“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”
The mystery of motherhood belongs, paradoxically, it might seem, to the mystery of the Son’s going to the Father. It belongs to the mystery of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is radical new birth and radical new life. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. We are brought to birth in this new life out of the tombs of our sorrows, out of the prisons of our souls, out of the graves of our wills still wrapped in “a cloak of maliciousness,” the spirit of ill-will that is so deadly to our souls and our communities.
The idea of new birth and new life is a mothering image, an image about giving birth. Sorrow and pain give place to joy. We have only to live that joy which is not about our arbitrary moods and feelings but a joy which is beyond the fluctuations and changes of this world, a “joy [that] no man taketh from you”. Why? Because it has to do with our being opened out to the divine life of God himself. This is the great meaning of the Resurrection. The Risen Christ is in our midst in the power of his Spirit. He lives in us and we in him. Such is the burden of our liturgical life which extends outwardly to give shape to our lives socially, politically, morally, and so on.
Jesus would teach us about that radical new life of the Spirit which he has inaugurated and established through his Death and Resurrection. We can only be nurtured in what we have received; in what has been given to us. We can only give as mothers give – sacrificially and selflessly – through what God has given and established in us. What we have received from God has to be nurtured in us by God. The love of mothers falls short, after all, of the completeness of God’s love for us. Our loves find their perfection and their fullness only in the love of God revealed to us in Christ Jesus.
Christ would nurture us in this new life through the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. He is God’s Spirit given to be the life of the Church. The Church is the mother, “the eternal feminine,” as it were, where we are sustained by God’s love bestowed upon us through the all-sufficient sacrifice of the Word and Son of the Father. We can only enter into this love through the forms in which it has been made known to us, that is to say, through the revelation of God in the witness of the Scriptures to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, especially through the eyes of John in his Gospel. We can only act upon what we receive. Such is the meaning of the Church and the nature of motherhood.
We need to understand again the truth and the power of these images, both for what they teach about the mystery of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and for what they teach us about ourselves. Christ would place us in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. The Church is the mother where that divine life has its beginning in us and where we are nurtured in its understanding.
This understanding has been wonderfully illustrated this morning in the baptism of Rebecca Elizabeth Marie Gendron. She has been named in God’s own naming of himself; she has been reborn into the life of the Church. In our secular culture this is mother’s day when we remember the mothers of our natural births and lives but here in this service we are also reminded of our spiritual mother, the Church, and of our spiritual beginnings in baptism and of the continuing nurture of our lives in the faith through Word and Sacrament. The conjunction of these ideas and themes is providentially wonderful. Her baptism is a strong reminder of our spiritual life begun and continued sacramentally here in the Church, our mother.
God creates the womb out of which we are born anew and enter into this understanding. His word creates and calls us forth even out of sorrow and pain and into joy and delight. Our loves find their end and their perfection in the presence of the Son in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. The Church is the mother where that love is received and acted upon in us.
The Holy Spirit is the animating spirit of the Church. It belongs to the magical, mystical quality of the Easter season to set our lives upon a new and ever-renewing foundation of grace.
“Grace is the foundation”, says one of the great nursing fathers of the spiritual tradition, “which alone can rule our unruly wills and illuminate our darkened minds” (St. Bonaventure, freely translated). Sin is that spirit of unruliness in us, our lawlessness, and sin is that spirit of darkness, too, our blindness to the things which Christ would have us know. But only if we remain wrapped up in that “cloak of maliciousness,” only if our ill-will and our ignorance close us off from the liberating grace of what is made known and communicated to us in our midst what is made known and communicated by the words of Christ.
Out of the womb of mother Church we are set into motion. The motions of liberty and joy arising from the doctrine of the resurrection allow us the freedom to act in the practical without becoming its slaves. That, it seems to me, is a powerful and necessary message for our world and day. It is captured in Christ’s word.
“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”
Fr. David Curry
Easter III, 2014