The Mother of the Priest

Extract

Our Lord, remembering the family occasions in his home town, once remarked on the joy of a mother who has just brought a child into the world. The joy is not merely the negative one of relief from pain; it is, he implies, a human joy because she knows that a man child now has existence apart from her own and yet so close-tied to her own existence that his very blood is hers. Our Lord, thinking of that, must have thought too of the reciprocal joy of the son belonging to his Mother, a separate being and yet the same blood—and more than that, the same mind and the same words, as his bringing forth continues to his maturity. The son belongs to his mother all those years as she, even more than his father, inspires his imagination with homely pictures and places on his lips homely words, the first being those of ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’.