Lent IV - Learning to love like a mother

You don’t get much closer to someone than by living rent-free in their womb for nine months, taking all the oxygen and nutrients that their bloodstream can Deliveroo to you, before being launched out into the world on a joyful and expectant tide, ready to receive all that life can offer you. Thus begins the bond between mother and child from which, unless there are significant and unforeseen difficulties, much of the thanksgiving and rejoicing of Mothering Sunday derives.

I will continue to call it ‘Mothering Sunday’ if you don’t mind; this is not because it is a traditional term: what draws me to it, paradoxically, is its very up-to-date ability to acknowledge and celebrate the fact that ‘mothering’ – dispensing what we might call a maternal kind of love – is likely to come from a far more variegated source of people (grandparents, same-sex couples, step- and extended families) than was once the case.

It is true that in the olden days of way back when, men were warriors and left home in the mornings to spear fish or slaughter buffalo or hew coal or repulse invaders, or whatever other task history had landed on their to-do list that particular day. The ladies of the house, meanwhile, would remain behind to shell the peas and feed the babies and generally keep the home-fires burning. This was perhaps safer work, though by no means less demanding or relentless. It’s much harder to run away from your responsibilities when you are pregnant or nursing an infant, especially when your child finally reaching man’s estate is absolutely required for the well-being of your tribe. So it was a collusion between biology and necessity that landed women with the role of being the dependable, selfless, ever-present parents, wielding the milk and the medicine and the bedtime storybook.

As we have indicated, however, the picture is far more varied today, and the dependable, unconditional, compassionate, kind and selfless love which, rightly or wrongly, we have long called and considered to be a particularly maternal kind of love, is one that children are likely to find in a range of family-members, friends and professional carers. It is, moreover, one that all of us, in all sorts of social and family relationships, must learn to imitate if we’re going to succeed in building up strong and protective networks for our dependants and relatives, and indeed for our wider communities. Maternal love is therefore to be celebrated and treasured every day of the year, not just on Mothering Sunday.

This brings us, as it always would, to the subject of Mary the Mother of Jesus. She is the great archetypal mother whom the Church particularly honours on this Fourth Sunday of Lent (also known as ‘Refreshment’ or ‘Rejoicing’ Sunday), and in thinking of her, we think also of the Prophet Isaiah’s image of Jerusalem as the great nursing-mother, dispensing nourishment and consolation to all who come to her (Isaiah 66.10f.). Mary’s love, we see, is not only compassionate and so on; it is also courageous and founded on absolute faith and trust in God. So when the Angel Gabriel pitches up (‘his wings as drifted snow, his eyes as flame’) to inquire of the Virgin whether she might be willing to bear in her unmarried womb the world’s Redeemer, at heaven-only-knows what cost to herself, a positive response is mightily brave and deeply loving not only of the unborn Jesus, but of the whole human race. And it is good that we will have another chance to celebrate this love on the Feast of the Annunciation ( known as Lady Day) on the 25th of March.

Mary’s ‘Yes’, and the ‘Yes’ of anyone who has ever lavished attention on a vulnerable infant, are responses made to the demands and opportunities of the human condition, and represent the desire to bring about the harmony which Saint Paul describes as the fruit of love (Colossians 3.14). This is the quality that we celebrate in what should be so much more than Mother’s Day. And, as we celebrate, so let us imitate, and seek to love with a mothering love in all that we do, driven not by the dictates of mere biology, but by a faith-filled act of the will.