People today have a very poor understanding of what it means to be human.  This is because in order to know what it means to be human two things are necessary: living life and hearing the wisdom of the ages reflecting upon our humanity.  Such wisdom comes from poetry, from hymns, from mythology, from drama (both tragedy and comedy), from philosophy, and from history.

When we shape our vision using these streams, then we have an idea of what humanity is.  It is at this point that we realize that the people who encountered Christ in the New Testament had a coming-to-reality moment with themselves.  Christ revealed to them who they were.

St. Ephrem the Syrian called Him the Mirror.  Christ was the Mirror showing us who we are.  Thus Christ reveals to us who we are.

Christ revealed to us the nature of humanity as it was meant to be and what it could become in Him.  This revelation began with what motherhood means.

Salus Populi Romani icon, 590 A.D.

housed in the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome

Christ’s Revealing Light into Motherhood

The light that the Incarnate Christ shined into the world began with the pregnancy and motherhood of St. Mary.

When He cried, she wiped His tears away.

When He was inconsolable, she was the one who held His hand and rocked Him.

She was the one who held His hands as He learned how to walk.

She was the one to whom He ran when He wanted safety and security.

She was the one from whom He picked up His speech.

She was the one who taught Him how to pray in his humanity.

She watched Him when He played so He wouldn’t wander.

She watched Him when He taught in the synagogues the words of God.

She was with Him when He slept in the manger.

She was with Him when He was laid in the tomb.

She was with John when he ran at the news of the empty tomb.

She did not run because she knew what happened.

If you can’t see anything in the relationship between St. Mary and Our Lord, then you are incapable of Christianity spirituality.  There’s just no way around it.  She is the closest person to our Lord Jesus Christ, and if you can’t learn anything from that closeness, what can you learn?

In the Gospel of Luke, after our Lord Jesus had taught those gathered how to pray and gave some teachings, “it happened, as He spoke these things, that a certain woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You!’

But He said, ‘More than that, blessed are those who heard the word of God and keep it!” (Luke 11:27-28).

What is not readily apparent to English readers is what our Lord Jesus is meaning here.  When the lady tells Him his mother is blessed, His answer is “Yes, indeed.”  The Greek word translated as “More than that” is menoun/menounge which is a word that affirms what one has said and amplifies it further by showing what else supports what she is saying.  So what our Lord Jesus is telling the lady is “She is indeed blessed but even more so because she hears God’s word and keeps it, and all who are like her are blessed.”

In his book Prayer, the patristic scholar and theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar further points out the specificity with which Christ was speaking: “Her ‘breasts’ are blessed only because she has heard the word of God and kept it (Lk 11:27 f), because she ‘kept all these things, pondering them in her heart’ (Lk 2:19, 51).  All contemplation must take its directions from Mary if it is to keep the twofold danger at bay: on the one hand that of seeing the word as something merely external, rather than the deepest mystery within it, that in which we live, move and have our being; and on the other hand the danger of holding the word to be something so interior that we confuse it with our own nature, with a natural wisdom given to us once and for all, to be used at will” (Balthasar, Prayer, 27-28).

And it is there that He reveals something more about motherhood.  A real mother is not just one who feeds you and provides your physical necessities, but also the one who teaches you by her example how to follow God.  The most important things we receive from our parents we do not receive by teaching through words, but by imitation of their life.  We receive their life directly from them, but of course, we have a choice as to which we go.  Some follow their parents’ way of life faithfully and wholly, for better or worse.  If the parents are good, then all good and well.  In the case of our Lord Jesus, His mother was an example of how to keep the word of God in her heart and let it grow and overflow.

Unfortunately, in this generation we have too many moms who treat their children as their friends, especially mothers who have daughters.  And as such, the children do not quite learn what motherhood is.  Maybe this is why so many women (and men) look down upon motherhood today.  They think something along the lines: “Why have a friend who birthed you?  Why birth people who will be your friends?  I get along just fine with my friends; why go through 9 months of discomfort and danger of disease and death, and through childbirth and its dangers, and raising and cleaning after a kid who defecates and urinates on himself or herself, just for a friend.  It seems like overkill.”  If this is all what motherhood was, it definitely is.

But it isn’t.  True motherhood passes down the pattern of life by simply living and being.  What a mother passes down cannot be passed down by simple talking.  A mother is not just a teacher.  A mother is a pattern for life.  She teaches by simply being.

St. Mary became a mother and she did these things by nature.

But humans before Christ shone His light on motherhood, were as it were half awake, or sleepwalking, not knowing what these things meant.  This was no different than slaves not knowing what they do, but they know that they have a task to do.

It was only when God became Man, that He revealed to us what it means to be human.

We saw the meaning.

Christ released us from servitude because true servitude is the inability to see further.

When humans have only been occupied with eating, drinking, and sleeping, they are servants to the cycles of life.  There is no ability to see further into what it means to be human.

But a free person dances with the cycles of life instead of serving them.

Christian motherhood, as exemplified in the relationship between St. Mary and our Lord Jesus Christ, is a stewardship.  Mothers receive their children (or lack of children for those called to other forms of service) from God as a stewardship.  They are to raise these children to become citizens in the Kingdom of God, necessarily learning that pattern of life from their mothers’ way of life more than anything else.  Then on the last day, when all of us stand before the judgment seat of Christ, we will be asked to account for what we did with this stewardship.

But this is not the totality of the relationship between mothers and their children.  It is also a gift.  It is a gift of love, the opportunity to love another human being from start to finish.  The opportunity to enjoy love, so that the relationship is not only good as stewardship but it is also good in itself.

We see both in St. Mary.  She received the stewardship based on the message through the Archangel Gabriel.  She openly consented to this stewardship “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).  We also see the love in her keeping everything she heard about Him in her heart and pondering them.  And we see how strong their relationship was when right before His first miracle, she didn’t even have to ask Him, but only told Him the fact “They have no wine” (John 2:3).  She could read His heart and He read hers.

And we all have a gift that we have received from them: we are invited to join them in this relationship since if we belong to Christ, and she is His mother, then she has become our mother.

May we ever grow in our relationship with Christ by contemplating the relationship between St. Mary and our Lord.

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