Maya, from which we get the name “May,” was the goddess of motherhood, and so lent her name to that month in which even today we celebrate our mothers.
Sometimes, Christians have been inclined to denigrate this holiday as a cardinal example of how the Hallmark industry has displaced Christianity in America. Doubtless they have a point. We are far more attuned to secular observances than religious ones, and the number of those who haven’t even heard of epiphany or Whitsunday is legion.
Still, I would make an exception in the case of Mother’s day.
If anyone ought to be able to extol the sanctity of motherhood, it ought to be Christians. For here alone do we find the role of motherhood arrayed in its proper dignity, not just as one more selfish lifestyle among others, but as a sacred charge – as old as mankind, and timeless as heaven itself.
“Does your wife work, or does she stay at home?” – there’s a lot lurking behind that question. As if the denigration of motherhood traditionally conceived were not bad enough, we also have to deal with the incessant lampooning of the stereotypically “desperate” housewife in the television and film industry. Perhaps most challenging of all, however, is the general zeitgeist of our time, which, instead of attacking or lampooning motherhood, finds a more constructive remedy in re-defining it altogether. As in so many other areas of life – sexuality, gender, race, class – we no longer give a definite Yes or No to motherhood. We simply re-define what it means.
As male, I realize I’m treading on thin ice here. It’s a cardinal tenet of our popular morality today that no member of one group gets to say too much about the members of another, and , and a white male pastor talking about marriage may sound like a thinly disguised attempt to invite all women everywhere to the good old days back when. But No. The cultural revolutions we see going on all around us would’ve never happened in the first place if there hadn’t been something wrong with the way things were. At the same time, however, I think many of us suspect that in the violence of this reaction something very fundamental has been lost. Motherhood is not a creation of our own that we can redefine at whim. It is a divinely ordained institution, and our mothers are participants in the mystery of creation itself.
The day-to-day reality is perhaps more variable than it has ever been. Family life can be a woman’s greatest joy or her greatest sorrow. Right now, with so little public consensus, it has undoubtedly become one of the most difficult roads a woman can take. There is so much opposition, so little encouragement. So many voices clamoring to have the final word on what it is all about, and so little reason to trust that any one of them entirely knows what it is talking about. It’s a lonely road, and we often feel condemned to a life of hapless errors as we grope our way forward, trying to rediscover the meaning of this ancient call. Many marriages fall apart, and even those which don’t…well, let’s just say the ship of family often comes to port looking like it just got out of a maelstrom.
But, as the old hymn says, “the anchor holds.”
To all you mothers – whether you think you have succeeded, or failed, or that your life is an unending twilight struggle against a foe that just won’t die – in Christ, you have overcome and you will overcome. There is no sacrifice that will go unrewarded; no wound that will not be healed; no sorrow that will not be transfigured into joy. For if the mystery of God’s own family had to endure the suffering of the cross then it is no less true of you – your service will be redeemed in the day of the resurrection. The journey is not pointless. No, it leads to victory.
Let her children rise up and call her blessed.
Proverbs 31:28
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