I’ve been feeling my mother around me lately. That’s not strange in any way since her birthday was the first day of May and one of her great loves was flowers. The beauty of flowering trees and bushes in addition to the daffodils, now past their prime, tulips and other spring glories, and the promise of roses, especially the roses…all speak of God’s generosity to me. And that word of God is synonymous with “motherlove,” wrapped in the smile of my mother.
If I sound too starry-eyed, please forgive me for my excess. The truth is that I won the parental lottery in this lifetime and it’s difficult not to shout about it although I rarely do because I know others have not been equally blessed. If I were given the opportunity to list my mother’s three best gifts to me, I would likely speak of her love of and faithfulness to God and the Holy Family (Jesus, Mary & Joseph), her lovely voice that she often exercised in church and shows and parties with friends, and her smile, generously bestowed on her family, her friends and basically anyone who crossed her path. My aunt – her sister – told me once that my mother was “the happy one.”
The bottom line of what she taught? It’s all about love, pure and freely given love and that’s the best lesson a person could impart. Happy Mother’s Day!
Often a saint’s memorial in the Church calendar brings lots of diverse thoughts to mind. Today Christianity celebrates the feast of St. Monica whose son, St. Augustine of Hippo, had much more overt influence on Church practice than she did. Monica has special remembrance, however, in the lives of Christian mothers who trust God to hear their prayers for their children. Monica is remembered for her perseverance in prayer and thereby credited in large part with the conversion of her son. Clearly, the story of their lives is more complex than that and other influences on Augustine (e.g. St Ambrose) had a part to play. Nevertheless, Monica has been a friend of mothers down through the ages.
Although I have never birthed a child I have, in my years of teaching and then ministering in a parish, come to understand the joys and sorrows of motherhood. I have watched mothers love their children through celebratory days in church and school and family life. I have listened to mothers lament behaviors that they did not understand in the lives and loves of their adult children and on occasion I have suffered with them because I loved their children too. Love has a way of breaking us open both in joy and sorrow, taking us out of ourselves to a greater capacity than we could ever imagine in ourselves.
I have lots of people whose birthdays I remember and I celebrate them at least in my mind if not with a card, a call, or (these days) with an e-mail. Today Eastern and Western Catholic Churches celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary – a birthday I always mark with a smile and/or a prayer of gratitude for her role in our life. This morning I wondered who came up with this date as probably no birth certificate exists to prove her arrival and most of what we know from that time is less than an exact science. What I found was that the first written mention of Mary’s birth was in the apocryphal text called the Protoevangelium of James, a document probably in its final written form in the early second century. It speaks of her parents, Joachim – a wealthy member of one of the tribes of Israel – and Anna, but is not clear about where or when she was born. Some accounts speak of Nazareth as her birthplace and some say it was a house near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem. The date for commemoration of her birth was logically set, but not until the sixth century, as nine months after the celebratory date of the Immaculate Conception.
