The Gift of a Mother's Love

The Gift of a Mother’s Love...        On the Memorial holiday weekend of 2005, a mother’s love saved my life.  That Mother was the Blessed Virgin Mary.  As a child growing up in a Catholic family, I was taught a specific set of beliefs about God and about how I should behave and pray to God.  As a child those beliefs stayed with me.  However, as I grew into a teenager and young adult, I questioned those beliefs as many young people do.  I went on living my life with the relative ideas I gained from the secular world around me.  Those ideas began to take shape in my heart, head and soul, leading me into new directions that were not always positive directions for my life.               In 2005, I found myself waking up in the hospital from a grand –mal seizure that had nearly taken my life.  Waking up in the ICU sometime later that day, two neurology doctors came in to speak to me.  I had been looking for the scapular that was always around my neck, but it was gone. One of the doctors knew from the nurse, that I had been looking for the scapular, so when he came in to see me, he took the scapular out of his pocket and handed it to me saying; “is this what you are looking for?” and I said “Yes.”  The doctor went on to tell me how severe the injury to my head was from the seizures. He let me know that I had a blood clot at the base of my brain, which should or could have burst, creating a massive fatal brain hemorrhage. He then stated that he believed that the lady on the cloth may have saved my life. I already knew that she had saved my life. I had begun wearing Mary’s garment of faith a few years earlier, when my life was in another kind of peril. The doctor went on to tell me that he was a Catholic too, but he had not been practicing his faith for quite some time. After seeing me that weekend, he told me that he had to take a new look at his faith tradition. Placing the scapular around my neck again that day, I could feel the warmth and sensation of my Mother’s love.
        While I love and cherish my earthly mother, it is my Heavenly Mother who has always been with me, throughout all of the struggles of my life. While I was given a specific set of beliefs from my parents, it has occurred to me many times over, that as we get older we must take ownership of those beliefs and turn them into the moral and spiritual faith that guides our lives. It is that faith in wearing my mother’s warm garment that guides my way each day.        I love the many images that we have of Mary holding her infant Son or following her adult Son on his path to Calvary. The look in her eyes and the love in her heart for her Son, are the same messages of love that she has shared with me. For nearly a year, I carried a small picture of the ‘Madonna of the Streets’ in the pocket of my old yellow fleece jacket. It was a picture that I was given by a priest that ministered to people on the streets. The image of the Madonna carrying her infant Son Jesus on the streets has the same deep facial image of love and care, which she had for him at the foot of the cross. In 2003, as I walked the streets of Pioneer Courthouse Square, Park Place Avenue, NW 23^rd Street and Lovejoy Street; I spent a lot of time looking at her picture knowing that she had the same love for me too. The priest and the picture are gone now, but the image of my heavenly Mother’s love remains in my heart and mind every day. While some of us are blessed to presently have or had in the past an earthly mother who loved and cared for us, the Blessed Virgin Mary is also our mother, our heavenly mother, the mother of our church and the mother of our lives, as long as we do not forget to include her in our lives.

 Lorraine Gardner – Servant of God