THANK GOD FOR MOTHERS ‘God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers.’

Whenever I hear Christopher Willcock’s beautiful version of Psalm 27 sung at Mass—‘Do not be afraid I am with you’—I think of my mother, Doreen Veronica Hannah, with fond memories and much affection. She loved that hymn, composed, if I recall correctly, for the deaconate ordination of Des Dwyer SJ and Adrian Lyons SJ in 1974.

Like all great music, the passage of time only strengthens its capacity to move the heart and soul. In 1994 my young brother Tim worked up enough courage to sing it with much emotion at Doreen’s Requiem, and thirty years on from its composition it continues to strike a splendid chord. What a gift Chris Willcock SJ has given us with his enchanting music!

Mothers have been on my mind recently. As I write this, Mary’s month of May and Mothers’ Day are approaching; we have just observed the feast of Mary’s motherhood of the Society of Jesus; and recently some of us were privileged to attend a dinner in Melbourne celebrating the life of Margaret Dooley. Wife of Brendan, mother of Edward SJ, Michael, Christine and John, she was all that a mother could be. Indeed, Margaret gave meaning to the old saying from the Talmud that ‘God could not be everywhere so He created mothers’.

There is no doubt that we learn about God through the best qualities of our parents. In the Bible, God is often portrayed as a compassionate mother. When one acknowledges that the mother’s womb protects and nourishes us, that it does not possess or control life, there is no surprise in the Prophet Isaiah’s beautiful words describing God: ‘Does a woman forget her baby at the breast, or fail to cherish the son of her womb? Yet even if these forget, I will never forget you’ (Isaiah 49:15).

God is more of a mother than any mother. God yearns for us from the depths, from the womb, in a way that nurtures, feeds, and brings us forth into life. Is there any wonder, then, that we hear people praying these days, ‘God our Father, God our Mother …’?

In his book, The Quest for Grace, historian Manning Clark talks about the difference between life-straiteners and life-enlargers, between those people who have a very measured, narrow view of life and want to contain it, and those who love the banquet of life with a passion and want to share it with others. Mothers are very definitely life-enlargers, as we see so clearly in their gift for home-making and home--sharing, for hospitality.

There is another wonderful saying in the Talmud, that ‘a hero is one who turns strangers into friends’. Hospitality, welcoming the stranger, has always been a fundamental part of our Christian heritage. ‘Receive the guest as Christ’, the Rule of Saint Benedict exhorts us. In our world today riddled by division and fear, in Australia where we have turned so many strangers away from our shores, the basic tenets of hospitality need to be revisited and embraced by all of us.

To be a true host, we must be open to the dignity of each and every person, constantly prepared to leave behind our baggage of false assumptions and resentments, ready to receive the stranger on his or her own terms. As Henri Nouwen has described it so well, hospitality can be offered only by those who ‘have found the centre of their lives in their own hearts’.

Joan Chittister OSB once wrote that ‘hospitality is the ability to make another person comfortable in strange space: ours’. Of course, we ourselves have to be comfortable in that space too. Only if we are at home with ourselves can we offer a home, offer hospitality, to others. In this Mary our Mother remains a shining light for us. In the midst of those awe-inspiring events of Christ’s birth at Bethlehem, Luke tells us that Mary ‘treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart’.

Mary models true hospitality for us—the fine art of having an open soul and a listening mind. Quoting Joan Chittister again, hospitality is ‘not merely a matter of opening the door: it is a matter of opening the heart’. True hosts are welcomers of all people, of difference, of change and new ideas. For those of us who follow Christ, this is magnified in the Eucharist where we meet the bread of life as our ‘host’.

So let us thank God for our mothers, who are true home makers, true hosts, who reveal the female face of God and give life at peril to their own. Let us thank God for our mothers who have nourished and enlarged our lives, who have done without that we might have.

Let us pray for those mothers who must mother below the poverty line, who are too young to mother, who must watch their babies starve or grow up with hate and violence in their hearts.

Let us ask God’s forgiveness for the many times we have taken our mothers for granted. Let us pray to share in Mary’s gift of treasuring God’s life and action in our hearts.

Christopher Gleeson SJ