It’s the week of buying cards for mums. If you’re a Dad you’ll be buying cards for your kids to give to their mums: for two reasons. First, they’re too small to know how or why and you know that there’ll be trouble for you if you don’t. Second, you have self-indulgent teenage boys who seem to have forgotten that food, clean clothes and emotional care and concern don’t just erupt spontaneously from the depths of the universe - there’s a good mum holding it all together. So, you get a card and a pen, you hold it in their hands and remind them how to write and be nice all at the same time. Apparently this stage of social ineptness does pass.
Mother's Day can also a difficult day for many women. It’s worth taking a moment to think of the many women who have lost children to tragedy and illness and the great many women who long to be mothers but can’t. Then, of course, there’s relational failure and the devastating removal of children, or those with mental illness who love their kids deeply but can’t care for them.
Being and wanting to be a mother is no small thing. I wonder if there is some incredibly deep connection to life that most men don’t get, but are the recipients of just the same. I am married to a woman who doesn’t consider herself to be an “earth mother” in the sense that looking after kids is her life. Yet at the same time we all receive something from her that can come from no other place. I’m not sure how to put it into words, but she is like the glue that holds everything invisible, but essential, together - all the deep stuff of relationship, care, nurture and being. Everything that often escapes my over focussed attention to tasks.
We often think of God in purely male terms. The Bible almost universally refers to God with masculine pronouns. Yet in the beginning the Bible claims God created us, male and female, in God’s image. God is not a man nor a woman. Together we are God’s image, equal but different, similar but not the same. Without one another we are not the image of God at all. This is an important point.
Perhaps Mothers Day should really be called “a celebration of women day”? It ought not matter whether a woman has kids, can’t have kids, or has no access to them - women are the mothering/creative part of God’s image that makes humanity the best it can be and indeed the best we experience.
Jesus had a mum, Mary. The Roman Catholic church hasn’t forgotten this, but too many have. In Mary we find a woman, chosen by God, to become the mother of salvation. If I was God I would have opted for a more spectacular approach, but I’m not female enough to fully understand God. Through a divine interaction, a female birthed a male saviour in love. It’s the image of God complete.
Digby Wilkinson 2009