We seem to have turned the hierarchy of human loves on its head. People rave about the specialness of a mother’s love. This is described as the most self-sacrificing, most heroic, most impressive kind of love. The pinnacle of all love, we are told, is a mother’s love.
This glorification of mommyhood was not always the case. It used to be that people were a bit more observant in some respects. There used to be charming sayings like, “That’s a face only a mother could love,” implying that the child was about as cute as a turkey vulture. In this saying is the understanding that a mother has but little choice in whether or not she loves her own child.
What is more remarkable than the mother’s love is her frequent disdain and annoyance with the child she carried and birthed into the world. If this magical mother’s love truly surpasses all other human affection, how can a mother become so irate with the object of all her love?
There is something primal at work. Having given birth to flesh-of-her-flesh, the mother usually loves her child. She will often see the virtues of a child that others don’t see. But the mother’s immaturity and selfishness are still present.
Do we really find it remarkable that a mother will feed her infant at night, bandage a scraped knee, and ensure a toddler has food and clean clothes? Of course, there are sad situations in which, due to some deficiency internal or external, mothers neglect their children. In the main, however, mothers address the bodily needs of their children. And we are supposed to be deeply impressed.
What is more eye-catching is the fact that caring for her own child is such a struggle. The battle of the will that occurs for most mothers to meet the needs of the day should give us pause. Recall: the mother’s love is primal, biological, and deep. Even with all these subconscious forces at work, the mother sometimes struggles immensely with being of good cheer while caring for her own offspring. This fact should dramatically curtail any expectations of grandeur we have about our aspirations for loving kindness.
A college graduate said without a hint of embarrassment that he loved the idea of people but found individuals impossible to live with. Isn’t that the rub? Yet, you can’t have a whole great mass of people without those irritating, hard-to-live with individuals. Thinking otherwise demonstrates a fuzzy thinking that is terribly common in our culture. We prefer the abstract and the imprecise. Get worked up about the plight of some unseen, abstract group of people half a world away is fun in its self-righteous way. Sharing the breakfast table with someone who snored last night? That’s tough.
With this perspective, what are we to make of a mother’s love? Certainly, a healthy culture should foster and celebrate the love of mothers for their children. Afterall, everyone has a mother at some point. But perhaps we should be a bit more reticent to put mommy’s care and affection on a pedestal of holiest most perfect love. It’s far from that. And if we look at that maternal love and see how short it falls of perfection, we might be tempted to throw in the towel.
No, a mother’s love deserves to be firmly planted on earth amidst the modest and concrete possibilities right around us. In this mess of the particular, we should also call on mothers to do more than love an ugly face. We should encourage them to lay down their lives for their children instead of waiting for a wash of sentimental feeling to buoy them up in times of difficulty. Even for a mother, love is a choice.
In the Gospel of John, chapter 15, Jesus says, “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” We glibly want to believe that, of course, we are the kind of people who would rescue anyone from a world of hurt, but it seems it’s not that simple. In a world in which a mother’s love comes with such faltering steps, the higher forms of love will take a great deal of surrender to achieve.
1 comment
Comments are closed.