Twenty-seven years ago, I never would have thought that I had anything in common with Our Lady. Actually, twenty-seven years ago, I thought I was quite the opposite of her. Pregnant not through a profound openness to God’s love and plan for me, but through the desperate grasping at a counterfeit love, I could not have been further away from the love of the Father and His plan for me—or so I thought. 

God absolutely does work in mysterious ways. 

Even though my fiat was not an acceptance to carry the Son of Man, it was to open wide my heart and body to the gift of life already stirring in my womb. It was to say yes to a mystery that I couldn’t yet comprehend, yes to a trust that I didn’t yet have, and yes to a vulnerability despite a closed heart. The first month was a battle of survival. 

It was my “agonia,” my wrestling with the devil. 

A blood-thirsty Satan wielded all he could muster, throwing me into despair, clouding my eyes, closing my heart with fear. 

“You’ll ruin your life,” one person told me if I continued the pregnancy. 

“It’s not a big deal,” another who had an abortion had said. 

“Nine months is a very long time,” the “counselor” at Planned Parenthood said. Back and forth I went, abort or carry, fear or hope, open or close. 

“Lord help, Lord help me,” I pleaded, “I cannot see.”

Then somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered a priest who heard confessions at a particular Church on Sundays, and off I went. God’s loving mercy pierced the darkness through the gentle words of this priest – “piece of cake” and “what a blessing,” were drops of ointment on a cracked and bleeding heart. 

Absolution was given and received, and the darkness lifted. What followed was certainly no piece of cake. Still, the compassionate words of this father to a broken and lost prodigal daughter gave me the hope and peace that I desperately needed…be it done unto me…

Over the following months, as this child, this daughter was nurtured in the safety and warmth of my body, I too was being nurtured in the safety and warmth of a little chapel, a womb of the Church, a little womb of Our Lady, that I had discovered nearby. 

Daily I would go to Mass in this little chapel and afterward just sit. Just sit and encounter Our Lord physically and spiritually, staring at the crucifix suspended above the altar. And there I learned about love, a love that hangs from a cross willingly, a love that breaks open a heart so wide and vast and stretches it beyond its limits yet does not destroy it, a love that would die to itself in order to give life to another. And in the course of these months, that love would become a reality to me. Though I had not seen this little child in my womb, I was madly in love with her and would have done anything for her. Even if that anything meant letting her call another “mommy.” And that was my anything and my everything. I gave everything I had because all I had was her. 

And like Our Lady, I was, in a certain sense, being prepared to give birth for the world.