Mothers and Pentecost
In the universal Church today we celebrate the feast of Pentecost. We think of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church, that marvelous time when the Holy Spirit filled the apostles with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, giving them the courage and confidence to spread the faith of Jesus Christ to all corners of the world. That wonderful moment is told to us in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Without the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to that small band of Jesus’ frightened disciples, we would not have a Church that today numbers over a billion people.
In the United States today, we also celebrate Mother’s Day. We recognize in this celebration the wonderful contributions that mothers have made to our lives. We wish all mothers here a joyous and happy Mother’s Day. Speaking only for myself, without the influence of my mother in my life, I would not be standing in front of you as a deacon. My mother (along with my father) raised me in the Catholic faith and in so many ways it was an honor to be her son. I am sure there are many of you who feel the same way. And we also pray today for those whose relationships with their mother might not be, or was not as positive. We pray for reconciliation for all mothers with their children on this special commemoration.
It is very rare that we would celebrate Pentecost and Mother’s Day on the same day. But let me suggest that this quirk in the liturgical and secular calendar is most appropriate. For while the Holy Spirit sends his sevenfold gifts to all of us through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, let me suggest that the Spirit does so in a most special way to mothers and to women in general.
While we also speak of fruits and charisms of the Holy Spirit, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are the following: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. While we all receive such gifts in different measures as St. Paul tells us in our second reading, we can see them all present in mothers and all women in a special way.
Women have enormous wisdom and a profound sense of loving and giving that are worth more than gold. It is not for nothing that in the Book of Wisdom, wisdom is always referred to in the feminine. Women are often wiser than men are because in certain situations they may know less but they understand more. Cleverness is often left for men but wisdom is for women. Men minds are analytic; women’s are holistic and look at the totality of a particular issue more easily. Wisdom is not the same as scholarship or technical knowledge. The latter is often the refuge of people (more men than women) who spend their lives bent on books but forget how to live. Here we are reminded of St. Bonaventure’s adage that men act but women endure. Indeed, women’s wisdom transcends and outlasts men’s desire to act.
God created women to be beautiful and their charm, lovableness and beauty exercise a powerful attraction that is central to the goodness of human life; women are fairer in beauty and weaker in physical strength. But they are clearly not lacking in character for they are the sex honored to give birth to the Savior of the world and through which the Body of Christ is sustained and renews itself. The one true God is the God of life and Jesus is the life of the soul. Mothers, who have the sublime mission of giving life, do have the Holy Spirit’s gift of understanding, and they intuitively weave this gift into their daily lives and the lives of the people they love. They play an integral role in the creative, transforming work of God For mothers, there is a metaphysical bond between womanhood and God when they are carrying human life within them. In pregnancy, women have the profound privilege of carrying two souls in their bodies simultaneously.
Girls are typically less spoiled than boys and therefore there is more sensitivity, intuition and empathic behavior toward others. This makes them a source of the great gift of counsel from the Holy Spirit. Women are better at sensing pain in others and joining that pain to themselves emotionally, psychologically and through service to others. Have you ever noticed that when children are sick, they always want their mom. Mothers have great understanding of the fundamental and lasting importance of human life versus the ashes and dust of human accomplishments. A computer or a machine will fade away, but a human being will last forever in terms of body and soul and relationship with the Creator. A mother’s greater closeness to creation is her strength.
As for fortitude, a mother’s propensity for sacrifice and suffering emulates Jesus Christ; indeed the agony of childbirth is a human reflection of the sufferings of Christ who redeemed us. It is often women who bring men back to God and the Church not vice versa, because men are trapped in this ridiculous sense of a desire for human control that makes worship something for sissies. Anyone remembering the Passion of Our Lord can see this male trait in its most destructive form, the folly of the control impulse which often leads not just to male ruin, but the ruin of others men control or over whom they exercise authority;
The Spirit’s gift of knowledge of a different kind is present in women and mothers. Women see the forest, men see the trees; their sense of time and space is geometric, not linear as men’s are. This greater sense of empathy also leads to a greater understanding of the need for legal protections against the weak. Before Martin Luther King there was Rosa Parks, expanded voting rights for minorities had as their historical foundations the trailblazing work of the suffragettes, women are leaders in protection of children and children’s rights, It is called Mothers Against Drunk Driving, not Fathers Against Drunk Driving. This kind of knowledge may not be book knowledge, rather knowledge of the needs of the human being without resort to statistics or force of argument.
