Finding a Mother in Mary

I lost my mother. Then, in the most unlikely of circumstances, I began to understand why Catholics call Mary theirs.

The first time I prayed the Rosary, I was sitting beside my sleeping son on a cancer ward, desperately trying to make sure nobody noticed what I was doing.

I had a pair of headphones on, a guided prayer playing through my phone and a string of beads concealed as discreetly as possible in my hands.

I was behaving as though I’d smuggled some sort of witchcraft device onto the ward.

Quite what I imagined would happen if somebody spotted me, I couldn’t say. Perhaps a nurse would summon a priest. Perhaps I’d be politely escorted off the premises for practising medieval sorcery.

It was all thoroughly ridiculous.

And yet, there I was.

To understand how I ended up in that rather peculiar situation, I need to go back a little.

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A mother-shaped absence

My Mom died in August 2025.

There’s something profoundly strange about losing a parent. The world continues exactly as it did before, yet something fundamental has disappeared from yours.

You can remember their voice. You can recall conversations, mannerisms, the ordinary little things you never thought to treasure quite so carefully.

But you cannot pick up the phone.

There is a particular kind of permanence to that absence.

I was still finding my feet with Christianity at the time. My journey into faith had begun in circumstances that were, frankly, about as far removed from a conventional religious conversion as you could imagine.

Those who have read The Pizza Place Providence will remember the episode in Chapter Four involving Sophie, two Pizza Huts, a technological catastrophe and a church we hadn’t intended to visit.

It was there, after Sophie asked to light a candle for her Nanny, that I impulsively asked somebody whether they had a Bible.

They gave us two.

When I got home, I placed them on the table and found myself behaving very strangely around them.

They sat amongst the usual collection of charging leads, junk mail and half-finished glasses of squash. I wasn’t entirely sure what the etiquette was. Could I put a mug beside one? Was I supposed to keep it somewhere respectful? Did it belong on the bookshelf with everything else?

I found the whole business faintly unsettling.

Eventually, I opened one and attempted to read John’s Gospel.

“In the beginning was the Word…”

I read it several times. The words seemed to float past me without ever quite landing. The language was abstract, the concepts unfamiliar and I came away with the distinct impression that the Bible had been written for people who already understood it.

I had entered a world whose language I couldn’t speak.

In the months that followed, I began to learn that language, slowly and often rather clumsily. The Anglican Church became my spiritual home, and through it I discovered a faith that has changed how I understand almost everything.

But the absence of Mom remained.

And then life delivered another blow.

Life on the cancer ward

My son Jack was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia.

We found ourselves at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, living in a world of chemotherapy, blood counts, bone marrow biopsies and the complicated business of trying to remain reasonably optimistic while being absolutely terrified.

For around three months, my wife Nicole and I operated something resembling a military shift pattern.

One of us stayed at the hospital with Jack while the other returned home to look after Sophie. We swapped daily. For weeks on end, we were barely in the same building, let alone the same house.

It was an exhausting, disorientating existence.

The peculiar thing about living on a cancer ward is the amount of time you have on your hands.

There are moments when you’re desperately needed. Things to organise, questions to ask, practical jobs to do and, above all, a son who needs his dad.

But there’s also an enormous amount of sitting around.

Waiting for results. Waiting for treatment. Waiting for a doctor to appear. Waiting for the next blood test to tell you whether you can allow yourself a little optimism.

It was during these long, strange days that I began writing the journal entries that eventually became my book.

I also spent an extraordinary amount of time researching Christianity.

My research had become increasingly meandering by this point. One question would lead to another, an article to a video, a video to an unfamiliar theological term, and before long I’d find myself reading about something I hadn’t even heard of that morning.

I was discovering that Christianity contained an astonishing depth of history, traditions and practices that had been almost entirely invisible to me for most of my life.

Some of these belonged to the Anglican tradition I was beginning to love. Others led me towards Catholicism, a Church I knew relatively little about beyond the usual cultural stereotypes.

Then, one day, I came across the Rosary.

I knew roughly what it was. I’d seen the beads, obviously, and had some vague notion of Catholics reciting prayers to Mary.

I looked into it.

I didn’t get it.

Why repeat the same prayer over and over? Why ask Mary to pray for us when we could simply pray to Jesus? And what was the significance of these mysterious ‘mysteries’?

It seemed unnecessarily complicated.

But I was desperate.

Jack had completed his first round of chemotherapy, and the news from his bone marrow examination wasn’t what we’d hoped for. There were more blast cells remaining than the doctors would have liked.

Their concern was evident.

