How devotion to the Mother of God helps us to better know God as ‘Our Father’
Carol Kellas, writing from Croydon to the Times’ Letters page recently commented on the exciting idea pitched by the Anglican Archbishop of York that the Church should re-think calling God our “Father”. The Most Rev. Stephen Cottrell wanted to represent those people who had had poor fathers. For them the association might be toxic.
“Sir (replied Carol), I’m surprised that Anglicans should find “Our Father” problematic owing to the existence of abusive fathers. We Catholics have no difficulty with “Hail Mary” even if our mothers were a nightmare.”
I don’t want to speak ill of the no-longer-here, but my own mother was a bit of a nightmare. People who know me well have suggested I look at both sides of the argument and point out that any mother who had to suffer a child as “independently-minded” as I was would have lost a bit of maternal tenderness.
She was an extraordinary woman, of fierce Celtic beauty, who married her way up society step by step. In one of the most impressive photos taken of her was of her receiving the Nobel prize for medicine. Actually, if you look closer the rather undistinguished smaller man on her arm with whom she swept up to receive the prize was the actual winner. It’s just – and the camera never lies, obviously – that she was the force of nature to whom the eye was inexorably drawn rather than the smaller introverted scientist who accompanied her.
But our relationship was too much like the unstoppable force encountering the un-moveable object, and led to testing struggle that no doubt scarred us both. As it happened, my mother was on a different religious team, much given to the consultation of mediums and other “channelling” women, unsurprisingly disliking Christianity. One of her more generous objections was expressed as, “Darling, can’t you take your Christianity less seriously and pursue it as more of a hobby like other sensible people do?”
But, pace Stephen Cottrell’s observations, none of this stopped me discovering Our Lady as the Mother of the Church and indeed the mother of my soul as I approached becoming a Catholic.
