Who was Maria? An explanation

As I mentioned in my own story, when I was young we lived in a border town. I guess I’ll just go on and name it. It was El Paso. Juarez is the city right across the river. My parents were very active in working with poor people in Juarez, and I spent a lot of my childhood going back and forth across the Rio Grande.

Somehow in all the trips over the border and whatnot, my parents became aware of a family with a 4-year old daughter whose arm had been badly scalded when her mother accidentally spilled boiling beans on her. It was a very serious burn. With no medical attention and in appalling conditions, the chance of infection was very high.

So it happened that she came to live with us for a few months until her arm healed to the place where infection wasn’t a danger. I was 6 or 7 at the time. She spoke no English, though she and my little brother got along just fine with him gesturing and making up his own version of Spanish.

We lived in this tiny little tract home - about 1200 square feet. It was certainly modest by American standards, but it was a wonderland to her. She had never seen a TV, never had a long, hot bath in clean water. Did she ever clean her plate at dinner!

My mother tells me that when they brought her back to her family, she cried and did not want to go. Her parents loved her. She was little and only understood that her belly was full at the big house.

Can you imagine her mother's pain, taking her child back into poverty, knowing that her little girl wanted to stay with strangers because she was hungry? It hurts to think about it.

When I refered to Egypt and Judea, I was remembering the story in Matthew of Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt with baby Jesus. They were running from Herod, who slaughtered the children in and around Bethlehem. They had to go to a strange land to protect their baby.

That's what Maria's mother did for her. She took her child to a foreign land to protect her from the "twin Herods" of hunger and infection.

I don’t know anything about Maria now. I only assume she has children of her own because that is about all that poor women in border towns can do. If indeed she has children, they are surely the least and the smallest.

Jesus said, “Whatever you do for the least of these, you have done for me.”

That would make Maria, who watches over the last of these, the very mother of God, as I read it.

Preacher

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