The call to spiritual motherhood

For all you single ladies out there, longing for a vocation to motherhood to begin, or all of you married women who are unable to conceive a child, take heart in this beautiful meditation from Caryll Houselander. Whether God has asked this special sacrifice of yours for a little while or has asked you to bear this lifelong cross of barrenness, may you find inspiration to the noble calling you have received ~

"For some, marriage is a vocation; it is a superb vocation, on it depends not merely our race going on, but the Christian life going on in the world. But there are others who have the vocation to be spiritual mothers. Sometimes they are married women too and learn this spiritual motherhood from their own children, but sometimes they are unmarried, either from choice or circumstance. I say 'circumstance' because it is a cruel mistake to suppose that if a woman would honestly like to marry but circumstances make it impossible, that she is merely frustrated and should devote her life to toy dogs, bazaars and acidity.

Circumstance is the one reliable test of God's will for us, and a clearer indication than any 'attraction' we might feel.

For the woman, then, who does not marry, is motherhood a vocation? It most certainly is, and God forbid that anyone should read into those words condoning of that fussy, grasping interfering attitude that passes so often for 'spiritual motherhood'. The essential thing is this, that the mother instinct, the capacity for love, be awake, alive.

This means suffering. It is easier in the long run to dry up the life in us than to develop and direct it. The woman who will be truly a spiritual mother will feel in herself, in her body and in her soul all the desire and necessity for a child of her own.

In this very passionate longing, in this aliveness of love her purity will consist. Indeed it is the essence of virginity, for we do not lay dead ash on the altar of sacrifice but burning fire. The same intense aliveness gives her a constant suffering. All maternity involves pain and sacrifice, spiritual motherhood as much as any other.

Then again she has to think this, that it is for the sake of the spiritually motherless children that God asks her to suffer this lifelong depth of feeling, which so far as her personal gratification is concerned will always be unsatisfied. He wants her to be hungry and thirsty all her life. This is achieved only by the development of her nature and complete abandonment to his will.

For whom is this hunger and thirst? For whom does God ask women to develop their human nature to its full warmth and tenderness and to sacrifice it? For the child Christ.

The child Christ lives in many souls, disregarded, unfostered, unhelped. It is not only in the sinner that he needs a mother, but in timid and ignorant sould, in while where innocent life is suffocated by worldliness, in souls surrounded by subtle temptations to so compromise with faith and holiness that were there no mother to help and counsel and make strong, his life could never be more than a sickly colourless flower growing in a dark cellar."

~ Caryll Houselander
in the essay "Mother of the Unseen Christ"
found in the book "Lift up your hearts".