Christmas And Motherhood
By GEORGE A. KENDALL
A few weeks ago, I lost my mother. She was almost 100 years old, had lived not only a long but a very full and good life, and, is, I am confident, with God now, so, from a strictly rational perspective, there would seem to be little reason to mourn. But as we all know, it doesn’t work that way. A mother’s role in giving us life, both natural and supernatural, is a huge reality, and the end of that role, at least in its earthly form, is a huge event, one that takes a long time to really assimilate. And we miss her very deeply.
And so, for this year’s Christmas article, I am going to write about motherhood, the central role that Mary’s motherhood plays in the Incarnation of the Word of God, and the central role our Christian mothers play in bringing Christ to each of us. (Keep in mind that the Christmas season celebrates not only the birth of Christ but also the Holy Family and Mary, the Mother of God.) And, of course, I am going to write about my mother.
My relationship to my mother was, I think, a rather special one because, when I was seven years old, a kind of bomb got dropped into my life when I came down with polio, losing the use of one leg completely, and the other partly. Suddenly, she had the challenge of raising a handicapped child. She met that challenge heroically, at least in my biased view. For instance: I was in the hospital for about two months, getting rehabilitation — physical therapy and such.
That ended with my parents taking me out against medical advice, because I was terribly homesick and starting to have an emotional meltdown, and they felt I needed to be home with my family. We lived about four blocks from the hospital, and for a long time after that three times a week my mother had to load me into my wheelchair and push me there for physical therapy. And each time she had to arrange for someone to stay with the four other kids.
She always did her best to keep me from seeing myself as a helpless cripple. That included forbidding me to even use the word “crippled.” I was not allowed to sit and be waited on, but was given chores to do, like washing dishes. I used to accuse her of violating child labor laws. For some reason she never took that seriously.
The first year after having polio, I was not in school (though, due to the kind efforts of a schoolteacher friend of my parents who came over three times a week to tutor me, I avoided missing a grade and in fact learned to read that year). The result was that I spent a great deal more time with my mother than the typical second-grader and we talked about many things.
She talked about the Catholic faith a lot, and told me all the stories about Jesus and the things He said and did. She talked especially about the things Jesus said regarding sanctimonious people who made a great display of piety and religiosity, but had very little of the love of God in them. She loved to quote Jesus saying, “Not everyone who says Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only he who does the will of my father in Heaven.”
This was when I first learned about the Pharisees. “Sanctimonious” was actually something of a dirty word in her vocabulary. She always detested phoniness and hypocrisy. I have believed ever since that year that these talks caused my faith to take a deeper root in my soul than might have happened otherwise.
Years later, in young adulthood, I tried very hard to jettison my Catholic faith but failed dismally, and I think that was why. That, and her prayers for me, which I had in abundance then and throughout my life (and, I am sure, still have now). After my mother’s death, we found, in her writings, the following thought about childrearing:
“To be shown by example, to be taught with gentleness, to be guided with firmness, to be directed with discipline — with all these bound together by the ties of faith, hope, and love is to be truly cherished and to have received the gifts which good parents, as co-creators with God, seek to give their children.”
That sums up her relationship with her children and her love for us very well.
About three weeks before her death, I went to see her, knowing that she didn’t have much time left, and spent several days. She was sleeping most of the time but wanted to talk when she was awake, and she and I had some really good conversations. She made no effort to avoid the subject of death but talked about it a lot. She was at peace with it, though sad at leaving her children.
I found myself caught up in the reality that I was communing with someone right on the edge of eternity, and in so doing being drawn close to that edge myself. That is a truly awesome experience, one that I will never forget. I just knew that the Holy Spirit was present and active in that room. She spoke a couple of times about time and eternity really being very close. She always had a strong sense of the presence of eternity.
It reminded me of a passage from Dostoyevsky that I love:
“Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things.
“God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it.”
It was a time of grace both for me and for my siblings, a time when we realized, more than ever before, just how much she loved us, and how much we loved her.
One of the hymns sung at my mother’s funeral was On This Day, O Beautiful Mother. At first glance, this might seem a little presumptuous, since the hymn is meant to honor the Mother of God, the Theotokos, and people might have thought we were misusing it when we sang it to honor our earthly mother. On a closer look, though, it seems to me to be not presumptuous at all, for a couple of reasons:
First, because Mary is the ultimate model, the archetype, if you will, of all motherhood, every mother worthy of the name, certainly every Christian mother, in some way shares in Mary’s motherhood.
Second, Mary is the Christ-bearer, the one who brings Christ to us, her children. Our earthly mothers, because they share in Mary’s motherhood, also, in their own way, bring Christ to their children. In giving birth to us, they gave us biological life. In nurturing and teaching us, they gave us life in the spirit by giving us Christ. Every Christian mother is a little Theotokos. So in one hymn, we can honor Mary and our Christian earthly mothers without contradiction.
Through a woman, a mother, the Word, Christ, becomes flesh and dwells among us, and we celebrate that reality especially in this season. And through our Christian mothers, who give us flesh and nurture us in the life of the spirit, that same Word comes to us, something else to be greatly celebrated, in this season and all seasons. Glory to God in the highest!
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(© 2015 George A. Kendall)
