A Woman Wrapped in Silence

by John W. Lynch

This modern spiritual classic is a touching and human portrait of the woman who was the mother of Christ, drawn with reverence and dignity―a narrative poem of special distinctiveness, universal in its appeal, and written in fluent verse of exceptionally high quality. The book does not draw on legend or easy fancy. Although written before the renewal of scriptural scholarship, the poem's biblical basis remains surprisingly valid. The story of Mary is told completely and with remarkable depth of human insight, and mounts in beauty and power as it goes along, till in the dark, almost unbearably real climax of the pain, the glory, the defeat The long inaugural at Calvary the Woman Wrapped in Silence becomes wholly magnificent in her last Tremendous majesty. †

Genres: Poetry, Catholic

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

Reviews

[booklady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anything I could write about this book wouldn’t begin to do it justice. Whatever your faith background, whether or not you are Catholic or even Christian, male or female, even if—like me—you aren’t a huge fan of poetry, but especially if you are, this is an incredible book. It’s a sleeper in need of waking.

It starts off quietly seeming to be using too many words to say little. I stopped reading it first time; am SO very glad I went back. The second time it captured me. Even so it is poetry, or poetic, so there is no skim reading. It lacks couplets and rhyming schemes, but still, as in all good prosaic literature, the mind and spirit are ‘on the slow-bound train’ forced to savor and allowed to soar.

Lynch’s words are interspersed with Scripture verses where appropriate. He provides some speculative scenes, but they are so delicately handled and tied to what is known as to seem woven from one cloth.

The most profound aspect of the book was that as it went along, there was less and less to describe more and more. As we all know, the most important events in Our LORD’s life came at the end and they would have affected His mother—any loving mother—certainly the mother of Jesus in such a way as none can imagine. And yet in Sacred Scripture, all her words come in the early days of Jesus’s life. She is silent after that—when others might have protested most vehemently; she was a Woman Wrapped in Silence, beneath the Cross, beside the Tomb, in the Upper Room.

Here too, she slowly slips from view, enveloped in obscurity, disappearing, like the moon below the horizon ... ever pondering The Word.




==========================================

September 25, 2017: He said in reply to the one who told him, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

She did not find He’d spoken
Of rejection or that she was scorned.
If ties were only fastened by a will
That serves His Will, then she might be the first
Of all, and the strongest bound, and in this still
Be His, and even by the sterner judgment,
Still be mother. More than that. She carried
In her heart His certainties, the pain,
The need, the disregarded loneliness,
And all the love He had, and knew they were
The sure reflections of her own.

Oh, if only I could remember to always put Him first when it seems like His Will is a rejection of me. Mary, your humility shames me.


September 15, 2017: The Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Indeed, she was. I was in tears yesterday reading about Joseph's death, one of many things not mentioned in Sacred Scripture, but left to our imagination. Of course Joseph must have died sometime after they lost Jesus in the temple and before Our Lord began His public ministry. Joseph was not mentioned at the Wedding Feast at Cana as he would have been if he were there. And certainly Joseph was dead by the time of Our Lord's crucifixion because Mary was again alone and Jesus gives her to another--the custom for a sonless widow.

Still, it is one thing to imagine that Mary lost her beloved Joseph. It is another to read about it. I felt that I had lost him too.


September 8, 2017: Mary's Birthday. It is not possible to read this book quickly, even if I wanted to. A couple of examples to ponder. Sublime.

From page 6, Above a quiet place, and found, just this,
A woman wrapped in silence, and the seed
Of silence was her heart that tried to give
All that it held to give, and ever more.

From page 39, But it was true. Already many there.
There was no room for them within the inn.
And Joseph turned away. To find again,
A woman wrapped in silence. Had she heard?
No sign appeared, nor stir of tranquil veil
To tell of it. Perhaps she had not heard.
Or was it that whatever rudeness spoke,
Whatever loss or lack of interest,
Colder and more harsh within the dark
Than rudeness, could not mar a calm grown deep
Beneath the weight of time since shadows came
To mark this night begun.



April 30, 2017: I first heard about A Woman Wrapped in Silence from this CD set On Holy Silence* which is based on a 19th century Carmelite nun’s book, The Twelve Degrees of Silence. Sr. Marie-Aimée de Jésus’s book was easy to find and read, although it is not supposed to be read quickly either.

Mr. Lynch’s book is out-of-print. It is not especially hard to acquire but good copies are limited, and it is definitely not a book to whiz through. I tried that already and it did not work. So now I am going to take my time with it. It is a poem about Mary’s hidden life. It is based on Scripture but it is also speculative and mystical. Also very beautiful, but not to be rushed through.

