Happy Mothers' Day!

Dedication: to all the mothers, physical and spiritual.

Mother Mary, pray for us!

The Dominican perspective has recently brought my attention to the connection of the word mother in Latin to the word matter and hence to the presentation of an intellectual argument for the consideration of mother earth which defends not only the sanctity of our physical nature, but also its revelation in a profound way of God's presence through His gift of motherhood.  While the gift of fatherhood involves a certain distance and separation from and hence image of the transcendence of God, the gift of motherhood that reveals God's presence in a particular way through the body because of giving life through her body presents to us the immanence of God.  He is not only transcendent, but immanent, closer to us than we are to ourselves as Saint Catherine of Siena would say.

 

Often the Gnostic error creeps in by one way or another that the natural and physical is bad while the supernatural and spiritual is good, but both are necessary for us to be a complete human person and both are good.  Saint Thomas Aquinas points us to how the order of nature and the order of grace work together in his much-quoted and often mistranslated phrase: "Grace perfects nature."  We do not need to disdain the natural world and all that is created, but to allow grace to perfect it.  We can never destroy our physical nature and become like the angels, for that would be to lose something precious to our very being--so precious that Christ Himself chose to make a marriage of mankind to God by taking on human flesh through a Mother.  Hence in a particular way the gift of motherhood, a natural gift, perfected by grace, becomes elevated to the most perfect icon of God's love for His creation, as evidenced by the glory of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Full of Grace.

 

Prayer, then, for a mother flows naturally from her physical being--her being for the other that takes so much of her attention and her faculties to be focused upon nourishing her little ones and guiding them in growing into the depths of the spiritual life through their contact with her love poured out for them in all the many little sacrifices that remain hidden in the soil of her being.  While men need to go up to the mountaintop to encounter God, mothers find that the Lord comes to them right where they are, touching them gently with the outpouring of His grace and love, showing them moment by moment how to be united with Him in the total sacrifice of themselves just as Christ gave up His life on the Cross.

 

Blessed are you who lay down your lives for your children--and above all for Christ whom you nourish in your children.  Blessed are you who offer the immolation of your body as a holocaust of love to the Father.  Blessed are you who sorrow for those who have strayed or for fear that one day your children may stray from the Faith.  Blessed are you who long so much for the holiness of your children and direct all your efforts toward it.  Your reward will be great in Heaven.

 

May Christ today through His Blessed Mother pour out upon you an abundance of grace and joy to sustain you in your vocation of motherhood!

Put on the Armor of the Holy Trinity

In his letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul told us to put on the armor of God (6:10-20).  Saint Patrick, whose feast we celebrate today, sublimated beneath the celebration of Passion Week (on the old Roman rite calendar), gave us a beautiful prayer called his Lorica, the Latin word for breastplate.  His prayer is indeed a fitting spiritual breastplate, for it is putting on the power of God.  There is no greater power than Christ.  Let us place Him today then upon us, praying with Saint Patrick through an invocation of the Holy Trinity.

Seven years ago, I shared a bit of that prayer through the version in my hymnal and reflected upon how this prayer was written in imitation of the invocations of the druids: In Honor of Saint Patrick.  Today I want to share with you all the verses to the best of my ability, sung for you as a prayer for His protection upon you.

The Rough Ice of Life

If God gives you ice, go ice skating.

Thus my paraphrase of the classic lemon phrase.  Allow me to pause there for a moment, however, and suggest that rather than make lemonade with one's lemons, it might be more suitable simply to drink them in hot water or tea, as that is an excellent remedy for fighting off colds, as a former Russian roommate of mine once taught me.  Hence, if life gives you lemons, it might just be that you need them as a remedy against illness.

In context of that, let me return to my paraphrase with ice.  The thought arose yesterday because once again freezing rain fell upon the Northwest.  Now previously, I had discovered the marvels of roads being turned into an excellent place to ice skate, so I was determined that should such weather return, I would certainly take advantage of it again.

Road conditions, however, as you may perhaps be able to discern from the above picture, differed substantially from the previous thick, smooth layer of solid ice that seemed designed for anyone who happened to have a pair of skates.  Snow had fallen first this year and melted irregularly, leaving rough layers in stripes across the road.  The ice had further been torn up by the chains of vehicles that had driven by already that morning.  Furthermore, many places had not frozen sufficiently, but remained more snow than ice.  It looked quite treacherous.

Stubbornly, I insisted upon venturing out, determined that I would once again ice skate.  As I did, it occurred to me that most people would have given up at once simply from looking at the state of the icy road.  Any who had failed to assess accurately might have been the less cautious sort and therefore found themselves fallen upon the ice, leading them to quickly abandon their eagerness.

I, however, took it slowly, learning how to work with the rough ice.  Much of the time I had only one skate on solid ice while the other broke through, still providing leverage forward.  Sometimes I had short bits of smooth ice where I could really skate.  Yet I always had to be on my guard for the next place where the tire tracks crisscrossed the road with ice pebbles.  I kept low, ready to flail my arms about to catch my balance when I hit a place with more friction.

Miraculously, I returned to the house without having fallen once.

While I skated, though, in this unconventional manner, I thought of some of my favorite lines of poetry from Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" that seemed to apply in a similar fashion:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

For I had taken that way less traveled (even though that is not in fact the point of the poem)—the way that few, if any, would have taken.  Yet that also seemed to me an analogy for the proper approach to life.  All too often in our lives we wait for the perfect smooth ice.  If I had done so, however, I would have missed a good morning of exercise and the excitement and adventure of doing what no one else would have done—and the story to tell of it afterward.