California poppies for you

MOTHERS NEVER were perfect and quite a few have been rotten. They have always possessed the power to create or destroy, to raise up or to tear down. Mothers never were perfect and yet the institution is without flaw. The ideal is unparalleled. A good mother is one of life’s greatest gifts.

The more degraded motherhood becomes, the more sickly sentimental it is. As the blogger Tiberge writes at her excellent traditionalist site Galliawatch:

Mother’s Day, like Valentine’s Day and Halloween, has ballooned in importance in recent decades, as if to compensate for the loss of love in today’s promiscuous world, the loss of souls in today’s paganized, world, and the loss of traditional motherhood in today’s world of “working moms, single moms, moms on welfare and other newly created icons of the liberated woman. There are even “cougar moms” who, in front of their own daughters, prey on men. These holidays at one time were mostly for the benefit of children who would make Valentine cards at school, dress up on Halloween to knock on doors and ask for candy treats, or buy (or make) a small precious gift for Mother (before she became, by feminist diktat a “mom”).

I know one woman whose mother continually undercut her confidence, complaining bitterly that she was not more successful in her career and that she had married the wrong man. Not surprisingly, this woman never had children of her own. She was rendered un-motherly by her own mother.

And yet miraculously, good mothers abound. In his church bulletin today, the Reverend James Jackson, of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church in Littleton, Colorado, includes a letter to his own mother. He writes: 

What consolation you gave me in my lowest days, and what superb companionship you provided during the best. 

In short, I do not understand how people can say that it is such a large career to tell other people’s children about the A,B,C’s, and such a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe. 

Bonum diffusa est says St. Thomas Aquinas. “The good diffuses itself.” You have passed on an enormous wealth of affection and wisdom and knowledge and love to your children – I see it in the superb skills of motherhood practiced by my sister. And if anyone says that there is anything good in me at all, or kindness or wisdom or morals or love, then I shall tell them that it came from you, the one above all others whom God chose to teach me these things. 

St. Bernard of Clairvaux once said that the love on earth which is closest to that of God’s is the love of a mother for her children. So if I hear someone wonder aloud what the face of God is really like when we see Him face to face, I shall say I have a good idea. 

For I have seen the love of God in the bright eyes and sweet countenance of my mother.

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