MOTHERHOOD

Human Motherhood is twofold in essence: *the physical act of giving birth, which women share with all nature, and *the soul of the child does not emanate from mother's body or soul, but freshly created by God Himself, who infuses it into the body of the unborn child.

Physiological motherhood is glorified by this cooperation with God Himself, who fathered the baby's soul and then permitted a woman to clothe it in her flesh.

Every child born of a woman has, then, two fathers: his earthly father, without whom he could not have life, and his heavenly father, without whom he could not possess a personality, a soul, an "irreplaceable" I.

The mother is the essential partner through whom both fathers work. Her relationship to the child has two resulting aspects: Mother-baby aspect, the child is physically and absolutely dependent on the mother; a Mother-person relationship, the child's right to eventually lead his own life and depart from his parents to live a life on his own.

Every birth requires a submission and disciplining.

Submission: it is sacrificial, consciously creative, and for this selflessness, a woman whole nature has been formed. Women have surer understanding of the doctrine of redemption: they have associated the risk of death with life in childbirth, and to understand the sacrifice of self to another through the many months preceding it.

In a mother, two of the great spiritual laws are united into one: Love of neighbor and cooperation with God's grace. Both are applied in a unique way.

Love of neighbor, to a mother, is love of a non-self; a mother's neighbor during pregnancy is one with herself, yet to be loved differently from the self. The sacrifice sometimes involved in the neighborly love takes place within her flesh; the agent and the object of her sacrifice are both contained within her.

The cooperation with grace in a mother makes her a partner of divinity: every human mother is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit - she brings God to man by accepting her mother's role, and thus permitting God to infuse a new soul into her body for it to bear. She brings man to God at childbirth itself, when she allows herself to be used as an instrument by which another child of God is born into the world.

The real significance of Motherhood: the spiritual element that goes to make a child -- the human mother cooperating with her husband, the father of the human body, and with God, the father of the soul that is eternal, indestructible, and unlike any other everformed throughout the history of the world.

Every human motherhood involves a partnership with the divine.