THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
Chapter XIV
AN INVOCATION
True civilisation is easily tested by its attitude towards motherhood. There can be no real refinement of human feeling where man s heart is not full of delicacies for the dignity of motherhood; therefore there can be no true civilisation where motherhood is either shunned or degraded. If there is anything that belongs to the health of the nations that dwell upon the earth, it is a loving reverence for the burdens of human motherhood.
The very size of such a need ought to make it for us a thing of supreme reasonableness that
God has given to mankind divine motherhood. Great as the divine motherhood is, it is not too great for human need; the dangers and servitudes that beset human motherhood in this corrupt world are so terrible that there is a kind of reasonable proportionateness in God’s omnipotent act, when He made motherhood into a divine thing.
Christianity is truly the religion of birth. It starts with the eternal birth of its Head and Redeemer; it comes from the highest heavens to our earth through the birth from Mary the Virgin. It summarizes its whole spiritual power in the word birth: "Jesus answered, and said to him: Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith to him: How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother s womb, and be born again? Jesus answered: Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit. Wonder not, that I said to thee you must be born again (John iii. 3 7). Christianity s moral power, Christianity s social contribution to the life of mankind is the sanctity and obligatoriness of the laws that govern the birth of man.
In Rome there is a shrine to the Madonna del Parto the Madonna of the Birth. Rome s instinct and Rome s language are always true; they denote a comprehension of divine things which has the characteristic of universality. The direct simplicity of such an invocation proves that in it the Christian man and woman have come very near to the Fountains of life. For me, the Madonna del Parto is a portion of that ever-blessed realm of thought whose outlines are given in the beginning of St. John’s Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men (John i. I 4).
Ever-blessed Mother of God, thy maternity fills my mind with raptures. Thou art the greatest mystery of life after the Triune God. Whence is this to me that the Mother of my Lord should beloved by me? But how could I fail to love this marvel of life? The Birth of the Word is eternal, unchanging; it was, it is, it always will be. The birth which is thine, O blessed Mother of God, I gaze upon it as I should gaze upon an immense lake on an island which the boundless sea holds encompassed from all sides: it is the birth of God surrounded by a more immense birth of God ; Thou art, O blessed Lady, the island containing the one and contained by the other. From thee, as from a point of vantage, I hope to contemplate tor ever the two Lives in Which the happiness of all created intellects lies, the Life that is born in eternity and the Life that was born in time.
There was a time when the world s evil did frighten my soul, when I looked upon it with scared eyes and an anguished heart, as if it were something mighty with power and substance in it. But from the day when I began to understand thy mother hood more clearly, and to love it more ardently, my soul has ever made merry over the idle efforts of the princes of darkness to cow man s spirits into timidity through their idle attempts at establishing a mendacious sovereignty of gloom. The Creator of the starry skies smiles sweetly at thee, Oh fairest of all women, and thou returnest His smile in triumphant peace, and I know that with God smiling at His sweet Mother the grim powers of evil are already defeated.
