Mother & Child

‘Mother And Baby’ by Marjanhols

Mother And God

23 February – This is the pastoral text of Fr Reuter: When a mother nurses her baby at her breast, in that baby she is loving and serving God, giving herself to God. I never looked at it that way. I always looked at my wife nursing the baby as giving herself to the baby, our baby, but not more than that. Marjanhols’ image is a powerful expression of a very graphic event: a baby slowly sucking milk from the mother’s milk while they are both looking at each other, the mother with love, the child with wonder, I imagine.

Where does God enter the picture? My answer is this: Before, During and After. Whatever the before, whatever the during, whatever the after. We are all God’s creations, including the ‘self-made’ humans. In whatever way you serve a creature, that is exactly the way you serve the creator. When you dishonor the creature. you dishonor the creator. It cannot but be that way. You cannot take the creator away from the creature. When you dishonor a child, you dishonor the mother, not to mention the father, not to mention the whole family, not to mention God.

Showing Soon

Showing Soon, Now Showing

27 December – The pastoral text of Fr Reuter is this: The Virgin Mary loved her Baby. The Filipino loves children. And in every child you are loving God. Apt image from SquareRoot who captions it simply ‘Pregnancy’ (flickr.com/). She is a Filipina would-be-mother; I can tell from the overall impression (when I searched Flickr, I included the word Filipino). The photograph is beautifully & delicately rendered that I can almost feel the tenderness. There is no baby yet, but it’s alright. The mother’s quietly happy. The baby will be ‘Showing Soon,’ but already you can tell that the mother cares so much about her baby she is anticipating the ‘Now Showing.’ And I know that she is going to breastfeed her child. She is a Filipina after all.

Children of a lesser God

Children Of A Greater God
01 December – The pastoral text of Fr Reuter is this: Our Lord was born as a baby, because He wanted to be loved. It is hard to love anything that you can not put your arms around. Everyone loves a baby. Apt image by Joschii who captions it ‘Children of South Africa’ (flickr.com/). Yes, except if we become children again, we cannot enter the kingdom of God and love those whom we hate. The babies are not only those whom we cannot help but love; they are the ones showing us that we ought to love all the time.