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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 11, 2008
Motherhood
I have it on reliable authority that today is Mother’s Day -- to say nothing of Pentecost -- and I hope to fit in a few words on that topic before my readers all head out to join the nearest Marian procession in honour of Our Lady. Well, perhaps not all my readers.Still, perhaps, the best place to start: for I seem to have earned at least a local reputation as some kind of Catholic religious nutjob, and I am rather proud of it. We do need to start somewhere, for the very idea of “motherhood” has been so transformed through the last couple of generations -- during which first divorce, then abortion, and then a lot of other things were turned from unthinkable options into consumer goods -- that it is now rather at sea. We get a lot of sentimental blathering, still, about motherhood in some meta-biological sense, increasingly abstracted from the pregnant realities. And of course, we all have or had mothers, or at least surrogate mothers, or at the very least institutional surrogates of surrogate mothers, and many of us are sentimentally partial to whomever. By all means, send a card. Even a visit to the nursing home with flowers might be “indicated,” to use the legal term. I have nothing against sentiment, on the one condition that it is deeply founded. In other words, I have everything against sentiment that is in its nature cheap, and that consists of wallowing in some transient emotion. The beauty of sentiment associated with motherhood is that it tends indeed to be deeply founded, in long personal experience, descending in shafts of memory far beneath the surface slagheaps of our lives. And the tremendous power that exists, or can exist, in the bond between a mother and her child, is stronger than the acids of any political ideology. Nevertheless, raised myself through most of my childhood in very Protestant surroundings -- of a kind that were impressive and worthy but have almost evaporated through the last few decades -- I was necessarily deprived of an important spiritual anchor. For reasons and unreasons going back to the Protestant Reformation, my people had lost the veneration of Mary, as she had been presented to Christian believers from the earliest centuries, and as she is still presented in the “Salutatio Angelica.” That is, as, “Holy Mary, Mother of God.” The very phrase would give my ancestors seizures, and while this is not a theological column, it may be worth quickly explaining the inevitability of that phrase, once one has accepted the Trinity, and the indivisibility of Our Saviour. In a sentence, the veneration of Mary is an inevitable extension of the worship of Christ: for if there is God the Son, there must be a Mother of God. Or to be plainer still, in line with the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. -- the human “Jesus,” and the divine “Christ,” are not two different persons. They are one and the same, and He was the Son of God, and of Mary. Hence the extraordinary veneration of Mary, from the earliest Christian times, and through the centuries -- so powerful that even the Muslims, appearing from the 7th century A.D., also venerate her. And long, long before even Christianity dawned upon the world, she is anticipated in every “Mother Goddess” known to anthropology. A Darwinist, or a Jungian, or sociobiologist, or whatever, may hold that this is all merely a projection of the big raw fact of human motherhood -- onto a cosmos that is fearfully beyond the comprehension of the primitive human mind. This hypothesis has the glib plausibility that is required to monopolize teaching in the academy, today. It is itself a view of considerable antiquity, and the anthropologists have discovered essentially atheist primitive tribes. This is a “secular” newspaper and I am only dealing with the pragmatic consequences of religious beliefs. What is the consequence of Marian “idolatry” (as my Protestant ancestors would call it, while turning in their graves), or as I would characterize it, the veneration of “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei” that has animated so much of this world’s most magnificent art and poetry? Its practical effect is to found all our intellectual and emotional ideas about motherhood, deep as they are, in something still deeper. It is to believe that real substance and significance underlies our natural love for our own human mothers, that it is not simply a biological quirk to be explained away by a few material causes. That it is instead the profoundest echo of what Dante finally called, “l’ amor che move il sole e l’ alter stele” -- “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Buy into that, and one’s own human mother is not reduced to a mechanism of “sexual selection” (to quote a zoological sage of the century before last), nor arbitrarily salvaged with the tearjerk posturing of a Mother’s Day card. She is rather enlarged to her true proportions. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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