By then, we had become reasonably accomplished at reading medical faces. The slightest hesitation, the careful choice of words, the tone of a consultant’s voice. We noticed everything.

And what we were noticing frightened us.

So, despite understanding precious little about it, I ordered a Rosary from Amazon.

Because apparently that was where my spiritual journey had reached.

Another strange object

I swapped with Nicole and returned home.

The following day, the Rosary arrived.

I opened the parcel and found myself examining this little string of beads and its crucifix.

I sat holding it, turning it over, running the beads between my fingers.

And then something peculiar happened.

I recognised the feeling.

It was the Bibles all over again.

There was that same inexplicable sense of possessing something significant without really understanding why. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do with it, how to handle it, or even whether I had any business using it.

A grown man, a reasonably intelligent one by most conventional measures, sitting in his own home feeling strangely self-conscious about a string of beads he’d bought from Amazon.

I had to laugh at myself.

Eventually, I stuffed it into my overnight bag, ready for my return to the hospital.

That evening, Sophie and I went to the pub for something to eat.

Life carried on, as it always does. We ate, talked and tried to enjoy a little normality before the next changeover.

The Rosary remained in my bag.

The following day, I returned to Jack.

Hail Mary, full of grace

At some point during that day, with Jack asleep beside me, I retrieved the Rosary.

I found a guided version online, plugged in my headphones and began following along.

I tried to keep the beads hidden.

There was something faintly embarrassing about the whole exercise, as though I were participating in a religious ritual I hadn’t been properly invited to.

The prayers began.

Our Father.

Hail Mary.

Glory Be.

Then more Hail Marys.

And more.

I was trying to follow the instructions, keep track of the beads and understand what the person in my headphones was telling me to contemplate.

The mysteries seemed particularly abstract.

I understood that they related to events in the life of Jesus, but the relationship between contemplating those events and repeatedly reciting the Hail Mary was completely lost on me.

The whole experience reminded me of opening John’s Gospel for the first time.

Here was another ancient Christian practice that clearly meant an enormous amount to millions of people, and I was struggling to understand even the basics.

I persevered.

I’m not sure I would describe that first Rosary as an especially profound spiritual experience. I certainly wasn’t suddenly overcome with some dramatic sense of heavenly presence.

I finished the prayers feeling rather awkward, mildly confused and still very much in need of help.

I put the beads away.

Then I returned to the familiar business of sitting beside my son and waiting.

Three doctors

The following day, the doctors came back.

There were three of them.

Jack and I exchanged a look.

By this stage, we’d spent enough time on the ward to recognise certain patterns.

One doctor generally meant a routine update. A check-in. A discussion about blood counts or the next stage of treatment.

An entourage meant something significant.

The previous significant development had been bad.

We braced ourselves.

But something was different this time.

Their manner was peculiar. They seemed almost confused, perhaps even slightly apologetic.

They weren’t particularly downbeat, which was encouraging, but neither did they appear to be delivering straightforward good news.

It was impossible to read.

Jack and I looked at one another again.

They began explaining that they’d looked at his bone marrow sample again.

Something about it wasn’t making sense.

The sample, as they were now interpreting it, didn’t appear to show what they’d previously thought it showed.

I struggled to follow the explanation.

I could see that they were struggling to explain it.

Eventually, I interrupted with what seemed to me a fairly reasonable question.

Was this better or worse?

Better, they confirmed.

In fact, it now appeared that Jack was in remission.

Remission.

That word.

A word we’d been desperately hoping to hear, and one that had seemed to be retreating further away following the earlier results.

I asked whether somebody had made a mistake when examining the sample the first time.

They neither confirmed nor denied it.

What followed was an explanation that washed almost entirely over us. There was talk of the samples, the interpretation and the unexpected change in what they appeared to show.

But the doctors themselves seemed perplexed.

Their repeated attempts to reassure us carried something of the same underlying message.

Did it really matter how we’d arrived at this news?

The important thing was that we’d arrived.

And, in that moment, they had a point.

After weeks of fear, chemotherapy, sleepless nights and conversations we never wanted to have, somebody had finally walked into that room and told us something wonderful.

We accepted the news with gratitude and relief.

When the doctors left, Jack and I hugged.

For a little while, the world felt lighter.

The beads in the bag

After the excitement had settled, Jack returned to his usual hospital routine.

He put his headphones on, settled back comfortably and began watching his programmes, a contented little smile on his face.

I sat beside him.

I opened my laptop, intending to get a little more writing done.

And then I noticed something.

My Rosary was hanging out of the overnight bag beside my chair.

I looked at it for a while.

The same beads I’d awkwardly concealed in my hands beside Jack’s bed the previous day.

The same prayers I’d struggled to understand.

