A God for Mama's
The eve of Mother’s Day is, again, a windy one.
Nature is in that fierce transition, laboring between old and new fronts in the atmosphere, in the heavens. The muslin clouds imply another round of spring rain. I can’t help but think about heaven breaking open and welcoming new life into everything below— those billowing hostas and the remaining royal hyacinth and all of us.
The kids pull on their rainboots and scurry out the door with J, off to pick up mulch and Mother’s Day surprises. I chuckle as they totter down from the kitchen door, straight through every last puddle, their hair flying all around as if underwater. The heart cannot help but swell from love of them and their wild little lives all unkempt and free.
And so after they leave, I step outside, too. And I am hit by another gust. It’s a stifling wind, wondrous and unnerving both. Indeed, motherhood proves that the world can shift in a single moment, how it moves us like the wind.
New life always requires the tears and rainfall, the baptism into some sort of death. From life to death to life. And all the labor in between. And yet the pain is not just from dilating or pushing.
No, its all else that lingers and throbs:
the brokenness and pain from our own mothers,
babies we’ve lost before we could ever hold them or name them,
pregnancy tests screaming a single blue line over and over again for months and years,
children who we did not birth from our bodies, but from our open-arms and homes and gaping hearts,
kids who have walked out and never came back,
grandmas and aunties and neighbors who became mothers at a moment’s notice, who carry us still.
And even for those who have healthy children, there is a piercing questioning and comparison:
Am I enough? Am I doing enough? Am I grateful or joy-filled or present enough each and every second?
Labor doesn’t cease at the final push.
No, it is only the beginning.
The baby emerges. But the birthing of a mother— that is a laboring of a totally different kind.
Mothers are birthed over a lifetime, maybe lifetimes.
The breeze presses and whistles as I move along the fields away from the white parsonage and church next door. With each small gust, a prognosis from friends and family hits my heart ringing: disability, infertility, neglect, failure to progress, custody. Each word, each moment is a contraction of the heart.
The birth of mothers may be the most wrenching labor of all.
Looking out over the empty and marshy fields, I notice a lone American sycamore tree. And I imagine Hagar— one of our matriarchs from Genesis— sitting beneath it. The tree’s white, peeling bark and dangling seeds are jarring against the open air, and so it seems fitting to see Hagar there, dejected and sent away with a swollen belly and a heart full of fear.
A long way from home, Hagar has experienced the full torrent of motherhood before her water ever broke: the euphoria of conception, an heir for the master, a child to break the cycle of oppression and slavery and powerlessness. And then, like a sudden gust of bitter wind, there is abuse by another mother— one who has been promised a child but is left wanting, waiting.
Two mothers pregnant with desire but seemingly barren of possibility.
The dejection sends Hagar running, pregnant with life and hope and tenderness, and yet also lifeless and hopeless and hardened by life in this female body.
I look down at my own figure, a son inside, too. How many times I have also run away. Because every woman is aware of her embodiment, the way it is threatens and then how we run.
And yet it is right here, right beside the road, maybe even under a tree like this sycamore, that the Lord finds her. In the moment of utter exposure and shame, He comes.
Then, this God who searches for wandering and forgotten mamas asks her to share her story, a script He knew well, a heart He held as if cradled. And yet He never assumes; He never condemns:
“Hagar where have you come from and where are you going?”
The question lingers as I step out of the brush and away from the strong trunk of the tree. From where? To where? Where are we all going? And will we ever make it?
I imagine staring up at an unforgiving sky and trying to answer Yaweh.
Us mamas are not often asked about who we were before or what we hope for tomorrow. Our hearts are more often buried under the lists and laundry and late night feedings. To remember who we are and imagine who we could be?
Is this question reek of judgment, some kind of mockery?
No. This is an invitation, a reminder.
We are seen.
Yes, this is question of longing, of dreaming, of reinstating the dignity of a lost woman— of all of us.
Here, in this question, we can be unburied, unearthed, reborn, too.
Because this God not only comes and asks, He listens. He shares the story and shame and shade with an unwed, unwanted, slave girl.
He mothers the motherless.
He nurtures so perfectly that a mother is born from the remains of a dejected servant.
I continue to pass by the sycamore now, the breeze steady as a breath. The breath of a Divine Mother.
And so the song of Hagar begins to ascend.
Reborn and full of peace, this seen and heard mother begins to create, begins to speak out like the Logos who birthed the whole world with His song. She not only declares the goodness of this mama-healing God, but she gives Him a name. Just as mothers name their most sacred kin, so Hagar names the One she loves:
“You are the God who sees me— El Roi. For I have now seen the One who sees me.”
Hagar births a new understanding of this Yahweh for all of us.
My eyes well up at the thought. A God who searches out shamed women, who calls us by name, who sees us. And then, in an act of vulnerability and exposure, He allows us to see Him in return, full of life and hope and love. The reality simply shatters previous imaginings of this God.
And it is this image, this knowing and seeing of El Roi, that allows us mamas to continue the laborious work of birthing and nurturing and longing and hoping.
A God for Us— a God for mamas. A God for wounded daughters. A God for barren wombs. A God who sees and is seen. A God who is, in fact, our Mother, too.
I turn at the stop sign roughly a mile down the country road. Hagar’s song whispers as the sycamore becomes clearer and clearer beside the empty field. And right there, the words of the Psalmist gush out then, two joining the melody our ancient mother:
But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
Oh, this is the song of Hagar, of the mothers, of all of us. To be held by God, our good Mother, and want for nothing.
God offers Himself to us. To mother the mothers.
As I walk up the drive and unto the front porch, I skim to the passage in Isaiah that reminds me, yet again, of our Divine Mother:
He tends his flock like a shepherd:
He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart;
he gently leads those that have young.
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