3 April 2019
Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
“Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you” (Is 49:15). Unfortunately, we do live in a world in which some parents have less and less tenderness for their children. Perhaps this started with the falling apart of fatherhood, as many men found themselves unwilling or unable to make the sacrifices that it takes to be a good father to their children. Just as troublingly, in recent years, I have even encountered more and more people whose mothers are aloof or even cruel to their children, even from a tender age. These cases are increasing as a sad manifestation of the brokenness of our world.
When I was younger, there were already people rebelling against calling God “Father,” because their experience of fatherhood was so dark. But now the same thing may be said more and more generally even about “mothers” and about parenthood in general, for some anyway. This is tragic, because God really does entrust to parents the care of little ones, and he does wish for the parents to be an expression of God’s own care and love for these little ones. Perhaps the breakdown of the faith might be linked at least in part to the breakdown of the family.
No matter how broken families may become, however, we Christians can never abandon the family as a real and primordial image of our own relationship to God. It is how the Son reveals the reality of the divine life that he shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit from all eternity: “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also” (Jn 5:19). If we have difficulty relating to God because of experiences that we have had with our father or our mother, let us then ask God to help us understand how he is our true Father and ask our Lady to help us to know her as our mother so that we might become more and more children of God who, by grace, can help to heal God’s good creation.