Piety in the face of God is also a gift to the Holy Spirit. With women and mothers, piety toward God often takes the form of convincing men to do the right thing before God when often women lack the secular power to do it themselves. Mahatma Gandhi, it is said, feared neither man nor government, neither prison, nor poverty nor death, but he did fear his wife. Woman humanize men; they often demonstrate greater human dignity in the face of masculine rowdiness and often contain and prevent that rowdiness from getting out of control.
They can also, for good and ill, bring men to their knees emotionally by their beauty, vulnerability, frailty and supposed weakness. This can be used to bring about much good. Queen Esther used her beauty in the Old Testament to convince a pagan King to save the Israelites from execution. What is more powerful than a very large man brought to his knees emotionally by his mother when she asks for something? What is more powerful than watching innocent little girls charm their fathers in ways they usually cannot resist? .
Finally, women and mothers understand more clearly what it is to receive the gift of a fear of the Lord. Women cry more than men it is true. All of women’s tears collected since the beginning of time would compete with the sea, men’s would fill a pond of modest size. Women do have a greater melding of heart and mind; they are more likely to be wounded than men, whose sense of linearity and literal ideas of meaning shields them to a certain extent from emotion. Women tend to take their feelings much more seriously than men; they are more attuned to them, they may dwell on them, be more romantic and sentimental, more affected by their dreams, their imagination, their fancy.
But this need not be a weakness. This tendency of a deeper sense of feeling often means that women receive extraordinary graces from God more often, or at least they discern them more often, they are more receptive to God’s voice speaking to them. Women more than men grasp intuitively that they are vulnerable, and that they need God’s help to live a happy and productive life. This may be one reason why there are more women than men in church, and more men than women in prison. But the fear (that is healthy respect of and empathy for of the Lord) women and mothers possess is clearly present in Scripture. In particular, the Stations of the Cross honor women’s fear of the Lord. At the fourth station, Jesus meets Mary his mother. He meets Veronica at the sixth station, and the women of Jerusalem at the eighth. Mary and Mary Magdalene and other women are at the foot of the Cross-. other than John, where were all the men?
Women showed more courage than any of Jesus’ male followers. If the faith of a woman in a man is strong, his chances of success are infinitely greater. The gift of fear of the Lord roots women in human loyalty that is so often critical to men’s success. The rootedness of men tends to be less reliable; a woman’s moral power is often more important to her than human accomplishments. For as Scripture reminds us, the exalted shall be humbled, and the humbled shall be exalted.
To be sure, brothers and sisters, God is neither man or woman. But all of us are made in God’s image and likeness. And so God is our spiritual mother, not just our spiritual father. And with respect to images of God in Scripture, it is the Holy Spirit that most often resembles the gifts that women bring to our faith and to our lives. It is the Holy Spirit that breathes life upon the earth in the Creation story. To whom do we draw our first breath? Our mothers. As we have already noted, the gift of wisdom in Old Testament Scripture is referred to in the feminine. Finally, in what form does the Holy Spirit appear over Jesus when He is baptized by John the Baptist? A lion? a bear? No, a beautiful dove.
So on this rare chronological congruence of Pentecost and Mother’s Day, let us honor the Holy Spirit, who gives all of us gifts from the divine godhead essential to the salvation of both men and women. And let us honor our mothers, who bring so much to the faith and worship of God and its loving carrying out in our human lives.