Happy Mother’s Day to all of our mothers, living and deceased! Giving birth to a child is a great gift in itself. Mothers and fathers collaborate with God, our Creator, to bring new life into the world. For that gift we must be grateful to our mothers (and fathers).

Infancy is a time of total dependence and requires a generous response from mothers and fathers. Parents know some parts of what they must do and learn others. They must be attentive to the baby’s every need. Then, a great transition takes place as the infant becomes a young child. Parents must now teach the child to move beyond total dependence upon others. They will need to teach the child about interdependence and self- sufficiency.

One complication in this process is our human tendency toward envy. We must be aware that the desires of others to possess things and to be in relationships with certain people, stimulate in us similar desires to have those things and be in similar kinds of relationships. We need to teach our children to form their own desires based upon good, charitable, generous, and unselfish goals.

As Catholic Christians we have an example from which to begin our teaching. The example is Jesus Christ. He was the one who had no envy in him. He only wanted to do his Father’s Will. His Father’s Will was, and still is, to love others. We are taught, even commanded, to love one another as Jesus loved. He loved without needing to possess, neither persons or things. He only wants us to love in that wonderful way of agape.

Helping children to recognize their God-given worthiness, in spite of what they have, or the conditions in which they live, is perhaps the greatest challenge. Teaching a child how to be grateful, unselfish, compassionate, sympathetic, and kind is what we expect parents to do. Some parents struggle to teach these lessons well because they did not learn them very well. Furthermore, parents suffer from the bad influences of other children and adults who are part of a child’s world. They must answer the child’s questions about why other children have things, or live in environments, different from their own. There are differences in values and in economic and social conditions about which parents must teach their children.

When mothers and fathers and other influential adults live a Christ-centered, agape love, they demonstrate non-envious love. This is difficult because so much of the world is oriented to possessing people and things. Too often, we measure our lives in comparison to one another instead of evaluating ourselves according to the example of the Christ.

Mary, our Mother and the mother of Jesus, had great success in teaching her on to do God’s Will. May mothers, now and forever, seek to be like Jesus, as Mary our Mother taught him and as she teaches us.

Peace, Fr. Andy