Dear crew,
The storms of our day are callously crashing upon the sacred reality of what it means to be both a woman and a mother.
Now, as a young male, I’m hardly in a place to understand—let alone speak about—what the mystery of motherhood entails. That said, I’ll steal a snippet from Edith Stein, who writes, “Woman’s nature is determined by her original vocation of spouse and mother. One depends on the other.” Womanhood is rooted in motherhood, even if not literal, biological motherhood; and motherhood is certainly a reality, rooted in the nature of woman, that extends beyond the acts of reproduction and birth. As an example, someone like Mother Theresa was, one could argue, more motherly than most literal mothers.
Regardless, most of us were in fact connected to our mother in a literal and physical sense during our time in the womb, during our birth, and during our first year post-birth; and this was in such an intimate way, that it’s probably best that we don’t remember it. However, it is indeed intimate, incarnate, and beautiful.
The craziest part? God himself chose to enter into this motherly intimacy. It is an intimacy without which the intimacy of our Catholic faith—found most clearly in the Eucharist—would not be. It is a spiritual intimacy that has come down to us as we are, as soul and body composite. Now, I don’t have to be a woman to know that that is something to ponder.
I digress. Here’s my Saturday poem for you. It’s short, sweet, and captures hardly even a sliver of the beauty of motherhood it hopes to express.
Hearts intertwined, they beat in tune;
Blood of thy blood, flesh of thy flesh.
With fiat refrain, your heart to me coos
In constant measure: yes—yes—yes.
Yes—to God’s blessings,
Yes—to my life,
Yes—man’s salvation,
By a mother’s sweet yes,
Hangs in the balance;
And upon it, all rests.
James, as a father, I could not have said this any better. Thank you for trying to remind your peers of the importance of understanding why God created man and woman, and why men such as myself, need to understand the nature and spirit of a woman for the salvation of our children.
You had me smiling at “coos”! Here is to our Mom!