"Woman this is your Son. Son this is your Mother."

All my life I've suffered from dyslexia, but it was virtually unknown when I was a boy. If the verdict of my teachers was divided between "that boy is stupid" and "that boy is bone-idle", what could my poor mother think about her precious son. What a help it would have been to me if my mother had known about my dyslexia! What a help I could have been to her if I'd only known what I was putting her through!

But what son ever knows and understands what his mother suffers, what she goes through watching her own flesh and blood fall, falter and fail as he gropes his way through adolescence and into adult life. I suppose it's as natural for sons to be absorbed with themselves as it is for mothers to be absorbed in them. There's usually selfishness on both sides, but with Jesus and Mary it was different. Neither of them were stained by the selfishness, the self-absorption that marks the rest of us. However, don't be deceived into thinking this made for a life of uninterrupted bliss. There could be and there were painful misunderstandings, separations and bereavements. If their close intimate and unselfish love for each other quadrupled their mutual happiness, then it did the same for their mutual sufferings too.   read on..............