It was the fourth station of the cross. Jesus meets his mother.  

And still, Ethel wasn’t crying.  

The church was too cold. The acoustics were too echoey. Her classmates recited the prayers in practiced unison, their voices weaving through the pews like incense. Ethel kept herself voiceless, mouthing the syllables arrhythmically. Her knees ached from the fourth genuflection.  

The melodic voice of the priest instructed everyone to kneel once more. Ethel didn’t follow. She slipped sideways instead, stepping into the side aisle where the stained glass windows lived.  

There, in the quiet corridor of color and light, the baby Jesus smiled.  

The window was warm with afternoon sun, painted in blues and golds and that otherworldly pink only saints and seraphs could wear. Jesus, swaddled in His mother’s arms, glowed like a secret. Mary’s face bent toward Him, soft and shadowed. Joseph stood behind, one hand on her shoulder—and above them, a star, like an open wound in the sky.

Ethel steps closer to the window. The colors shift across her uniform—blood-red on her arms, gold on her chest, as if she’s been marked. But she doesn't feel holy. Just human. Small. Curious.

The girl had passed this window a hundred times, but today, it snagged at something.  

This boy. This baby. Everyone talked about the crown of thorns, the nails, the sacrifice. How He bore the sins of the world. How He was beyond a man. But she looked at the soft curl of His infant hand, the roundness of His cheeks, and she didn’t see the God. 

She saw someone's baby boy.

She was supposed to think of the Passion today—the lashes, the burial, the resurrection. The agony. But Ethel couldn’t stop thinking of Jesus as this.

She tried to imagine the boy in the window growing up.

A boy who probably fell and scraped His knees on cobblestones. Who may have lost His breath laughing too hard. Who was rocked to sleep when storms frightened Him. Who cried when Joseph raised his voice.

What kind of boy was He?

Was He funny? Did He sulk when His mother told Him no? Did He ask too many questions at the temple? Did He have a best friend He whispered secrets to under fig trees? Did He dread the weight of what He’d grow up to carry?

And what if Jesus got lonely?  

What if He was too tired to be kind sometimes? What if He didn’t understand what was being asked of Him? It must have been so scary to the mind of a child.

They never talked about that Jesus in class. No one mentioned how Joseph taught Him to plane wood and sand corners. No one mentioned how Mary must have sung Him to sleep, trembling at the knowledge that her child was born to be sacrificed. It was always miracles and martyrdom, always God—but never a boy.

Ethel pressed her fingers against the glass, tracing the outline of Mary’s face. She imagined the weight of that baby in her arms—not the Messiah, not the Savior. Just her child. Her boy. 

Ethel blinked, suddenly aware of the stillness. The footsteps and prayers had faded into the background. She was alone.  

Outside, the trees swayed under an April sky. Inside, colored light clung to her sleeves. 

Ethel breathed. She looked back up at the stained glass baby. It was strange. Today was supposed to be about the cross; all she could think about was the cradle.

A baby who would be broken. A boy raised knowing He would die. A child who will one day ask His father, ”if you are willing, let this cup pass from me.”

That was a son, begging His father to make the inevitable pain bearable. 

What must that have been like?

Maybe holiness wasn’t only in the miracles. Maybe it was in the ache of growing up, in the quiet courage of being ordinary before you’re asked to be anything else. Perhaps it was the bravery of surviving a childhood built upon your inescapable death.

Ethel wasn’t ready to believe again—not fully, maybe not ever. But maybe it was enough, for now, to wonder. Not at the divinity of Jesus, but His humanity.

It was enough to think about a Palestinian boy from Nazareth who learned to walk, read, and build. Who sat on His mother’s lap and played with other kids and laughed and lived. Before the crown. Before the nails. Just a child, once.

Ethel cast one last glance at the window before rejoining the herd. She knelt with her hands folded.

This time, she whispered the prayers. Not to the God on the cross.

But to the boy in the glass.  

- Beatrice Diane D. Bartolome
(Illustration by Erika Marie Ramos/FEU Advocate)