The Blessing of Motherhood

 Mother of God, Mystical Rose

Happy Mother's Day to all mothers, grandmothers, godmothers, and those who mother the world! Motherhood is a distinguished vocation. At Mass yesterday, Father Jim gave a homily about the nature of God's love being compared to the way a mother loves. He said that motherly love is the overwhelmingly most common example the Bible gives us to know the abundance of the unconditional love of our Father in heaven.

I am blessed today with a husband and child, both of whom, in their own ways, made me a mother. I am blessed with my own mother and two grandmothers being alive, and I got to see them all today. I am also blessed with the great-grandmothers I was privileged to know while they were still living, and those whose existence led to my being alive today, but who I will not meet until I see them after my own death.

And this year, I am blessed to honor and love Mary, the Mother of our Lord, as my own, spiritual Mother. I thank and praise Jesus for giving her to all of us from the cross. The last thing He did to complete his Passion before He died was to say, "Behold your mother" to his beloved disciple, who is symbolically all of us, His brothers and sisters.

As an added bonus, Mother Earth has blessed us with perfect weather and roses in full bloom--in May! If we could behold all of the beauty around us at once, I do not think we could stand on our own two legs for even a moment, so crushingly, achingly glorious is all of God's creation. Such astounding, overwhelming Beauty, we cannot begin to comprehend it. So we gaze into the faces of our mothers. We breathe deep the fragrance of a single rose. We behold the mother bird feeding worms into open beaks and know that even in the smallest of ways, God's maternal love is never ending and can be found everywhere we turn.