Do we really mean it on Mother’s Day?

Editor: Hasn’t Mother’ Day become a mask of love, a day expressing care.

When we use the word care today, it is not difficult to make it mean love without demeaning love.

Professional care predominates; we have medical care, care for the pupil in the school, take care and care of poor mother.

Is not Mother’s Day care something institutionalized by the media and commercial interests? You owe care to this person. If this is all we do, is it not disunity beyond anything we could imagine for family life.

To love one’s mother, at least in the way I am built, after having read the story of the good Samaritan, is an ongoing, practical love. What about elderly mothers’ abandoned to care homes in our society?

In Japan most parents with children over 35 could count on the blessing of old age within the household. Living is replaced by survival care.

I find that in today’s Catholic society, educated sons and daughters can deny the most fundamental of all loves; the filial love for the mother in her religious faith, which has enabled her not only to give them birth, nourish their youth, but who has sustained their reckless adult life at considerable sacrifice.

To drive the visiting mother to the local parish church on a Sunday morning puts quite a strain on joy. Is it not a new variety of the sin of pride?

A son can be compassionate with the anonymous atheist he does not know, but not the caring Christian mother whom he does know and who also loves him most of all. Some can be so obsessed with casting the religious mote out of their mother’s eye that they can remain blind to beam like presumption and ingratitude that afflicts their own vision of things.

What is the greatest Mothers Day gift? Does it not consist in turning around one’s heart to declare a fresh willingness to love; from today, I will love you always, immediately and with joy without condition or expectation. Never tell a lie to your mother.

Fr. Harry Clarke, Kelowna