Lord, grant me patience to allow my children room to grow from their mistakes.
I want so much to protect them and to help them through the hard lessons of this world.
Help us to growing understanding and you find common ground, calmly and patiently growing in unconditional love for you and for one another.
Mary, Mother of us all, help me to be a patient mother.
(from “Talking to God: Prayers for Catholic Women” by Julie Dortch Cragon)

This weekend our country celebrates Mother’s Day, a day of great blessing and joy for many families who celebrate mothers, both new and old, in their role in the cooperation in God’s plan for families in the world. I begin this article with a prayer because it is in prayer that the Christian mother finds herself united more closely with God the Father and the earthly father of the child or children in her life.
Prayer, we know, is an essential link to our life with God. It is our daily conversation and our intimate time with our God in living our lives and sharing the daily graces and sufferings, the daily blessings and struggles as we seek to follow Him through our Lord Jesus Christ. But it is also true, when we bring our prayers to God for family, and in a special way for our children we find our connection with God not only strengthened but our connection and intimacy with spouse, children and family grows in strength and unity.
I know we understand this on a deep level where it almost seems natural as we journey through life…we hope and pray our young people grow in grace and peace in their lives but I also know just as we often put prayer on the back burner in our own lives for many reasons they busyness of the world often distracts us from truly offering prayer to God for those we love in all circumstances of our lives.
I remember at a Worldwide Marriage Encounter meeting several years ago how a couple shared the story of prayer and dreams for their children. They shared how they struggled with their children with arguments and stress filling the days. As they began to pray God inspired them to share their prayers with their children…not just the earthly desire for safety, good grades and a successful future but more importantly for their desire for them to grow in holiness, happiness and fruitfulness apart from the material. It is a reminder to us all: we are more than our material successes and failures, we are children of God. “Perhaps there is no greater gift we can give our children than the gift of our prayers. As parents we, almost without thinking, nursed their bodies and their minds throughout our daily activities with them, but it is in the praying fervently for our children that we can help the life of grace flourish within their souls, aiding God in transforming them into the children He desires them to be.” (from “A Parent Who Prays” by Katie Warner)
On this Mother’s Day weekend we are constantly reminded of how our mothers have prayed for us and hoped for our growing closer to God as the ultimate goal in our lives. We are reminded how God, the giver of all life, transforms us and invites us into a unity of love and grace.
Let us recall the gift of life where we are made in God’s holy and divine image. Archbishop Fulton Sheen reminds us of how each child, born into the world, through the mother’s life-giving love is made in the image of God seen in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. “Motherhood recalls that the best lives are those in which the physical and the spiritual development are never separated, as in the mother and in her child’s education; both grow together. Precisely because of the soul, there is body development at each instant. The Christian mother is like Simeon, who took the forty-day-old Divine Child into his arms. But the true picture is not that he bore the Child, but the Child bore him. The mother, too, will see herself not merely physically bearing a child, but the Child, composed of the body and soul inseparably, bearing her.” (from “Three to Get Married” by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen)
Happy Mother’s Day!
God Bless
Fr. Mark