Dear Colleagues,
Does anyone know of cases where a mother prays that if God must take any of
her children, that He take the weakest?
In the autobiographical text I'm working on, the narrator tells how her son
died during a plague while caring for a converso she had saved after a
pogrom and raised as a Christian. (This is the second plague of her
lifetime--in the first she lost her siblings.) She describes a prayer that
she had heard a nun say 7000 times on her knees before a crucifix
("Merciful son of the Virgin, take pity"), and then says: "I placed great
faith in these words and prayed this prayer every night, entreating God
that he should want to free me and my children, and if any of them had to
be taken away, it should be the older one for he was sickly." She next says
that she told her son to watch over the converso "for the love of God",
because there was no one left to do this --13 people had died caring for
him. The son (age 12 & 4 mos.) protests, and she responds: "For the
charitable act I am performing, God will take pity on me." The son becomes
sick and dies. Most scholars look at this episode from a very modern
perspective and blame the narrator for her son's death. They've come up
with many reasons to condemn her, and chief among these is that she "prayed
for her son's death." I know that I've read instances in which a parent
prays that God take the weakest child if He must take any, but I can't
locate any of these now. Any suggestions?
Many thanks,
Jane
Jane E. Connolly
Department of Foreign Languages
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL 33124
Phone: (305)284-5585
Fax: (305)284-2068
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