HOMILIES PREACHED BY FATHER ALTIER ON MOTHER'S DAY.

Today our nation takes an opportunity to celebrate our mothers. We put aside a day for Mother's Day. Mother's Day actually did not begin in America, but it began almost a couple of millennia ago. It began by people coming back to the church where they were baptized. They recognized that the Church was their mother at the baptismal font. So the idea was that they would celebrate a day when they would all go back to their mother church. All the converts would be there together, the ones from over the years, and they would all be together in the place where they were baptized. They would celebrate their faith and life that they had learned and received in that church.

It did not take a whole lot of time for people to say, "If we are going to be able to celebrate the supernatural life that we have through Holy Mother Church, then it is also fitting that on this day we should visit our mothers (our natural mothers) from whom we have natural life." That is the way Mother's Day began. First of all, by recognizing the life given to us by God in Baptism. Then from there to say, "We wouldn't have the life of Baptism if we didn't have natural life, and that we received from our mothers." Today we take the opportunity to think about motherhood on both of those levels.

When we look at the readings today, we see some different elements that any mother would recognize.

The Love of a Mother

Sunday May 13, 2001

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Reading I (Acts 14:21-27), Reading II (Rev 21:1-5a)

Gospel (St. John 13:31-33a, 34-35)

They would have to know it is only through many hardships that we will enter the kingdom of heaven.

How a mother knows that, even from the time of birth when she thinks of not only what she has to endure but of what a baby has to endure in childbirth, and then going through all the struggles of when they are little - whether it is all the problems of teething, or the difficulties when a baby gets sick, or whatever it may be, all of the little aches and pains and hurts that a little baby goes through as they learn to walk and they fall down and they bang their heads and they do all the other little things. Then, of course, there are the teenage years which are very distressing, not only for the kids but for the moms as well. They endure that for their children.

They encourage them and they try to build them up. So it is indeed through many hardships that we grow. We learn wisdom on the natural level but we also grow in love with God. We learn wisdom on the supernatural level by enduring the hardships of life and offering them in union with Jesus Christ. It is in that that we put love into practice.

There would be no putting love into practice if we did not have a means to be able to learn it in the first place, and that comes from our mothers. That is the commandment that Jesus gave us: We are to love one another as He had loved us. Where do we learn that except from our mothers? More than any place, for most people, they learn love from a mom. All of us, every single one of us, learned love at its beginning by dwelling for nine months listening to the beautiful sound of a heartbeat, the beating heart of our own mother. That was the sound that permeated our life more than any other for nine full months. Every single second of our existence for nine months, we heard constantly that rhythmic beat.

If a mom brings all of her babies to the doctor and they all put the stethoscope on, they hear the baby's heart and they can hear the mom's heart. One person told me how beautiful it is to listen because where the doctors would say a mother's heart sounds like lub-dub, lub-dub, but from a child's point of view they would say it sounds like love-you, love-you. That is what we grow up with. That is how we begin our life: with that constant reminder of love that a mother gives to her children. She conceives that child in love. She bears the child in love. She raises the child in love.

Just step back and consider again what a mother does, pouring herself out entirely for that baby. She has to do things for a child that normally none of us would like to do. Yet, how a mother rejoices even in that. We know that we don't always rejoice in some of those things even as moms, but for the most part, a mom accepts with peace and with joy in her heart even some of those things which are so unpleasant. She is full of love even when a child is sick and makes a mess all over. On a natural level, we would walk away from that. But out of love for a child, a mother enters right into that, not only to clean up the mess, but more than anything to be able to care for her child.

Once again, in that we see a mother pouring herself out, loving her children even when it is not easy, even when it is not pleasant, because a mother's heart knows only that love.

We think about the moms who have so generously brought into this world many lives. They look at those children and realize with every single conception that their hearts (and their ability to love) expands every single time. When that first baby is born, a mother is so in love with that little baby she cannot imagine that there can be a greater love because of the love she has for her husband and the love she has for this child. Six and eight and ten and twelve babies later, she realizes the love that was there for the first one was only a foreshadowing of the love that has now grown. It has grown through all of the aches and the pains and the hardships of all of these other little ones she has brought into the world. Her heart that was exploding with love on the day that first one was conceived, and the day that first one was born, is now expanded far beyond whatever that mother could have imagined on the day of the first birth.

We see again the most extraordinary element of God's creation: the heart of a mother.

We think of the miracle of that little baby that is born of our mothers. We need to look even a step prior to that and look at the heart that desired beyond all else to conceive a child, to love a child; that is our mother. How grateful each one of us must be to our mothers for the life that we have. We see how a mother, as her children continue to grow to the point where they have their own babies, is able to repeat with Jesus (or is able to understand those words of Our Lord in a new way), "Behold, I make all things new."

Think of what a great-grandmother must experience in her old age when she looks at this tiny little baby that is not the child of her own child, but the grandchild of her own child. She looks at God renewing humanity as she, in her old age, looks to a new birth unto eternal life. She sees a new birth as life continues in this world and rejoices because she recognizes that her motherhood is not for herself, but her motherhood is for someone else. The unselfish love of a mother is the closest thing in this world to the love of God. She gives herself for the sake of a child and that is what we see in the motherhood of the Church as well.

