All of us I believe have some desire to see God, to gain some glimpse of God from the time of our first God awareness. I suppose there are cultures who have lost the gift of teaching God awareness, but I do not live there. I do know that a theory I was taught decades ago was that children are born with this awareness fully in place. The role of guardian or parent is to help the child not forget what he or she knows but to grow into it. To color it with vital shades of wholeness and hope, I would add. These are the shades we see vividly in Jesus if we care to look.
On this Mother's Day, which this year falls on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, it is fitting to recall the vital role of parenting in faith formation. For many of us the least conditional form of love we find is from our parents and often our mother who has carried us into life. Where this is not true we are blessed if there is a grandparent, godparent or other adult who has adopted this role. The parental task in faith formation is first to love from the bond of one who creates life and releases it well guided into its potential. That guiding and releasing will involve imaginative play, the joy of seeing what lies in the child's imagination. The imagination nurtured in positive, caring possibility is where religious awareness finds its roots. When this imagination is tortured with violence, negative stimulation, devaluation, one must wonder what becomes of the religious imagination. Many of us develop with some mixture of the positive and negative. Notice that classic fairytales are a mixture of both positive and negative, but even in say Hansel and Gretel the good wins out. Care becomes the final lesson of love, both that of the child and the good parent and providence.
Jesus uses this religious imagination to stimulate religious hope and action. In today's Gospel we have a collection of teachings which reach into our imagination and call us to deeper life. Two themes are clear. There is a process in God's mind for our growth. It is becoming like our Master, Teacher. We do not need to be all knowing but to know enough to follow. Secondly, there is evil which will seek to misname the good as evil. Yet stay with the good for this will make you, save you, develop your godly character. In this journey to stay the good, God accompanies you and values you above all else. Finally we welcome God when we welcome each other in God's name. Even the smallest act of welcome, a cup of water shared, is noticed and rewarded by God who knows our heart.
And I must wonder, do we comprehend this last act as meaningful because in our infancy and childhood we were so dependent on adults to give us drink and food and care and they did. Sometimes it was our mother, sometimes a grandparent, sometimes a hired caregiver. Their care was god-like to us. And where this was missing, it can take real work of care to restore this lost place of first intimacy, love well imagined.
So today I am grateful to a mother of four who cared well enough for me to trust. Who saw that I remembered God in my childhood. Behind her I am grateful for grandparents who loved me into imagination and Christ. I am grateful for two of them in particular. As I imagine backwards I am grateful for those who became spiritual mothers and fathers for me and aided my imagination and growth into a godly life.
I imagine Mother's Day to be so much more than a Hallmark Card. Behind it is what God imagined motherhood, parenthood to be, a place where we taste love we first know as God's gift woven into us. This is the place we are ever to remember. If we have forgotten, Jesus can help us imagine it anew.
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