Mary's take

Mar 30, 2013

The timing just happened this way. Yesterday, Good Friday, I finished reading the Testament of Mary by Irish novelist and journalist Colm Toibin.

It’s a short, at times opaque and cryptic — even for me, raised as a Catholic and a one-time priest wannabe — imagining of the getting-it-off-my-chest admission of Mary, the mother of Jesus, about what really happened at Christ’s crucifixion.

In this novel, Mary’s final days are filled with a sort of interrogation by two disciples (two of of the epistolarians, so maybe James and Timothy, or maybe not) who want to hear Mary recount Jesus’s life and death and resurrection not as she remembered it but as they wanted to write the story.

“They caught one another’s eyes and for the first time I felt the enormity of their ambition and the innocence of their belief.”

“Who else knows this?”
“It will be known,” one of them said.
“Through your words,” I asked.
“Through our words and the words of others of his disciples.”

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday.

Anton Zuiker ☄