Mother’s Day 2011
Fr. Anthony Brankin
Gospel: Luke 24:13-35 They recognized Him in the breaking of the bread.
Full homily text: On behalf of all the priests in the rectory—and with the sisters in the convent, I wish to extend to all our mothers—the joys of this Mother’s Day.
It is so beautiful to see this confluence of events—just yesterday our children received their Blessed Lord in Holy Communion for the First time—and today—Mother’s Day—they crown Jesus’ mother, Mary.
Walk on the spiritual path along with St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal into the Love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Are you a lay person interested in plunging more fully into a way of daily devotion? Or considering a vocation to the monastic Visitandine tradition? Go to Visitation Spirit website.
In Latin, Italian and Spanish, you could say that yesterday our children received Il Santissimo–Holy Communion—and today they give thanks to His Mother La Santissima.
Mothers are more valuable
The Holiest Son and the Holiest mother—we are all family on this Mother’s Day.
I know that mother’s day was started by the card companies, but I think that Mother’s Day is becoming more and more important each year because mothers are becoming more and more valuable each year.
I am not the only one who believes that less and less people these days understand what a mother is—how she loves and gives life—and never thinks of herself. How she suffers and endures whatever she has to—even were she to have to give up her life. But she does that so that those she loves would not suffer or die. Life and love—and even death. Don’t those words define totally what a mother is?
But the people who form this society, the ones who produce the television shows and movies and music, the ones who write the newspapers—compose editorials about what cool people should think—the ones who print magazines and ads to tell us what is fashionable and correct—they assault motherhood and womanhood at every step of the way.
Formed by the media
We cannot help but be formed by these shows and people who produce the shows. We are watching them all the time. We are letting someone who does not believe what we believe—either about Jesus or life or love or motherhood to form us—all day long—all night long and with a television set in each room!
You know the movies and shows I am talking about—where the strong woman is the one with the combat boots and machine gun. And if she isn’t shooting and beating everyone up she is involved superficially with a hundred lovers. And she is never a mother! Never a mother! And this is played out in the media this way everyday, 24/7. Our culture doesn’t like mothers—or fathers—they only like party girls and party boys who just wanna have fun. What do you think is the unspoken and subtle subtext of every article we read about Lindsay Lohan or Snooki Polizzi or Charlie Sheen? That love is not about family and having children. It is about soft core pornographic lives—about how women need only be silly and selfish—and it is cute when their men are vulgar and crude and brutal.
All this transpires before our eyes and souls with the support and encouragement of stupid and grasping politicians who do not even know that it is their mothers and their wives and their daughters who are also being assaulted.
Having babies is a good thing
As Catholics we are, of course, pro-life which is to say that we believe that having babies and children and families—and as many as God sends us—is a good thing and a healthy thing and a happy thing. To be fertile and fecund is to be full of life and love. That is the goal of life. It is not to be sterile and crabbed and constipated and selfish.
But when was the last time you heard anyone in the media extol the beauties and wonder of having children? When was the last time in the media you saw where pregnancy was treated as a good thing and not as some disease to be avoided?
Our modern culture teaches us so surely that you don’t need to have children and you certainly don’t need to get married. We have the pill. You can be gay or straight—alone or with others, but you can have companionship and fun and someone to go out with and go home with at night—and no babies to worry about. No responsibilities. No problem. The pill has taken care of that. And the pill has pretty much destroyed love and is in the process of destroying families.
Women no longer aspire to motherhood—and men no longer aspire to fatherhood. All we need is sex. And this is the message we all hear every day all day in every corner of this society.
Of course this is not new. This whole struggle came about—as did all of our woes—from the Ancient Enemy, Satan, who can not stand humanity.
Satan wants to bring us down
Satan’s sole activity, since the creation of Adam and Eve, has been to try to bring humanity down and destroy us. In that way he can strike back at the God who cast him down from heaven so long ago.
And Satan hurts us most effectively when he is able to make us sin against life. How better to get back at the Lord of Life and Love than to have us kill life and love—and maybe even motherhood in the bargain. That is why the devil tries to get us to sterilize ourselves, abort our children, and fill our brains, and homes and wombs with death and ugliness and unhappiness. If the devil can get us to hurt our own humanity—then he feels he has hurt God himself.
Well how do we fight him? How do we win the war for God, life and love and families and mothers?
Question all we read, see and hear
Well first of all we must become aware. We cannot go through our days and nights any longer as if we were in a coma—just passive receptacles of all the garbage they feed us. We have to start paying attention to what is going on around us. We must read each article in the newspaper, or view each ad in the magazines, watch each show and movie or listen to the radio—with a new ear and a new eye and ask ourselves at every moment does this picture or this dialogue or this story promote life and love? motherhood and fatherhood? or does it ridicule those things?
Does this article or that song express reverence and respect for families and parents and children or disdain?
Do the things we read and see, encourage lust or love? death or life? And then once we have asked and answered those questions and are now aware of what is going on around us, then we must refuse—utterly refuse—to go along with it anymore! We must stop co-operating with it all. Stop watching! Stop Listening! Stop being involved with our modern culture of death.
And if we pay attention to the evil going on all around us, and begin to resist, then maybe there is hope. It won’t be easy being different. It won’t be easy not being like the rest of them out there watching what they watch and reading what they read and being a blissful part of it all. But it will be good for us and for our world—and by rejecting the deathliness of this culture, we will have done so much more for our mothers than buying them a box of candy. We will have shown we have finally understood what our mothers meant by the life and love they gave to us.