In the Book of Revelation (the second reading),we hear about the Church coming down from heaven, the new Jerusalem as a bride adorned for her husband. That bride in union with her husband brings forth new life. The new life the Church gives to us is not for the sake of the Church, but is for the sake of her children and for the sake of God. So that as Jesus would be able to say as Judas walked away from the Last Supper, "Now is the Son of God glorified, and God is glorified in Him, and God will glorify Him." That is exactly what has happened to each one of us on the day that the Church exercised her motherhood at the baptismal font. God glorified each one of us and He has said to each one of us, "My dwelling is with men."

He has come to us and He resides in our hearts, our hearts that were prepared to receive the gift of God (Who is Love), of the indwelling of the Trinity. Our hearts, even as tiny little babies had only known love and were prepared to receive Love when He would come to us on the day of our Baptism. Our own mothers brought us to the baptismal font in, once again, that selfless kind of love, where they offered us to God. In their hearts they are saying, "This baby of mine is now a child of God. This child that God has allowed me to conceive and bring into this world, I now give back to God. This child will be born anew at the baptismal font and will share not only the natural life, made in my own image and likeness along with my husband, but now is renewed into the very likeness of God in Whose image this child was made in the first place."

A mother shares in the creative work of God providing with her husband the material for the body. God infuses into us, in the womb of our mother, our soul. The two, God and our mother, are sharing in creation. They are renewing the face of the earth, providing for new growth, a new generation of people who are created to glorify God, who are made to be saints and who are made to love. All of this is due to the love of a woman who is our mother.

Today as we meditate upon this mystery of life we consider our first mother, Eve. We consider our spiritual mother, the Blessed Lady. We consider the Church, Mater and Magister (Mother and Teacher). And we consider the most beautiful woman in our lives, our own mother, the one who gave us life, the one who taught us to love. She is the one who gave us to love Him, so that even in the newness of life all things would be new once again. Our mothers, out of love for us, wanted to give us not only natural life but they wanted to share with us eternal life. They have taught us to love so that we would be saints. They have brought us to the baptismal font so that we can get to Heaven. They teach us by word and by example what it means to follow the commandment of love. As they have done in this world, and as Our Lord has already done for us (as He promises in John's Gospel), I think that we can say the same for our mothers and our grandmothers who have gone before us: They go before us to prepare a place for us so that where they are, we also may be. Thanks be to God for moms. They are the ones who teach us the love of God in human form.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Motherhood, an Awesome Gift from God

May 11, 2003 Fourth Sunday of Easter

Reading I (Acts 4:8-12), Reading II (1 John 3:1-2)

Gospel (St. John 10:11-18)

Today our country takes out a day to honor moms, a most fitting thing to be able to do as these are the incredible women that God has chosen for each one of us to give us life. A mother’s task, as we all know, is to conceive, to bear, to nourish, and to educate her children. It is the single most important and dignified task on the natural level in this world. What God has entrusted to a mother is nothing less than the souls of the children that He has given to her. With a mother’s care and with a mother’s heart she carries her children with her, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It does not matter how old she is, it does not matter how old they are, she never ceases being a mother. Even when you see mothers who are in their nineties and their children are in their seventies, it is pretty clear that this is still mother and child. And that mother continues to be a mother not only in this life but in the next as well. Which is why, of course, we pray for our mothers who are deceased, but also to know that if our mothers have gone the right direction after death, they continue to pray for us. Rather than stopping their maternal care, in fact it increases when they get to Heaven because their love increases as they look at God and they know perfectly even as they are known, as we heard in the second reading today. Consequently, our mothers who are in Heaven know us even better now than they did when they were in this world. They love us more perfectly, which is an astounding thought when we consider the love of a mother.

This concept of Mother’s Day actually began many, many centuries ago. It began when the Christian people would recognize that they wanted to go back and celebrate the place where they were baptized. At the Easter Vigil, the new converts would be brought into the church and they would be baptized. They would come into the church at night dressed in white robes after having been baptized by the bishop, and all the people would stand and sing as the new converts would come forth. As this would naturally stir one’s sentiments, the people would think about the place where they themselves were baptized. So the tradition grew up that on one particular Sunday out of the year people would go back to the place where they themselves were baptized, to their mother church. There, with all of the others who were received into the faith and baptized at that particular parish church, they would all gather together, children of the same mother, children born at the same baptismal font.

And it did not take long before people would recognize that if they would gather to honor the same mother on the spiritual level, the same place where they were reborn, that it also made perfect sense to continue on to honor the woman who bore them in the natural and physical order as well. Soon it became a matter of not only visiting their mother church, but on that same day they would honor their own mothers. That continues in this day. We do not recognize, generally, the religious element of this, but thankfully, at least even in our pagan country, we continue to recognize the dignity of mothers.

