A Reflection for the Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

“Can a mother forget her infant, be without 

tenderness for the child of her womb?”

 These words from today’s first reading remind me (as if I needed reminding!) that my mother will celebrate her sixty-sixth birthday this Friday—on the feast of St. Joseph, as she always reminds me. My relationship with my mother is, without question, the most “godly” relationship in my life. I hope that all of us can say this of at least one person in our orbit: that they care for us without any expectation of return. So many of our encounters with our fellow human beings are transactional. We give something—and the recipient had better pay us back with something of equal value, or he’s a cheat. That’s the essence of justice, the lex talionis: good for good, evil for evil.

My mother’s love, and God’s love, aren’t like that at all. That’s why Isaiah’s imagery is so potent. Who could imagine a mother forgetting the little creature who’d suckled at her breast? The little human who was powerless to give her anything in return for her care? It’s impossible—and yet, we’re constantly forgetting that God’s love is like this.

In my case, it’s a willful forgetting. My awareness of God’s limitless love leaves me paralyzed. If God will love me no matter what—and love me no more if I am particularly good, no less if I am particularly bad—what am I supposed to do? I tend to fall into the trap of setting up my own rules for love. The better I am at fulfilling them, the more I am worth as a human being, the more deserving I will be of God’s love. I know I’m in good company, because this is what the Pharisees did, too.

Until quite recently, my primary motive for pursuing a Ph.D. in history was the vague idea that it would somehow make me more valuable than other people. Knowing a lot would be my way of justifying my place in society. I suspect that many of the Pharisees, too, for all the bad press they get in the Gospels, wholeheartedly believed that they needed to justify their existence before God. It wasn’t necessarily that they wanted their fellow Israelites to praise them for their ostentatious righteousness, though that may have been a motive for some. Rather, they assumed that they needed to pay God back in full for all the love God had shown to them. They were itching to work out their own salvation.

Being told that you should do…nothing…to earn God’s love can be a bit deflating. It does not, however, mean that you should sit idly by, twiddling your thumbs, being neither particularly good nor particularly bad until the end of your days. “My Father is at work,” Jesus reminds us in today’s gospel, “and so am I.” What is Jesus’s work? To do the will of his Father. And how do we know the will of the Father? “Pray about it” is the answer I’ve received from more than one spiritual director. Or search in the scriptures—you’re bound to find God’s will there!

If prayer and scripture fail to provide you with an answer, try humanizing the question, like Isaiah does: What does it mean to do the will of my mother? What does she want from me and for me?

Does the answer come more easily when you ask the question that way?

It’s pretty clear that what my mother wanted most for me was to grow up to become a happy and healthy human being. What precisely that might look like, she left up to me. My dad was a physician, but no one ever pressured my brother or me into studying medicine. My mom simply wanted me to exist, to my fullest potential.

Actions like those enjoined by the prophet Micah—to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God—come naturally when we practice the art of simply being. Set aside a moment today to ask yourself, “Am I doing the will of my mother? Or am I stifling my existence, limiting myself through some unconscious habit or assumption?” You may find, paradoxically, that the best way to exist is by not trying to exist at all.