7. BEHOLD YOUR MOTHER: Learning to be Tender-Hearted Beyond our Cynicism

Recent studies on priests in America in the aftermath of the clergy scandal of 2002 show that a good number of them nurture a positive attachment to Mary, the Mother of God. They speak of Mary in loving and affectionate terms. A number of studies both here and abroad show that the relationship between mother and son, in the early life of the priest influences a whole lot the adult priest’s ability to adjust to a demanding priestly life and role. My own findings in my dissertation confirm what we have always informally conjectured – that mothers in many more ways than one, are truly mothers, too, of our vocation.

In my last reflection, I talked about the ambience that makes us, the environment that shapes us to be the best we could be. Polar bears need the vast icy expanse for them to thrive. Priests need the ambience of a prayerful life to be true to their role and ontological nature as acting in persona Christi.

I would like to add an additional element to this ambience of prayer. I would like to call this, together with Gerard Manley-Hopkins, not only the ambience and habitat for us priests, but our atmosphere, the air we breathe, the air without which we would be limping, gasping for life, for that breath of intimacy that humanizes us, that makes us get closer to the full stature of Christ, who is and who was son of Mary, woman, mother, lady, queen. Allow me, at the risk of boring some of you, to quote a beautiful poem of Hopkins. If you remember your literature, you would know that this poem capitalizes a whole lot on simile, metaphor, and personification.

The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe

Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflakes; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but not breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindles to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race –
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemed, dreamed; who
This one work has to do –
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvelous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn –
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azured;
O how! Nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps,
Yet such a sapphire-shot
Charged, steeped sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A bleat and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy, vasty vault.
So God was God of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like our which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

One of the most memorable books I have read as a college seminarian was a spiritual autobiography written by Brother Raymond, OCSO entitled “The Man who Got Even with God.” I have always been making a pitch for this book in my work with counselees and directees. Long before the popular attractiveness of Henri Nouwen and the likes of Ronald Rolheiser came to the scene, this book already made its mark as something that addresses itself to human beings with red blood flowing through their veins. This was as passionate and honest a self-report as that of Nouwen’s and Rolheiser, the precise reason why they are popular authors.

Here is a struggling man, who talks to his fellow struggling men, who is candid about his disappointment, even his anger against God. His story is not the hopelessly anemic and sugar-coated, anesthetized, and vacuum-sealed hagiographical reports of the lives of saints, but a story of a man with real passion, with real hunger, and with real anger against an equally real God, who allows bad things to happen to good people. The high point of the story from which he took the title was the challenge and the threat that he hurled against God at the height of his anger and frustration, being the impulsive and mercurial character that he was: “I’ll get even with you, God!” And he did. He became as saintly as an ordinary sinful mortal could be … maybe not a saint with plastered looks and glassy eyes, and one whose name appears in the elenco dei santi e martiri, but a saint as normal, ordinary sinful people could be, who sins more than just seven times a day.

But this is all beside the point I am trying to make. What I am pointing to is just as remarkable as his human way of relating to God, with his warts and all, but also his earthly and eminently human way of relating to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the mother of us all. He wrote: “The man in us needs a woman; the knight in us needs a lady; and the child in us needs a mother.”

I faintly remember a speaker back in the day when I looked at studies as a chore, and not a passport to liberation, when we would spend a great deal of the time sleeping in class, and complaining about professors who were talking against each other. Our professor in Spiritual Theology, a relatively known writer, told us that devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary ought to have at least three characteristics. It ought to be tender, true, and loving. If I understood him well, in between naps and chitchats, such devotion must be first, truly human with real human feelings. Such was a basic minimum. The heart must come into the picture. There is no such thing as a devotion to an idea. That, to my counselor’s mind, would be an OC thing (obsessive-compulsive trait). Second, it must be true. It cannot be all heart. The mind must cooperate in the whole venture. Heart and mind ought to work in tandem. One does not offer oneself to something not known, not understood, not perceived in toto. But the third has to do with the level of execution. It is the level, not only of knowing and feeling, but of action. The basic order of battle for the cognitive-behavior therapist is simply this: cognition, emotion, action. What we know, how we feel about what we know, explains what we do.

I am talking about good, old fashioned talk about human willing. It is the level of the doing. Forrest Gump, for all his being intellectually challenged, understood well what his mother used to tell him repeatedly: “Stupid is, as stupid does.” Agere sequitur esse. Action follows nature. Doing flows from being.

We are back to the ambience thing. We are back to the natural and supernatural habitat we move in as frontier beings, the habitat of the natural and the habitat of the supernatural – the order of nature and the order of grace.

Sister Bridge McKenna, I think, explains best what this closeness to Mary is all about for priests and religious like us. She hits the target when she alludes to the fact that in Mary, the two orders of nature and grace shines out so well, so clearly, so realistically. In her view of Mary and our relation to her that cannot be said to be high falutin theological insight, she nevertheless tells it like it is for us in her statement that is full of wisdom and insight. Urging priests to love Mary as sons, she said: “No wonder you priests are so close to her, for you both look at Jesus – she on earth and now in heaven, and you, in the Eucharist – and you both say, as no one else can, ‘This is my body; this is my blood.’”