The same mysteries that had seemed so abstract.

And now, less than a day later, here we were.

I wish I could tell you exactly what happened with those bone marrow results.

I can’t.

Perhaps the original sample had been interpreted incorrectly. Perhaps some aspect of the laboratory process had produced a misleading picture. Perhaps there was an entirely ordinary medical explanation that had simply been communicated badly.

The doctors hadn’t given us a definitive answer.

But the timing was extraordinary.

I had prayed the Rosary for the first time in my life, desperate for my son’s recovery.

And the next day, three doctors had walked into our room, visibly perplexed, to tell us he was in remission.

What was I supposed to make of that?

I sat looking at those beads, trying to process what had happened.

I’d spent much of my life as an accomplished sceptic, quite capable of explaining away almost anything vaguely religious. Coincidences were coincidences. People found patterns because they wanted to find them. Desperate people were particularly susceptible to seeing meaning where none existed.

I knew all those arguments.

I’d made most of them myself.

And I could still make them.

Yet there was something about that Rosary hanging from my bag that I couldn’t quite dismiss.

I reached for my laptop again.

The beads stayed where they were.

But something in my understanding of them had changed.

I have prayed the Rosary ever since.

Behold your mother

That experience left me with questions which have followed me into my continuing exploration of Christianity.

I was confirmed in the Anglican Church, a Church which welcomed me when I was grieving, confused and taking my first uncertain steps in faith. I have enormous affection and gratitude for the people who helped me find my way.

More recently, I’ve felt increasingly drawn to explore Catholicism. There are questions about Church history, authority, apostolic succession and the Eucharist which I find fascinating, and which have challenged some of my previous assumptions.

I’m currently attending the Catholic Church’s initiation programme, RCIA, and spending time at Mass, while continuing to reflect on the faith and community through which I first came to know Christ.

I haven’t settled the question of where I ultimately belong denominationally.

There is a great deal to think through, and I’m conscious of how recently I would have dismissed almost all of this as complete nonsense.

But one subject keeps drawing my attention.

Mary.

Coming from my Anglican background, I understood her importance in the Christmas story. She was the young woman who said yes to God’s extraordinary plan, giving birth to Jesus and raising him.

I admired her faithfulness and courage.

But the extent of Catholic devotion to Mary puzzled me.

The statues. The prayers. The titles. The extraordinary reverence shown towards someone who, however remarkable, was still a human being.

And especially this idea of Mary as Our Mother.

I struggled with that.

Then I began to spend more time with John’s Gospel.

There’s a moment during the Crucifixion when Jesus looks down from the cross and sees his mother standing beside the disciple whom he loves.

He says to Mary:

“Woman, behold, your son!”

And then to the disciple:

“Behold, your mother!”

— John 19:26–27

I’d always understood that passage as Jesus making provision for his mother.

Even in the agony of his final moments, he was ensuring that somebody would care for her.

It’s a beautiful interpretation.

But Catholic teaching sees something deeper in those words.

The beloved disciple is also understood as representing the followers of Christ. Mary’s motherhood extends beyond her relationship with Jesus to encompass the spiritual family of the Church.

She becomes, in this sense, our mother too.

I find that interpretation fascinating.

I’m still exploring the biblical and historical arguments for understanding Mary in this way. I know that Christians from different traditions do not all read this passage identically, and I can appreciate why some might be cautious about drawing wider theological conclusions from it.

Nevertheless, I keep returning to those words.

“Behold, your mother.”

Because I know what it feels like to lose a mother.

And I know what it feels like to sit beside your own child, utterly powerless to protect him from something terrible.

Mary experienced both the extraordinary love of motherhood and the terrible suffering of watching her son die.

When I picture her standing at the foot of the cross now, I see a mother watching her child suffer.

That image means something rather different to me after those months in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

I can barely begin to imagine what she endured.

And the possibility that this same woman might have a continuing maternal relationship with Christians is something I find increasingly moving.

I’m beginning to understand why the idea means so much to Catholics.

I’m also beginning to wonder whether there is more to discover here than I had previously allowed myself to consider.

A mother who points towards her son

One of my continuing questions concerns the Catholic practice of asking Mary to pray for us.

Surely Jesus is the one mediator between God and humanity?

Why involve Mary?

The explanation I’ve encountered is that Catholics distinguish between the worship owed to God alone and the honour given to Mary and the saints.

When Catholics ask Mary to pray for them, they understand themselves to be asking another member of the Christian family, one they believe to be alive with Christ in heaven, to intercede on their behalf.

It’s an idea I’m still working through.