*Both On Holy Silence and The Twelve Degrees of Silence are excellent!

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, beautiful book about Mother Mary. Shoutout Dominican Sisters at fall retreat ‘23 for recommending this and shoutout God for helping me stick to it. There are so many heartwarming, human moments woven into this story, and it does an amazing job giving the reader some semblance of the emotions that Our Lady must have been going through as she journeyed through life. I found the first 1/3 ish of the story kind of hard to get through, but there are so many banger pov’s and food for thought moments throughout the story that I never wanted to stop reading it entirely. Woohoo!! Your turn @Maddie!!!

[Owen Chamness · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really, really beautifully written. I loved reading from the perspective of the blessed mother, and particularly Ioved the sections depicting her relationship with Joseph. However, I found it hard to follow at times, especially when not much narrative advancement was going on.

Awesome book!

[Elizabeth Faustina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was beautiful. The insight into the Holy Family's life, especially Our Lady's, made it so much more personal and lovely. I'd highly recommend.

[Anna Joy]

The WAY I love this book.

I pulled it off the shelf at a used bookstore in Nashville in 2004, because I thought the binding said, “A Woman Wrapped in Science”. On the first page, we learn it is the story of the Virgin Mary, and I stood in that little aisle totally immersed until my friends were begging to leave.

Since that day, if I’m ever supposed to declare a favorite book, this is it.

But you know what? I’ve never read the whole thing before. I’ve kept it like this extremely special bottle of perfume, only using little bits at a time to make it last as long as possible. This year I decided that was silly because I love re-reading things, and books don’t run out.

The whole thing is a poem, and sprinkled throughout the narrative are blocked quotes from Scripture that act as our landmarks. While the story is fictionalized, the author worked hard to keep all of his made up narrative congruous with the factual account we have, and what results is just pure magic.

I’ve never made it to the Crucifixion scene before, and it was brutal. Not just because we’re looking at it from a mother’s lens, but because the descriptions include tiny, sensory details I’ve never heard or thought of before. Like how the crown of thorns tangled in His hair when they removed it to prepare Him for burial.

My copy was printed in 1948 (published 1941), so the pages are fragile, and the cover is disintegrating. But even if you get a new copy, this is not a book to come along with you on your day, to pick up and read bits of here and there. It’s one to read as meditation and as prayer.

I’m so glad to have experienced all of it now, and I can’t wait to keep reading it as long as it’s still in my possession.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The long narrative poem—be it considered an epic or not—is a rare form today. When John W. Lynch published A Woman Wrapped in Silence—1941, from best I can tell—the form was still prevalent in recent memory. Edwin Arlington Robinson, author of poems like Merlin, Lancelot, Tristram, and King Jasper (which had a notable preface by Robert Frost), had just died in 1935; Robinson Jeffers had already published the more well-known poems of his career, like Tamar in 1924 and Cawdor in 1928, though Medea was still to come in 1946. This is to say that Lynch was not alone in his form, however strange it seem today.

Lynch’s style, though, was somewhat odd. His focus was not on the exterior action—as is common in narrative poetry—but on the inner life. For this is a poem of the interior life of Mary. Lynch’s voice is an omniscient narrator, occasionally speaking from the modern day, talking about the differences in what the different Gospels report, or about later traditions, but, in general, his view is limited to what Mary is thinking and feeling. This focus on the interior, while allowing intensive psychological description, leads to an abstracted work. Since the narrator is third person, and it is not Mary herself reporting her experience, there is a kind of calmness that reigns throughout the poem, a coolness, which Lynch’s fluid blank verse supports. Even in the depths of the Crucifixion, the poem is not very fervent: it is a cool, somewhat detached observer calmly reporting on the mother’s inner anguish.

This poem is not in Mary’s voice, and, really, it is almost voiceless: Lynch is scrupulous about not putting any words into the mouths of Mary, Jesus, Joseph, or anyone else. I believe Joseph may have a word or two, but that is all: any other dialogue given is in direct quotes from the Douay-Rheims Scripture. This lends strange gaps to the work, as Lynch often shies away from describing what Scripture states explicitly. In many climactic moments, the poem stops, and prose Scripture is inserted. It gives an odd feel to the work, as in the description of the Annunciation, where Lynch’s verse merely talks around the edges, commenting on how “Luke had words to tell, but Luke’s good words / Are faltering, and halt before they lead / Beyond the outer margins of the light,” or how, to Gabriel’s speech, Mary “Not, ‘Aye,’ returned: not, ‘Aye, for all the tribes / And all the worlds await.’ But secretly, / Uneager, prideless, unafraid, the brightness / Flamed to greater radiance, and then…” her Scriptural response is quoted (7-8).

