Today we celebrate Mother’s Day. In each of us, “Mother” evokes a whole spectrum of emotions that echo the personal experience of our own mother, but also collective memories and associations of the Great Mother of all creation.
Images are the first language of the soul, and ‘mother’ symbols from all cultures remind she is the real source of life, in whose womb we grow to pass through to this life. And just as mother’s blood and heartbeat accompanied us in the womb, so, after birth, mother’s warm embrace and milk accompany in our first months of life.
Mother is our safety, comfort, joy and fulfillment. Mother is the one with whom – over and over – we desire to be one, but from whom – over and over – we need to detach in order to become ourselves. The last detachment, the great transition of bodily death and decay, might not be accompanied by a mother figure in this world… but Mother will still greet us on the other side.
As Pope Paul VI reminded in his message to women at the close of Vatican II, as midwives and as death-bed guardians, women are the protectors and tangible presence who guide our souls in earthly life. As Catholics, we also strongly believe that the Mother of God and our own mother is the one who intercedes for us even beyond our earthly finality.
Still, not all life is a reminder of the comforts generously offered by Mother Earth or by our earthly mothers. The passageway, long or short, from first breath to last is also accompanied by daily struggles and suffering. Today in particular I want to remember those mothers who suffer the most: the mothers who tend the wounds of their children, even the mothers who bury their flesh and blood.
On this day when we remember all mothers, let us not only celebrate the joy they bring, but have the courage to remain with them as they bear the horrors of the world on our behalf
I want to remember suffering mothers, because they are also the ones most taken for granted. Women tend to all aching souls through their presence of care, through their tears of lamentation. But who is present to the mother whose heart has been broken by grief and now finds herself inconsolable?
Young men like to think of themselves as heroes through saving a damsel in distress. But true heroism comes in confronting death. The mother who weeps when faced by tragedy is still healing herself and the world. But the mother whose tears freeze, the mother whose broken heart can only occasionally thaw through flairs of rage, the mother who becomes isolated as madness becomes her only way to cope with horror… she is the same mother of life who slowly withdraws the breath of life and becomes death; the mother who in her deep-seated woundedness is abandoned, is left alone, becomes – as so many myths through the ages tell – a personification of death.
On this day when we remember all mothers, let us not only celebrate the joy they bring, but have the courage to remain with them as they bear the horrors of the world on our behalf. Let us stay with both Mother’s warmth and Mother’s wrath… with her kindness, but also the ice of her retribution. The two sides of Mother are true of both our earthly mothers – all women in our lives – but also of our Mother Earth, who will not forgive our abuse and ravaging.
But to carry this responsibility of holding mother, like John, the beloved disciple did after Jesus’ death, we must be transmuted through love to become true children of both our earthly and heavenly parents. This is the wonder and tragedy of our destinies: as physical beings, nothing and nobody ever feels more divine than Mother. But as beings who also have a desire to self-actualise – to be our unique self, manifesting our distinct potential, we need the power of the Spirit. “Father” is the one who accompanies us in this journey to the unknown … but Father is ever inevitably distant, pushing us to dare to accept being cast apart, to submit to the suffering of becoming oneself and thus of bearing one’s own cross to the point of death. There might be a different peace – of resignation, of fulfillment of destiny, of true selfhood – at the end of the Fatherly, heavenly pursuit. But first, we must dare to take the leap: to move beyond Mother, who tenderly cares for our childlike souls, who holds and nurtures our need to belong, to the deadly Mother, who in her deep woundedness needs the balm of acceptance… of love that embraces even death.
nadia.delicata@maltadiocese.org