Like every other Catholic on the planet, I have been listening to Father Mike Schmitz’s amazing “Catechism in a Year” podcast. And, like all of those other Catholics, I listened to day 132 of that podcast, which happened to fall just a couple of days before Mother’s Day. Ironically, the reading was about Mary, our mother. And I heard Father Mike choke up at the end, while talking about motherhood. Which is especially poignant because his own mother recently passed away.
I feel ya, Father Mike. This Mother’s Day is the third without my mother. It’s still not easy.
I am a huge fan of Mother’s Day, and of motherhood in general. The privilege of bearing and forming children is more sacred and more important than my feeble vocabulary could possibly convey. And it is desperately undervalued in this world. So I am glad we take a day to celebrate it. But I’m not gonna lie — for those of us who are childless and motherless, it can be an especially rough day. A reminder of what we don’t have, and of what in many cases we wish we had.
There is a reason that the barren woman and the orphan were two of the most pitied classes of people in the Bible.
But today I bring happy news to the motherless and the childless. It’s not true. Even though your physical mother is gone, you have a mother. And yes, even though you are childless, you can still in a very real sense be a mother.
How do I know? Because I heard it from two very reliable, very holy people. One was St John Paul II. And the other was St. Benedicta of the Cross, also known as Edith Stein.
Let’s start with St. John Paul II. In his beautiful encyclical Redemptoris Mater, the Holy Father recounts the story that begins in Luke 11:27. Jesus is speaking to a crowd, and a woman cries out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked.” In other words, she is saying something nice about Mary, Jesus’ mother. Jesus’ response, however, is surprising. He doesn’t say “Yeah, my Mom is pretty great isn’t she?” Instead, He turns it around, saying “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”
For years, I found this passage disturbing. It seems like Jesus is dissing his mother, rejecting a compliment on her behalf and instead directing it to some other unidentified, almost mythical person.
But then St. John Paul II set me straight.
First of all, is Jesus really taking attention away from Mary? After all, who heard the word of God and kept it better than she did? St. John Paul II writes. “…at the Annunciation she accepted the word of God, because she believed it, because she was obedient to God, and because she ‘kept’ the word and ‘pondered it in her heart’ (cf. Lk. 1:38, 45; 2:19, 51) and by means of her whole life accomplished it” (Redemptoris Mater, 20).
No, what Jesus is doing here is shifting attention from Mary’s physical motherhood to her spiritual motherhood. He is saying that she is much more than just a biological mother. “…the new and different motherhood which Jesus speaks of to his disciples refers precisely to Mary in a very special way” (Redemptoris Mater, 20).
In doing so, Jesus gives us two very profound insights. First, He extends Mary’s motherhood beyond himself. Way beyond himself. In the flesh, Mary was Jesus’ mother. In the spirit, Mary is mother to all of us. Jesus gives us his own mother. He once again makes that clear when, on the cross, he says to John, “Behold your mother. (Jn 19:25-27). Mary is, as the Second Vatican Council tells us, our mother in the order of grace.
Second, Jesus introduces this idea that motherhood exists not just in the physical realm, but in the spiritual as well. All of us who “hear the word of God and keep it” become mothers in the order of grace.
This is where St. Benedict of the Cross picks up the ball.
Edith Stein never gave birth, never nurtured her own child. But she was a powerful spiritual mother, to those in her own time and to those of us who were not yet alive when she perished at Auschwitz in 1942.
Stein, a devotee of St. Thomas Aquinas, said basically that “form follows function,” and that women’s bodies are clearly designed for motherhood. “The clear and irrevocable word of Scripture declares what daily experience teaches us from the beginning of the world: Woman is destined to be wife and mother. Both physically and spiritually she is endowed for this purpose.”
But this woman, who herself was neither a wife nor a mother, wasn’t saying that all women are called to be physical mothers, but rather that as women our motherhood radiates out beyond biological motherhood, to all we encounter. She said that women, by our nature, are “fashioned to be a shelter in which other souls may unfold. Both spiritual companionship and spiritual motherliness are not limited to the physical spouse and mother relationships, but they extend to all people with whom woman comes into contact.”
Put simply, whenever we bring the love of Christ into the world and into the hearts of those around us, we are practicing spiritual motherhood.
I, as a non-physical mother, am so thankful for the concept of Spiritual Motherhood. I could write a book about it. Perhaps someday I will. But, for now, my word count is coming up. So I will end with an exhortation. Perhaps several.
First, for women: practice spiritual motherhood. Whether you have your own children or not, give life to the love in God in the hearts of those you encounter. Make it your goal. Do it every chance you get. Use all of those motherly instincts to bring love to a world that desperately needs it.
Second, show appreciation to the spiritual mothers in your life — those who have loved you, loved your children, loved the elderly, loved anyone with the heart of a mother.
And finally, remember that even if your earthly mother has left this earthly plane, the one who “hears the word of God and keeps it” is still your mother in Heaven. And while she can’t hug you like your physical mother once could, she can love you. And she can pray to her Son for you.
And that’s something to be thankful for.