Throughout the work, Lynch is trying to strike a balance between providing a continuous thread of narrative and keeping strictly to Scripture (as he says in the acknowledgement at the end, he had another priest correct the poem so that it would be brought “scrupulously within the limits of what is factually contained in the New Testament” (277)). Rarely does he bring in anything from legend or tradition, and when he does so, he is very forthright about it, as when he discusses a traditional spot from which Mary is said to have watched when the people of Nazareth tried to drive Christ off a cliff (210-211). Occasionally, he is very harsh about such legends, as when discussing the Flight into Egypt, where he proclaims that people “have been impatient of such wisdom / And have chafed at Matthew and have made / Embroideries of further words to web / The silences he left with intricate / Detailing” (88). Yet Lynch’s whole work is, in a sense, like this: all of the episodes of his poem are “embroideries of further words to web / The silences.” This is not to say that it is wrong for him to do this: it is simply pointing out what he is doing. He is adding to Scripture, however much he claims he is not, by expounding on Mary’s inner life and thoughts.

In general, this expounding aims to portray Mary as any mother, describing her relationship with Christ in ways any mother’s relationship with her son might be described. This can lead to touching passages, such as the description of how Mary felt during her forty days of enclosure after her childbirth, before the Presentation: “And she was grateful then, / That for this little while there was no more / Than time, and no more to be asked of her / Than loneliness with Him” (57). (This could be seen as an idealized version of what all maternal leave should be.)

Lynch’s view of Mary and Jesus’ relationship, though, becomes much more debatable in the latter part of the work, when Jesus is an adult. He portrays Mary as abandoned by Jesus, as shunned by Him, as so often happens with parents and their adult children. That comes through in the Wedding at Cana, at the moment when she and her relatives try to see Him and are rebuffed, and throughout His public ministry. Yet this idea of abandonment continues on: Lynch reads Jesus’ words to Mary and John from the Cross as a disowning of Mary. “He’d asked He be to her no longer son! / He’d severed her from Him! He’d asked not tears, / Nor pain, nor life, He’d asked she turn away / From motherhood! That she unbind her bond / In Him, deny her name, her love, refuse / Her own and grant that He was not and she / No longer be!” (246) And this is not all, for, since Lynch strives to strip away tradition and legend, he cannot even depict a post-Resurrection meeting of Jesus and Mary, since it is not mentioned in Scripture. He tries to find a way, but it is always hedged by backpedaling and uncertainty: since Lynch’s aim is not to fashion a narrative, but to reflect on Scripture, he cannot forthrightly depict what is not there. Even if His meeting with her is granted, though, Lynch cannot let Mary truly feel joy: “He was alive, but He had not returned. / She knew that now. She’d seen Him, but He’d not / Returned. His name had altered. He had gone” (271-272). The Resurrection, instead of bringing joy, brought confirmation of abandonment: “”These were / The hills without Him now. These were His roads / Without the hope that He might pass, or turn / A lane to bring a shadow in this sun. / This was the world without Him, after Him, / The silence when His words had all been said, / And He had gone. This was her own place, lonely, / And she’d come to it” (273). This is a Mary who seems ever alone, ever abandoned, who does not even seem to feel God with her (oddly, He is rarely mentioned in her psyche, at least after the opening sections of the Infancy Narratives). This is an aging mother whose son has left her for good, spurning the one who bore him, and leaving her, a widow, alone forever. “She was / A woman now who was alone with time, / And in her heart, the wait and ache of time” (275). So the poem ends, with an abandoned, joyless, widow.

It is a shocking portrayal compared to typical views of Mary. In reality, it seems like a view of Mary without the supernatural. Mary does not seem to feel God with her, she does not seem to feel part of His plan, after the beginning; this is the Mother of Sorrows, but not the Lady Full of Grace. No one would say to this Mary, “Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia!” For this mother cannot rejoice, while she feels ever absent from all; this Mary is the true Mother of the Disappeared.

