A Mother's Love

Mother’s Day often seems to have been an invention of the greeting card industry and the florists of America. How can we recliam it as an important occasion to voice love and to celebrate our mothers?

To read what the Apostle Paul says about love in First Corinthians seems to be a good starting place. It will also gives us an opportunity to counter the bum rap which Paul has gotten in some quarters when it comes to his views on women. I will not address that issue directly, but it seems to me that the reality of genuine love in all relationships offers a basis for something creative on this particular topic.

All of us, including Paul, have or had a mother. For better or for worse, our individual experience of motherhood began with childhood. We came to know love in that unique bond of mother and child. You remember the old joke, to the effect that we learned to pray at mother’s knee, but we learned other things at other “joints.” Most of our sense of self and of our value as persons
began in the nurture and care of our mothers.

Jesus once wept over the sight of a city whose children were scattered and lost. He voiced a mother’s love when he said, “I long to embrace you, just as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not.” There is, indeed, a more excellent way for those who have experienced, as children of God, the love of a heavenly parent.

A Mother’s Love

Come home with me and I will show you a mother’s world.

If I speak in down to earth terms of motherhood or, in a flight of fancy, of being touched by an angel, but never speak of a mother’s love, I will be singing her praises off key and spouting phrases with little substance.

And if I picture a mother as filled with wise sayings and as ever ready with a gentle touch; and even if her pioneering spirit is seen as challenging mountains and pushing the frontiers, but I do not show her as embodying love above all else, I will have failed to paint her true colors.

Or if I, as a mother, sacrifice my personal fulfillment and give myself unselfishly for the sake of my children, but try to give the utmost without love, I will get the good housekeeping seal of approval but not the gold for parenting.

Love in a mother’s realm shows patience with her children and is kind in offering counsel; is not jealous of her daughter’s gifts nor blinded by pride in her son’s achievements. Love does not get uppity nor is love strident.

Love, cutting the apron strings, does not insist that mother knows what’s best; does not lose it when a child fails to meet her expectations; nor does she store up resentment. Love finds no joy in failure but looks for the good stuff.

Love in the family circle bears each burden willingly; believes in the possibilities present in each loved one; hopes for the fulfillment of every promise; endures through thick and thin. Love prays, “Bless this mess.”

A mother’s love goes on forever. As for hunches or educated guesses, they will come and go; as for predicted outcomes, they will not pan out; as for quick judgments, they will prove unfounded. For our book knowledge (even Spock) is incomplete and each prognostication will fall flat, but when a mother’s love has its way, our real faces will shine and our false faces will be grounded.

When I was my mother’s child, I spoke as a child of a heavenly father; I thought too, as a child, of a safe heavenly home with a mother’s arms enfolding; and I reasoned that God must have a mother’s face. When I became a grown up, I knew I would be wrong to give up such childlike notions.

For now, as I look in the mirror, I see my mother’s face with my own eyes, and in my own eyes; remembering her, I see myself as one loved and I know myself, even as she knew me and loved me into being.

So faith in the saints in glory, hope in a bright appearing, and love that will not let us go, these three abide, but the greatest is the love that bore us and bears with us all the days of our lives.

Make love maternal your aim

(Permission is given to reproduce, with source acknowledged.)

From Love’s Letters: A Poetic Book of Confessions by George Gunn
(Library Lane Press / Copyright 2001)