The Other Mothers Under the Cross

The Romans erected three crosses on Golgotha the day Jesus of Nazareth was put to death. The middle cross bore the savior, and the other crosses bore thieves or criminals -- depending on the translation you read. All four Gospels narrate this event.

Though Luke mentions women who stood weeping at a distance, and John tells us that women, including Jesus’ mother Mary, stood weeping under Jesus’ cross, none of the Gospels mentions the other women who might have wept on Golgotha that day or in the potter’s field when Judas took his life.

The mothers not mentioned in the Gospels confront me as we approach the end of this Lenten season, and have done so since Sept. 18, 2001, when I became one of them. I now find myself standing with Mary, the sorrowing mother of the innocent victim, as well as with the mothers of the guilty. I do not know the role my daughter played in her death, nor have the police or medical examiner been able to determine how and why she died. There are, of course, several different possibilities -- none of which belong in the life of a funny, generous and loving but troubled young woman, the child who wept with me over the losses thousands of women experienced on Sept. 11, 2001, and whose violent death a week later united me with them.


Before Francesca died, I’d empathized with women who must bear the burden of unknowing, those whose children’s deaths remain unresolved. I also grieved for those who had no doubt, who knew their children died as victims of murder or war or suicide. I knew that they too had loved their children no matter what identity those children wore to death. I participated in their sorrow from a distance. Until Sept. 18, I had not considered that other mothers might have stood with Mary on Golgotha, or in the potter’s field, grieving their shattered children on the day Jesus died. I now know that when those three crosses cast their shadows across the horizons of the earth, they united all of us who mourn.

©Beryl Singleton Bissell

Adapted from an article published in the New Catholic Reporter, 2006

Our lovely larcenous mess

What was I doing at a concert on the night of 9/11/01 among a swaying praising group of evangelicals when my heart was sick with grief over the tragedy taking place in New York?

What was I doing at a Praise God concert when I should have been at home waiting for my daughter who was driving 254 miles to be with me on that awful day?

What was I doing keeping my daughter waiting, when this was the last visit she’d ever make; when the following week -- on the same day, and at around the same hour -- a bullet would take her young life.

The nation was suffering, my daughter was suffering, and this group of traveling gospel singers was singing songs of joy and the audience was on its feet singing with them.

The concert was meant to be one of praise, to be worship-filled and trusting, but I found it inappropriate and shallow: the waving arms and swaying bodies a pretense of praise in a time of agony.

I was in anguish to leave that concert. My daughter was coming home and I'd put a prior commitment before her needs. I'd been consumed with worry about her and now that she was coming home, reaching out to me, I wasn't there to greet her. Instead she had to wait hours for my return.

As I sat there, shuddering inwardly throughout the entire event, I wanted to gather the elderly women I'd offered to take to this concert, and flee from that temple back home to my daughter. Instead I waited for it to end, and afterwards agreed to stop for a bite to eat on the way home.

What a mistake. Francesca was huddled on the couch watching the replay of the 9/11 events when I got home. I took her in my arms and held her close. She'd come home because she wanted to be with her mother, because she was afraid, because she was reaching out instead of pulling away.

That night she asked me if she could move back home with us. I said yes . . . and then I let her leave to get her things. Letting her go was an even greater mistake than not being there to greet her when she arrived that night.

“Accepting ourselves means accepting the whole package, the whole sour and sweet, lovely and larcenous mess that we are” says Philip Simmons in Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, a book of powerful, illuminating essays he wrote during the final stages of ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), his promising literary career cut short at the age of 35.

It is so hard to accept this “lovely and larcenous mess that we are,” isn’t it? We look on our mistakes as failures, especially when the results are so devastating.