My mother is a teacher in an elementary school just a few hours north of Connecticut. Her name is Diane. The town she works in is an idyllic, upper class, picturesque, New England neighborhood not at all dissimilar from Newtown. And like Newtown, it is the sort of place where school shootings don’t happen. Shouldn’t happen. The kind of place that leaves you feeling like, if it did happen here, it could happen anywhere. Just like Newtown.
I thought of my mother much last Friday when news of the massacre raced across my computer screen.
And my mind went to my own wife, a mother named Carrie, who prays daily for our 3 boys that have to enter a school through which there is an electronic locking door and a woman who sits behind a glass window. A mother who worries about what it may look like in another few years for our boys to try to learn in places that look increasingly more like prisons than the academy; fortified bunkers instead of schoolhouses. A mother who now wonders if she is risking her sons’ lives by sending them off to public school every day.
And I thought of the mothers of Newtown. Mothers just like Diane, just like Carrie, who carried their children within their bodies for 9 months and brought them into this world through hours of pain and tears and the greatest joy a woman can know. Mothers who could never imagine life without their child, and now are forced to.
And in this season of Advent, I thought about Mary. The teenage mom who was forced to give birth to her first child on foreign soil, with nothing but swaddling clothes, a tired donkey, and a brand new husband whose only solace in this crazy story was that he talked to an angel in the middle of the night. I thought about the fact that just when it seems as if the long night has finally passed, and all will end well that another angel comes on the scene and tells them to run like hell. Escape. Run for their lives, to another land, because a madman is after them, slaughtering every male child under two in his wake. As Mary gathers up her child and heads out of town she can hear the screams behind her as the city burns.
I am not a mother. But I have come to understand the powerful maternal instincts our Creator has endowed women with; instincts that are bent towards protecting, nurturing, and sheltering…at all costs. Instincts that would cause a woman to risk her own life for her child without a single concern for her own wellbeing. Instincts that have kept mothers across the nation awake at night this last week and inviting them to pray more, hug more, praise more, appreciate more and linger a little longer by the bedroom door to watch their children sleep peacefully.
In this violent world, where mothers live on constant guard, I have been particularly moved by the words of God through the prophet Isaiah this week when he wrote "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” God’s use of the maternal metaphor should be particularly moving to us in such a time as this. As deep as the anguish is for mourning mothers in Newtown, God’s pain is no less deep. He knew these children before their mothers ever did.
I thank my mother Diane for teaching me this truth and I am proud to watch the mother of my own children pour this truth into my 3 sons today as well. There is no greater gift a mother can share with her child in a world that seems bent on preying on the most vulnerable and innocent among us than the fact that ”God will never forget you.”
Mothers of Newtown, mothers everywhere, need to hear the same message to their own ears as well. You are mothers, but you are daughters first, and ”God has not forgotten you.”
