Dear Friends,
Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms in our community!
One of the blessings and curses of the Catholic priesthood is the charism of celibacy. It has created for me a place where I am able to be a part of so many people’s lives where I can intimately observe the working of human love. However, it has also removed from me the experience of having my own children and being with them as they grow and embrace the life God gives them.
Just this past week, I met with a family as they planned a funeral for a 96-year-old mother who dedicated her life to caring for her spouse (who suffered a stroke in his forties), her children and grandchildren. She modeled, in their words, the power of self-sacrificial love. I also met with young couples preparing for marriage who dream of being able to offer that same fullness of love to their children. I spent time with families who are suffering and others who are ill. Every one of them became for me the incarnation of love.
In my observation, parenting has got to be the biggest act of faith a person can take. Parents pour themselves into these young souls, knowing that they won’t see the fruit of that labor until well past the time that they can fix it. In faith, they plant seeds and water them and try to provide the most nourishing soil, but in the end can only pray and wait to see what will grow. I have often used the example of parents giving their children car keys when they turn sixteen as the greatest act of love and faith. They could keep their children locked up in the basement and then they would never have to worry about what will happen to them, but that would not be love. Love sets children free. Mothers know this truth all too well. Love involves risk and love suffers.
When I have been on retreat at Cloisters, I have spent long periods contemplating their copy of Michelangelo’s Pieta. The Pieta is a statue of a mother doing what every mother fears – holding her dead son. She could not keep Jesus safe. The very fact that she was human doomed him to pain and death. There were times when she did not understand or doubted who he actually was. Remember the times in scripture that his family came to take Jesus home? Perhaps sometimes Jesus seemed to Mary to be just a homeless, unemployed rebel. She might have wondered why he didn’t come home and just be a carpenter. We know that his death was the beginning of the Kingdom, but none of the people around him, including Mary, understood that transformation while he was dying.
Mary simply trusts Jesus. Mary embraces her son’s death. Without knowing what we know, she holds him as if it were his birth. She is at peace, not because she did not care about her son, but because she loved him more, not less. She loved him enough to love even what seemed to be the mess of his life and death. She loved God enough to love the fullness of the call that He had given her. Mary was not naïve, not immune to pain, and not privy to the secrets of God. Bravely, she brought her child into the world and embraced his death which she could not understand.
Mothers help us to see the power of God’s love as they give so generously of themselves for their families. We honor them today for all they have done for us. Perhaps St. Paul’s description of love will describe motherly love: patient, kind, not jealous, not pompous, not rude, not seeking its own interests, not quick tempered, not brooding over injury, not rejoicing with wrong doing – it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This love never fails.
Peace,
Fr. Damian