out of the sky like the mythical gods. Rather, He came to us as an infant belonging to a race, a tribe, and a family. And all those things had governments; they all had hierarchies to keep order, unity, and stability. And of course, the family precedes the race and the tribe. The family comes first. It is the family that is the basic building block of civilization—not races, tribes, or governments.
The family then should be given privileged status by its governments, instead of being punished and attacked by them. However, our governments, taking their cue from Karl Marx to “abolish the family,” are well on their way to doing just that. The family—a man and a woman who come together to raise children and start a little independent society—is a threat and therefore an enemy of the all-powerful state.
Are you prepared to be an enemy of the state? If you are a witness of Christ in this present darkness, then you will be. Do you have that in you? The Holy Family became an enemy of the state. They had to flee the country.
Do you want to be a saint? To do so, you have to be adopted into the Holy Family that is Christ’s Church, a family with a Mother and Father, hierarchy, commandments, and rules, which provide order, unity, and stability amidst the chaos of a lost world headed for hell.
When my lost-and-found, three-year-old brother Matt saw his mother, he ran into her arms.
When you become lost, you have to do the same thing; you have to run into the arms of your Blessed Mother. When you’ve lost Jesus, when you’ve lost your way, you have to cry out to the Virgin, “Help me to find your Son. You’ve had training in finding Him. Help me, dear Mother, to find your Son, so I can make my way home.”
Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash
