Umbilical Cord of Love

FAITH IN FOCUS: The Umbilical Cord of Love

St. Bonaventure said that after the long fast of our Lord in the desert, when the angels came to minister to him, they went first to the Blessed Mother to see what she had on her stove, and got the soup she had prepared and transported it to our Lord, who relished it the more because his mother had prepared it. Of course. 

-Dorothy Day

I am born connected. I am born remembering rivers flowing from my mother’s body into my body. She passes on to me the meaning of religion because she links me to our origin in God the Mother. 

-Meinrad Craighead

At the end of James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, prepares to leave Ireland for France, to begin a new life as a writer and poet, free of the conventions of the Irish Church and the domestic banality of his family. In the final entries of his journal, he proclaims his independence in words that echo with the fire of youth and the determination of the creative soul that seeks release: 

“Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience, and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

When I was 18, and read those words for the first time, my heart leapt within me! Yes! I thought: that is what I want! Nothing to hold me back; no ties or bonds to keep me from my own heroic leap into the world! Like Joyce’s hero, I would go out into the world and make my mark, be my own man, experience life and shape it according to my purposes.

It was only years later, re-reading this wonderful book, that I noticed the irony Joyce had sown into the scene; for just as Stephen makes this heroic declaration of artistic freedom, his mother sits quietly folding his clothes and packing his suitcase for him. So much for the triumph of heroic individualism.

Many of us, I think, have spent at least part of our lives idealizing the lonely hero or the solitary saint. We have accepted the great myth of our culture that freedom comes through independence and self-reliance, through pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and standing on your own two feet. We have idolized the “Man of Genius” (and how often it seems to be a man) such as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, and undervalued the many quiet hands by which we become ourselves. Even in matters of faith, we can tend to view Christ as the great loner—saving the world by his own strength of will—and miss the revelation that he does nothing alone, but always in that communion which is God’s true being. We forget, as the Council of Toledo seeks to remind us, in 675 AD, that the Son is begotten, not alone, but “from the womb of the Father” (“de utero 

Patris”), and from that womb—and the womb of Mary, his human mother—Jesus grows into the one who saves us by uniting us to all creation.

Growing older, I have come to see how deceptive and destructive the addiction to independence can be—how much it twists the freedom God intends for us and turns us away from the abundance offered through commitment and love, making life more like Hobbes’ vision of a war of “all against all.” Yet, in the truth that grace teaches, we come to know that we are united in a web of relationships as deep as our DNA and as self-evident as the buttons that mark our belly. Indeed, perhaps there is no better reminder that we are bound together than our belly buttons, which recall how we begin our lives tethered to our mothers—who feed us before we ask and who (when all is well) bless us before we enter the world. Not one of us is “self-made,” but generation after generation, we are made and formed by the women who accepted us and shaped us, as best they could: who formed our bodies in their wombs, formed our souls in their love, formed our character by the example they gave us in their lives. 

While it may be true that our mothers—whether those who gave us physical birth or those who have borne us only in their hearts—may, at times, drive us crazy; yet, we know, nonetheless, that without such love we would be adrift, and when separated from that love, we ache in ways beyond all telling. So it is, that we who have been blessed by biological or adoptive mothers, by step-mothers or grandmothers, by mothers who gave us birth and mothers who gave us the love our birth mothers could not, must give thanks for them, and for all those who, with a mother’s heart, have said “Yes!” to the gift of life and to their role in the miracle of creation and communion. We should remain awed by those upon whom the Spirit has moved, creating from their flesh and bone, their spirit and soul, a new person, a new life, a child of the living God.

This weekend, as we celebrate Mothers’ Day, let us pray with joy and hope for the women who have shaped our lives in fundamental and transformational ways—the mothers of our bodies, and the mothers of our hearts. May we forgive these mothers for their failures, and bless them for the grace that packed our bags and sent us into the world—never alone, but always connected by an umbilical cord of love to them and to the God who gave us, thankfully, into their care.

Fr. John Whitney, S.J.