When was the last time you saw your relationship to Mary in that way? When was the last time you imagined your relationship to Mary put in parallel lines with her relationship with Jesus, her Son, and our brother? Doesn’t this remind you of that worldly song “Somewhere Out There?” Beneath the pale moonlight, lovers see each other because they see the same big star in the firmament. That star unites people in love. That same star brings them towards closeness, intimacy, even in the distance, even though they are out of sight. Even in an earthly sense, we mean it when we say, we live by faith, not by sight.

How true are the thoughts of Hopkins! He refers to Mary as our atmosphere, the air we breathe, that among other things, filters the bright light of the sun, and makes them it bearable, makes it gently visible. Like the stained glasses in churches, the sun’s rays which symbolize God’s grace are sifted and filtered, and doled out so that we could withstand it, so that we could benefit from it in doses that we can bear. Truly, Mary is the Mother of Grace, not in the sense that she is its origin, but in the sense that as co-mediatrix, all that grace from the supernatural order, comes to us in the natural order, in a way that we can assimilate, and that way is provided for us by Mary, woman, lady, mother, queen, air wild, world-mothering air, as Hopkins calls her.

The role of mothers in priestly and religious vocations is beyond dispute. We do not need doctoral dissertations to show that. But we do need to know exactly what that role is, for better or for worse. Each of us needs to clarify exactly what role she is still playing right here, right now even if you are well into your thirties, or forties, whether you have transitioned through midlife, or you are currently going through its throes or woes, or joys, or triumphs as the case may be.

Recent decades of research by object relations psychologists have shown the world just how much primary caregivers have influenced, made or broken individuals through a poorly managed process of separation-individuation during the first 36 months of a person’s life. What transpired in those first three years, from the individual’s so-called “private logic” and point of view has immense consequences in the way we, even as priests relate to God, to authority figures, to mother figures, and to the Church, and the Congregation we belong to.

The late John Cardinal O’Connor of New York understood this very well when he wrote:

In my judgment, nothing advances vocations as does devotion of priests to the Eucharist and to Mary: I don’t know that any statistical studies have been done, but from what I observe, those dioceses in which Perpetual Adoration is widespread, personal Eucharistic worship on the part of priests is habitual, and devotions to Our Lady are highlighted – those are dioceses in which vocations flourish. Vocations aside, however, I am sure you will agree with me that commitment to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament and to Mary, Mother of Priests, is as strong a lifeline as any priest could hold on to. I know how much I need that lifeline.

Connor, in relation to this, gives the following lines that help clarify the point of our reflection:

Mary might easily be called the Mother of Priests, since she is the mother of Him from whom their priesthood derives. Not only that, our Lord entrusted Him mother to the care of John, the beloved disciple, who stood in for each of us. Mary is, therefore, the universal mother of all humanity, not by a figure of speech, but by a command of her Son. All of us were spiritually begotten at Calvary; priests, then, can claim Our Lady’s spiritual motherhood in two ways. Finally the story continues beyond Calvary. Spiritual writers often note the presence of the Blessed Mother with the Apostles, awaiting the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Church. Her prayers, they tell us, were directed to her Son, specifically for those men He had chosen and appointed to spread His Gospel. Because of her closeness to the Church at its inception, the theology of the priesthood has always emphasized that the call of each priest has its origins in the merits of Christ and His Blessed Mother.

But all this does not detract from the primary topic of this reflection. Given our Filipino natural propensity to be rather close to our mothers in general, given the fact that culturally and historically and spiritually, we have always been known as “el pueblo amante de Maria,” we priests and religious could not afford to be any less, any different, any more disjointed from this laudable cultural, theological, and spiritual heritage. Whilst we are exhorted to give a close look at the way we look at the figure of woman, at the figure of mother as primary caregiver, at the image-representation of woman-mother in our psyche, we are also exhorted today, to build on what already is there – the tender, true, and loving devotion that most of us have for Mary.

We would do well to end this reflection with a prayer to Mary, the Mother of Vocations:

O Most Holy Virgin, we come to you to implore a great grace, in behalf of all the peoples of the earth. We ask of you laborers of the Gospel. You are our Mother and Queen of Apostles, you have obtained the grace of their ministry. Through your intercession, every vocation has come. Obtain for your Church and the whole world numerous and chosen priests, apostolic and holy persons, who are fervent with zeal and charity. Remember the command of your Son Jesus, when He said: “Pray therefore, the harvest Master that He may send workers to His harvest.” Hear us, O Mother, for the greatest comfort of the Most Holy Heart of Jesus. Amen.

Mary, Mother of Vocations, pray for us.