This is something that each and every one of us does recognize in our relationship with our own mother, and yet it is something which we need to protect because motherhood is under severe attack. When we have determined in our society that the most important task is relegated to the act of having at the most two children because it would be a violation somehow for a woman to bear more than that, we have destroyed the nature of what motherhood is really about. A woman is designed for life, abundance of life, and that is what Our Lord desires. Every single woman shares in the task of being a mother. Even if she does not conceive and bear in the physical order, the love that God places into the heart of a woman bears fruit in the spiritual order through prayer, through sacrifice, through the love which is demonstrated most perfectly in the heart of every single woman, especially we all recognize it in the hearts of our own mothers. It is that love, the love of a mother, which brings more children to the Lord.

Saint Paul tells us that all fatherhood has its origin in God. We saw in the second reading today from the First Letter of Saint John the love that the Father has bestowed upon us in letting us be called His children. All of us recognize, of course, that there is no fatherhood unless there is first a motherhood. Men, in and of themselves, would be completely barren unless it was for the generosity and the life-giving nature of a woman. So if God is going to be Father for each one of us, there needs to be a mother. And just as each one of us has a mother on the natural and physical order, each one of us also has a mother on the spiritual and supernatural order – it is this beautiful Lady who is right here [Father Altier is pointing to a statue of Our Blessed Mother Mary]. And if all fatherhood has its origin in God, then all motherhood has its origin in Our Blessed Lady, the one who conceived us in her heart on the day the angel asked if she would be the Mother of God, because in conceiving Christ she conceived all who would be members of Christ. It was at the foot of the Cross, where her heart was pierced by the sword spoken of and prophesied by Simeon, that she gave birth to each one of us in a spiritual way. It is for this reason that Our Lord on the Cross would be able to look at His own Mother and give each one of us to her as He said, “Behold your son.” Then He looked at His beloved disciple – that is, you and me, those beloved of Christ – and said to each one of us, “Behold your mother.”

Each one of us has learned from our own mothers what it is to be loved, to be taught, to be nourished and cherished. Saint Peter in the first reading tells us that there is no other name other than Jesus Christ given to humanity by which we are to be saved. And I suspect, for the vast majority of us, the first place we heard of that beautiful name of Jesus was on the knee of our mother as she taught us how to pray. She taught us about Jesus; she taught us how to love Jesus. As every child knows, the safest place to be is in the arms of his mother, the place where he is going to be able to be completely relaxed, the place where he can place his head upon the heart where for the first nine months of his life he lived immediately beneath, to be able to hear the heart of his mother, to know the comfort and the love of the mother while being upon her shoulder. So too do we recognize the same thing in our Blessed Mother.

Children know that when things are frightening, when times become difficult, they run immediately to their mother. In the picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Jesus is shown with his sandal dangling by the strap to be able to demonstrate that as the two angels, Michael and Gabriel, presented to Jesus the implements of His torture, He ran to His mother and jumped into her arms to be protected. He is our Shepherd; He is the One Who leads the sheep. He leads us to the place where the sheep can be at peace, where they are going to be fed and nourished, where they are going to have life. He leads His sheep to the same place that He Himself went – right to His mother – so that she can lead us, as a mother does, right to our heavenly Father. This is critically important because these lessons that each one of us learned early on in our lives in the love of our mothers for each one of us needs now to be put into practice in a very particular way because over these next months things are going to get very frightening. But Jesus has given this time to His mother, and He has entrusted each one of us to His mother. Like Him, we must run to her and we must jump into her maternal arms, find our comfort on her Immaculate Heart – indeed, in her Immaculate Heart – and there know that we are safe, that we have nothing to fear as long as we are with our Mother.

Each one of us, every single day (not just today), must be so grateful to our mothers for the heroic act, the heroic love that they have demonstrated in bearing us. Indeed, I suspect for most of us, if we look back to our early years of childhood and being teenagers, our mothers had to practice truly heroic love just to tolerate most of us. So how grateful we need to be to our moms for everything they have done and everything they continue to do. And how grateful we also need to be then to Our Lord, to our heavenly Father, for giving us a heavenly Mother to love us in an heroic manner, to love us so much that in order to give us life she would unite herself to the death of her Son so that each one of us could have life. All motherhood comes from her because she is the new Eve, the mother of all the living, of all of those who are alive in Christ.

And so on this day we give special thanks to each and every mother, to our own mothers on the natural order who brought us into this world and who taught us the most important lessons of life. We are grateful to our Mother, the Church, where we were born at the baptismal font. We are grateful to all of those astounding women who exercise their spiritual maternity in union with Our Lady in prayer, in sacrifice and suffering, to bring many more children to Christ. And we are grateful to our heavenly Mother who leads us to Jesus, who teaches us about Our Lord, who protects us, who guides us, who nourishes us, who prays for us, the one who will bring us to eternal life and teaches to us the only Name given to us by which we are to be saved, the Name of her Son, Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God for moms, and thanks to every mom who has co-operated with God in the work of creation and created the most incredible thing: a human person with a soul which is eternal to give glory to God.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

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