The mission of being a mother
A true mother is always with her child, even if distances separate them. There are countless facts in which a mother, almost with a sixth sense, knows what is happening to her child, even without being physically next to her.
She cheers for him and is able to take his defense in the most terrible courts. She is able to smile and even cry for her son, even when she should. Santa Monica can tell how much she cried for the conversion of Augustine, to the point that, after thirty years of uninterrupted tears, she reached what she wanted. Later, she well deserved to receive, by Pope Alexander III, in the year 1153, the title of “Patroness of Christian Mothers”.
There are mothers who permeate her existence with continuous dedication, becoming a precious ointment that heals the pain of their children. Always willing to protect them, they even go so far as to give their lives for them. Such an image God left us in nature itself: for example, the fact that an animal as clumsy as a chicken is proud and angry against the attack of the hawk, to defend, to the last consequences, its tender chicks. . This image was used by the Savior himself, referring to the chosen city: Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which kills the prophets and stones those sent to thee! How many times have I wanted to gather your children like a hen its chicks under its wings, and you didn’t? (Luke 13,34)
So, how many and how many virtues could we highlight from this irreplaceable person called a mother. However, among all of them there is a preponderant one, whose value overrides the others, perhaps completely: the virtue of patience, practiced by the mother who stays next to her child’s bed of pain, watching like a tireless guardian angel, surrendering . until the holocaust.
And here is, perhaps, the episode in which the Mother of Mothers, under the title of Mother of Sorrows and Senhora da Piedade, most expressed her love. There she was, Stabat Mater Dolorosa, next to the weeping Cross, suffering with the Divine Son, reaching Redemption for us. It was the Virgin who, par excellence, praised the Lord with the psalm: “I will be by your side in your pain!” (Ps 90,15).
In order to have an idea of this terrible trance suffered by Her, St. Bernard assures us that, at the moment when they pierced the side of Christ, the spear had pierced the Body of the Redeemer; but the soul pierced was that of Mary (sermo in dom.infra out. Assumptionis, 14-15: Opera omnia, Edit. Cisterc). And as we learn in the book of Proverbs: “The furnace tests gold, and tribulation tests the righteous!” (Prov 17,3).
What glory to her, what surprising daring! To have Him in her virginal arms in the supreme hour, holding in her heart the sacred sanctuary of faith.
Let us therefore turn our eyes to the one who was Mother par excellence, and let us ask her for our mothers, begging her to obtain from her Divine Son a special blessing for all those who carry out such an extraordinary mission.
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