Sixth Sunday of Easter: God is Love (Mother's Day)
In today’s second reading, St. John says: ”Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God…for God is love”. As you’ve probably heard me say, for us who use one word ‘love’ to mean so many different things, we must understand: God is not one type of love among others; God is love. Love is the very essence of His being. And God is not simply another thing in competition for our love; when we love, God is with and in us, because He is love.
And maybe there’s no better meditation than that for Mother’s Day. Since a mother and a mother’s love is intended to reflect God’s love, maybe we could follow that reading inserting the word mother in place of the word God: Love is of a mother….Whoever is without love does not know a mother, for a mother is love. This speaks to the heart of what motherhood is intended to be, even if it’s not always reality. I have no doubt that any mother here would tell us that motherhood and the sacrificial love it demands is seldom easy.
I’ve talked with mothers who—in a moment of exhaustion, chasing tireless toddlers—wondering if they’re really cut-out for it. Or on occasions that they experience the sting from their children, as they reach ages in which they challenge and sometimes dismiss their mother and reject her maternal guidance. I consider what must be the hollow feeling that surely comes when a mother has outlived her child, and for those who have wanted so badly to have a child, but for reasons beyond our knowing, it was not to be.
The institution of motherhood is further challenged in a culture seems to discourage the selflessness that motherhood demands; as though motherhood means unnecessarily surrendering a woman’s personal freedoms and potential for achievement. It seems to persistently tell us that a woman’s greatest achievement is to be more like men, and that this potential is lost in nurturing the feminine ideal and the distinct feminine genius, as St. John Paul II described it.
No doubt, motherhood is central to whatever devotion we bear toward our Blessed Mother Mary. She surely knew what so many of you women know: the inevitable fear and uncertainties that come with the responsibility of giving her body over to the life of a child within her. She surely knew that it would come with sacrificing any number of things in order to protect and sustain that new life. And she must have known the pain that would come with seeing her child rejected and even killed. While no mother, no woman, would ask for that, it is love: love born of personal freedom.
There are so many beautiful artistic presentations of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but those that resonate most profoundly to me are those in which she is holding Jesus. In the cathedral in Toledo, Spain there is a beautiful statue, in which Mary holds her toddler[1], Jesus, in her left arm. What we usually see in such art is her face looking straight ahead, into our eyes, with a more serious, perhaps even stern, facial expression. In this statue, one instead, sees Mary with eyes locked on the child bearing a playful grin, as Jesus touches the chin of his mother, mirroring a smile and joy in his mother. Images like that of Mary, so lovingly holding Jesus, help me to better understand how God loves and rejoices in all of us. It tells us that God loves and rejoices in us like a mother loves and rejoices in her baby.
On this Mother’s Day, may we rejoice God’s love—especially as it is revealed in our mothers, those living and those who have gone before us: in these women who for our benefit echoed Mary’s fiat: “Let it be done to unto me”; these women who gave (and give) up their freedoms for us, their children; these women who accept the uncertainties and tireless work of caring for us; these women who endure the heartaches that motherhood can bring, including the heartache that can come with an inability to bear children. But let us not only rejoice in maternal love; let us honor it by responding in kind.
Trusting in a mother’s love, we call upon the prayers of the Mother of us all: Holy Mother of God…pray for us….Mother of divine grace….Mother most pure….Mother most amiable….Mother most admirable….Mother of good counsel…. Mother of our Savior…. pray for us.