I can appreciate the reasoning, particularly in light of the Christian belief in the communion of saints, while also understanding the reservations held by those who prefer to direct their prayers exclusively to God.

There is also the question of how much of this can be established directly from Scripture and how much depends on the Church’s tradition and teaching authority.

Those are significant questions for somebody trying to discern between Christian denominations.

And I’m taking them seriously.

But my experience with the Rosary has made the discussion much more personal than an abstract theological argument.

The more I’ve prayed it, the more I’ve begun to understand its rhythm.

At its heart are the mysteries of Christ’s life.

His birth, ministry, suffering, death and Resurrection.

We contemplate these events through the prayers of the Rosary, often seeing them from the perspective of the woman who knew him more intimately than almost anybody else.

There is a wonderful moment at the wedding at Cana when Mary notices that the wine has run out.

She brings the problem to Jesus.

Then she turns to the servants and gives them a simple instruction:

“Do whatever he tells you.”

— John 2:5

I’ve come to love that verse.

It captures something fundamental about the Mary I am discovering in Scripture.

Her attention is fixed upon her son. She recognises a need, brings it to him and trusts him to respond.

And I find myself thinking again about that afternoon on the cancer ward.

A frightened father sitting beside his sleeping son.

A string of beads in his hands.

A prayer he barely understood.

I’ve wondered many times since whether there was some significance to that experience beyond the extraordinary timing.

I don’t know.

But it has certainly encouraged me to explore a part of Christianity I might otherwise have dismissed without giving it much thought.

The mother I wasn’t looking for

There’s another aspect of this that I find difficult to explain.

I miss my Mom.

I miss being able to tell her things. I miss knowing that somewhere in the world there is somebody who has known me from the very beginning.

I think about that particularly when something extraordinary happens.

Like being told that my son is in remission.

There are moments in life when you instinctively want your mother.

And I no longer have mine to turn to.

Perhaps that’s why the Catholic understanding of Mary has begun to resonate so deeply with me.

There’s something profoundly comforting about the idea of a maternal presence within the spiritual life of the Church.

Someone whose own life was touched by suffering, fear, love and grief.

Someone who knows what it is to be a mother.

Someone whom Christians have turned to for centuries, seeking her prayers and maternal care.

I can understand the attraction of that.

And I can also understand why the whole subject raises questions for Christians from other traditions.

I’m still working through those questions myself.

My Anglican faith has given me an enormous amount. It was through that Church that I first began to read Scripture seriously, to pray, to receive Communion and to discover what living as a Christian might mean.

Those experiences matter deeply to me.

At the same time, my exploration of Catholicism has opened up a wealth of history, theology and spiritual practice that I find increasingly compelling.

I don’t yet know exactly where that exploration will lead.

Nor do I feel any particular need to pretend that I have all the answers.

There is something rather wonderful about discovering how much there is still to learn.

And Mary has become one of the most unexpected parts of that discovery.

I think back to the day those two Bibles were handed to me in church.

I brought them home, placed them on a table and treated them like mysterious objects whose significance I couldn’t yet grasp.

Months later, another unfamiliar religious object arrived at my house.

I turned it over in my hands, felt strangely self-conscious about it and eventually stuffed it into an overnight bag.

One of those objects introduced me to the words of Christ.

The other has helped me contemplate his life through the eyes of his mother.

And whenever I think of that second object, I return to the same image.

My son, smiling contentedly at his programmes, his headphones on.

Me, opening my laptop beside him.

And a Rosary hanging from the bag at my feet.

I still cannot explain the extraordinary sequence of events surrounding Jack’s remission. I don’t know precisely what happened in that laboratory, or why the doctors’ understanding of his results changed so dramatically.

I know what happened in that hospital room.

I know what I had prayed the day before.

And I know that, since then, those little beads have become a part of my daily life.

There’s a certain irony in all this.

I spent much of my life dismissing religion as superstition, and now I find myself praying the Rosary every day.

I suspect the younger version of me would have had quite a lot to say about that.

But I also wonder what he’d make of the idea that a man who had lost his mother might, through his faith, begin discovering an entirely new understanding of motherhood.

I’m still discerning where I belong within Christianity. Perhaps that journey will ultimately lead me into the Catholic Church. Perhaps it will deepen my understanding of the Anglican faith through which I first encountered Christ.

For now, I’m continuing to read, pray, ask questions and follow where I believe God might be leading me.

And somewhere along the way, a woman I had previously thought of largely as a figure in the Christmas story has begun to occupy a much more significant place in my spiritual life.

I still have plenty of questions about Mary.

But I find myself returning, again and again, to those three words spoken by a dying son from the cross.

“Behold, your mother.”

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