If you cringe at a reflection on the motherhood of God, blame Julian of Norwich who said in the 14th century, “God feels great delight to be our Mother.” She called Jesus our “true Mother” from whom we receive our beginning, our true being, protection, and love. “The deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, in whom we are enclosed.” Some scholars believe that Julian herself was a mother whose child or children died in the plague. Hence, her practicality.
Julian’s is not the syrupy piety we find on some greeting cards, but an unsentimental understanding that motherhood means work. “A mother’s service is nearest, readiest and surest.” From laboring to bring us into the world, to feeding us with his body in the sacrament of communion, Julian notes all the ways in which Christ does the work of motherhood. Almost 700 years ago, she by-passed the dominant male metaphors for God and created these images of feminine divine nurture.
Or to go back further: Just before Adam and Eve must leave Eden, this maternal gesture: “the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.” Just as mothers for centuries have called after departing children, “It’s cold out there. Wear a jacket!” Or they button coats, zip zippers, tie shoes, stitch rips, sew costumes, hem pants or skirts that are too long.
When Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son, author Vincent Pizzuto in Contemplating Christ names the “’theology of dress’ by which the father transforms son from vagabond to heir as he dons him with the finest of clothing”: the best robe, a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet (Luke 15: 22). His action echoes in Julian: “As the body is clothed in cloth and the muscles in the skin,… so are we, body and soul, clothed and enclosed in the Goodness of God.”
In today’s gospel, Jesus makes a promise rich with motherly overtones: “I will not leave you orphans” (Jn. 14:18). Two contemporary moms, both terminally ill, wrestle with how to do this for their children. When Kate Bowler, 35-year-old professor at Duke Divinity School and author of Everything Happens for a Reason and other Lies I’ve Loved is diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer and not expected to live, her first response to the news is: “It’s just that I have a son.” A very young son named Zach, it turns out, and she later prays: “God, let me stay the mom of a boy who loves tractors.” She writes him letters for later, promising, “the water is rising and the levee may break and sweep us all away. But…I will not let go.”
When shortly after surgery, Zach comes for a visit, he’s furiously screaming because she’s too weak to hold him. All Kate could think was, “I can’t leave you here. Alone.” When some time later, she and her husband Toban take him to a Palm Sunday service and Katie holdshim up to wave his palm, she looks at Toban and thinks, “Is this one of those moments? The kind that he will have to look back on alone?” After she has lived through the first year, which doctors said she had a 30% chance of surviving, her hopes still center around Zach: watching him scrunch his eyes tight and thank God for sticks they toss into a stream, seeing him graduate and launch into the world. Maybe those dreams will come true: she’s still alive, still writing.
Nina Riggs died at age 39, after writing The Bright Hour about her experience of terminal cancer. She inadvertently echoes John 14 when she says of her young sons: “Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right within all this. I can let go of a lot of things: plans, friends, career goals, places in the world I want to see, maybe even the love of my life. But I cannot figure out how to let go of mothering them.” Because, she writes elsewhere, “When you fall in love with your kids, you fall in love forever.”
In addition to her grueling treatment, she wonders about her legacy, wanting “a better sense of what kind of mother the kids will remember me to be.” It’s immensely consoling when she learns that their memories can outlast her physical life: “A retired rabbi…writes me an email out of the blue about how he lost his mother when he was nine years old. In the message, he lists all the things he remembers about his mom and all the ways she remains in his life: her favorite flower, the books she read him, her sense of humor. ‘She is far from a hole in my life. She is an enormous presence that can never be replaced.’”
We sensate humans have a hard time wrapping our minds around an abstraction like infinite love. We need the smells and bells, the concrete details that aid memory: Jesus asleep on a pillow in a boat, making good wine for a wedding, his hands breaking bread. Many whose moms have died still remember her perfume, her laughter, her hands pruning roses in the garden, her freckled arms hugging them, her custard, soup, French toast or pie. In the strength of those memories, Jesus’ promise is kept and all can in spirit gather at the kitchen table.
Kathy Coffey 