I’ve learned I have one job.
It’s been a long lesson.
And I’m still learning it.
But it is a beautiful lesson towards the most beautiful truth. I am Woman, God’s crown of creation. His exer kenegdo. Mindblowing… And yet, it answers the lifelong questions of this woman’s seeking heart.
I still struggle to open fully to receive His gift, to let Him permeate my whole being.
I’m still learning to see and to trust, and to open to what this means in my own unique person and the spiritual motherhood with which I am entrusted. But I love it so, this gift of my womanhood.
Woman’s body and soul makes manifests this truth (we as women are the jewel in the crown of creation, His final act of all creation!) in infinite ways that are too numerous, too magnificent, too beyond mere humanity to count. That only gets us into trouble – and we are mystified as to why.
It was never meant for me to try to manufacture my own dignity and worth, but I’ve been voracious in trying.
But, with grace that gives eyes to see and a heart ready for communion with Christ Who ever pursues me as bridegroom (and a steady stream of lifelong grave sufferings to teach me who I am and Whose I am, and where my healing lies) – all I must do is simply open to receive. Even when it hurts.
There is great freedom in letting go of the grasp – the death grip – of all those ways we respond to life situations which will never satisfy, heal, or bring the freedom we seek, and in fact blindly serve as the very barriers to freedom we ache for.
I’ve made it so so hard – without seeing that, without knowing that – when all the while it was so incredibly simple. And I’ve not yet met a person for whom this isn’t true as well. But it seems that this is the path we must follow towards our own unique and unrepeatable pilgrimage to our “Fiat”.
I share with you today this reflection that I take often with me to prayer and contemplation entitled the “The Soul of the Mother”, which speaks of Our Lady who is the most perfect apostle of Jesus Christ who ever lived. She is our model for what discipleship was intended “in the beginning.” This is how Eve was created. What Adam and Eve rejected, Christ and Our Lady have restored.
“The Soul of the Mother” was written by the most amazing woman, Dr. Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967), a Swiss physician who was drawn to the Catholic Church after some rather difficult illnesses, family/life challenges, immense sufferings, and who authored over 60 books.
I often refer to her works, as her writings speak to my heart as woman in profound ways They draw me deeper into intimacy with God My Father, the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ my Bridegroom, and His beautiful Mother who has taken my hand to show me the way. I never want to let go of Mama Mary’s hand, for in a mother’s love she leads me to the One Whom my soul loves, and Whom I’ve been looking for my whole life.
Praying with and contemplating my own womanhood and call to spiritual motherhood with The Soul of the Mother always leads my own feminine soul to soar to the highest heavens, and the deepest, most intimate places of my heart, where Christ Who is God made manifest waits for me.
I share this with you so that He may permeate your heart with His love in and through his most beautiful creation, Our Mother whose very being radiates “He Whom your soul seeks.”
The soul of the Mother is completely simple. All questions and all answers become an integrated whole in her. Her being is indivisible. Her soul is not so simple in and of itself but rather by virtue of the nearness of God, which allows her to give herself again and again in such a way that everything complex and incomprehensible is taken over by God. God is so near to her the he himself brings the simple answer to all questions, smooths and solves every seeming complication, and renders all of life’s circumstances so large and clear that, while a mystery may remain, it is never an agonizing riddle. Mary lives so much in God that she always knows what God wants from her and that nothing is simpler for her than to do the pure will of God, even when he requires hard and bitter things of her. And not only her outward action is determined in this way, but even her inner consent, which flows at any given moment from her state of perpetual readiness. There are may questions in Mary’s life, but she does not dwell on them. She does not brood over the incomprehensible that is beyond her power of understanding. Problems cannot become of essential importance to her, for problems are such limitations; she, however, is all readiness and openness for everything. Thus she is beyond the multiplicity of the incomprehensible in order to live in the infinite simplicity of the fulfillment of God’s will.
Because God is so near to her, his eternal, living truth lives in her–not a theoretical truth, but the truth of the one and three-personed God. Through grace, this truth becomes her own truth In everything she does, she is true. In her is no lie, no concealment, no pretense, no lagging behind a demand, no tension between what is and what should be, no regret, no falling away from the idea God has of her. Everything about her is pure truth. She has a steadfastness–coming not from herself, but as a continuous gift of grace–in which she is able to carry out the dizzyingly high mission entrusted to her without hesitation and indecision, with a simplicity that can only be explained by her participation in the simplicity of God. Because her mission is so true and so great, God constantly gives her his truth so that she may fulfill the truth of her mission.
From this simple truth of her mission, to which her whole being is ordered, comes an understanding of why all her personal qualities flow together like a sea. They do not exist separately, side by side; rather they form one simple whole. If one tried to pick out the most essential of her qualities, no one quality could ever be emphasized definitively, for each is connected with all the others, and each can be regarded as the center of her being One can never describe one quality without at least suggesting the others. The unity of her bright being can perhaps be best illustrated by means of a dark mirror image, the unity of sin. Just as a sinner, when he tries during confession to isolate one sin that he wishes to confess, realizes that fundamentally every sin is connected with every other and that behind the formed comprehensible guilt there is a background of incomprehensible, formless sinfulness in his soul that he can never describe or exhaust, so he who tries to understand the soul of the Mother through individual qualities will soon realize that they are only the representation of an infinitely simple, because infinitely rich and full, foundation of her soul.” (Handmaid of the Lord, p. 23-24)