If we put aside the debate on how accurate the representation of Mary’s mind is, it’s worth a quick look at the verse itself. Lynch writes in blank verse, unrhymed, loose iambic pentameter, just as Edwin Arlington Robinson did in his narrative poems a decade or two before. In general, Lynch’s verse is very smooth, flowing easily between lines, with almost entirely common words, so that it is a shock whenever he uses a more obscure or poetic words, as when he speaks of “wolves couchant” or says “the sun was lapidist” (89, 155). Though the general style is older—after all, Milton’s epic was in blank verse, as were most of Shakespeare’s plays—there are bits that reflect more modern poetic trends, such as his use of sentence fragments connected by ellipses, or sometimes repetitive lines where the syntax breaks down, as in this description of the nailing of Christ to the Cross: “Then the mounting, breaking ring / Of iron bent again to iron, beating, / Beating, sounding to the air on strokes / Of iron, beating to the skies that filled / And rang and held above the world the iron / Beating down and sounding till no more / Of earth, or life, or memory was left, / But only on the air, the beat of iron, / Iron, sounding, sounding beat of iron” (222). Typically, the verse is fluid and focused on describing the mindset of Mary, without too much attempt to use poetic devices to make individual lines or phrases stand out, though there are occasional instances, as in the phrase, “We must not trust too much / The much too ardent mind,” or the repeated thesis, “His way with men has been to take men’s way” (90, 6). Personally, I like poetry to be more self-consciously poetic; I like the devices, the inversions, the alliterations, the rhymes, all of it, so Lynch’s style is not my favorite, but I think he did it well.

In conclusion, Lynch’s A Woman Wrapped in Silence is a work of a modern mindset, a psychological analysis of Mary that often seems to strip away the supernatural, set in a now archaic form, the blank verse narrative poem. Because of Lynch’s strictness to Scripture, there are necessarily some breaks in the narrative—the lack of a childhood narrative of Jesus, Mary’s almost complete absence from His public ministry—where some poets would use poetic license to smooth it together. (An old example is Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad, a Renaissance Latin epic.). Personally, I found Lynch’s verse a bit too plain much of the time, and I would argue with his characterization of Mary’s relationship with Jesus, and especially with his lack of description of Mary’s relationship with God; however, if I looked at the poem absent the context of Christian tradition and Scripture, I think it powerfully portrays a mother’s sense of estrangement from her grown son. The whole first section of the poem shows the closeness, the deep love of the mother for her child; then there is the break of childhood and early adulthood; when the mother and child meet again, when he is an adult, there is a gap—unbridgeable, it seems—between them, a gap that survives death itself. My rating will reflect my personal feelings towards the work, but, if you wish to see Mary portrayed as the true Mother of Sorrows, to the extreme, then Lynch’s poem is a worthy read.

[Elly Smyczynski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous book about Mary. It is not an easy read but ohhhhh the blessings. One of my all time favorites. I learned so much about this holy woman. I would recommend this book to everyone. I think I have read this book three times.....generally during lent. Awesome.

[Charmaine Saliba · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Woman Wrapped in Silence is written in verse and tells the story of The Mother of God, Mary. It is Beautiful written.

[Anne-Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful interpretation of the life of our Lady as documented in the gospels. Not only does it help you to imagine how our Lady was when she lived on earth but it helps you to enter into the life of the holy family as well. Another silent figure - St Joseph - is also transformed into a living breathing person whose presence is tangible even after his death. And like a mirror our Lady reflects back to us Jesus - her son - in a way that reveals him in a different light that enriches your understanding of the second person of the Blessed Trinity. This is a poem that needs to be read and pondered again and again.

[Miss Clark]

Deeply contemplative and looking at the humanity of Mary and what the Biblical narrative tells us of her life. It fills in the gaps while always staying within the confines of what the Gospels tell us. Very well worth the read.

[Suzette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenging but beautiful read.

[Margaret Hovestadt · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely amazing poem! If you dont like nonrhyming poetry, you wont like this. The entire book is set to a rythm, which makes the life of Mary feel like music.

[Shannon]

Simply astonishing.

[Mary Bowes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary, Joseph, and Jesus come alive in the beautiful imagery of this work.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Started/Stopped this one a couple times but so worth it to get all the way through. A novel characterization of Mary unmatched to any other non-Biblical poetry about her.

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely beautifully written book on the life of the Blessed Mother. It is written in a soul stirring prose, so lovely and resplendent that at times just brought tears to my eyes and lifted my soul. I have never read a book like this before. It also gave me an insight into the Blessed Mother’s life with St. Joseph that was so real and human, so beautiful and intimate that it helped me to see them as real people, living a life like ours, only in perfect conformity to God’s will. Truly, an amazing book!