Nothing in western culture has morphed more in my lifetime than the image of motherhood. This Sunday, Mother’s Day brunch will be celebrated by a generation of achievers, multi-taskers, CFOs, philanthropists — mothers who head out in the morning looking like a million bucks. I wonder: If Mary, the archetypal mother of Christendom, were to appear today on a street in lower Manhattan – or inner-city Baltimore – what we would see in her, and she in us? Would we even see her?
Those of a certain age experience a Proustian moment with the blooming of the forsythia. A year didn’t go by that, as schoolchildren, we didn’t vie to carry Mary’s statue into a packed church on a quiet evening in May, crown her with a wreath of entwined daffodils, and sing our hearts out to all that she represented to us then – the sweetness, gentleness, and patience of accessible love.
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