To Good Mothers Everywhere

To all women who labor as mothers, at times with great pleasure and at many other difficult and straining times simply because they are persons of the highest character and selflessness, I offer my most genuine veneration. You are worthy of more praise and honor than we men are capable of giving to you. My wife is a person of such sacrifice, love, and dedication, that in my most honest moments, I know that I have not come close to becoming, myself. I love you, baby. It is no small coincidence that the most laudable Saint of the Church is the Mother of our Lord. In Her very body she bore God the Son, and we honor her with the title, Theotokos. My wife, my own mother, and so many others bear Christ, too, as they emulate his dedication and self-sacrifice.

So, to all women who have attained to and been granted such divine honor and calling, you have our deepest respect, and the following from G.K. Chesterton is left here in your honor.

Chesterton on Motherhood

“It is not difficult to see why … the female became the emblem of the universal … Nature …. surrounded her with very young children, who require being taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment … is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. … How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”