Tough as Nails, Gentle as a Dove

Audio Version: S3E9

I have a lot on my heart to share with you from my prayer and reflection. Our Character for today is the unnamed mother in 2nd Maccabees chapter seven. For the sake of our audience I am not going to read all the gory details! It is really gruesome but I will pull out a little and you can read it for your own study. I highly recommend it but it is PG--13. I’ll give you the friendly version and spare you the details. During the time of the Maccabees, the Hebrews were being overtaken by the Greeks due to disobedience. This was God’s design to bring them back from wrong, to purify them, and draw them to their Creator and Protector. Suffering usually does this. God does not allow it to be for no purpose and it is not bad. It is what we do with it. 

In raising children, we are constantly faced with challenges and we have to choose our battles. Children test our boundaries and see if we are going to keep them safe by our rules and if we will follow through in love and compassion. They want to see if we will be there for them to uphold them to find the peace of God and the security of a safe home. Us mothers become a bit of a punching bag sometimes. We have to deal with keeping the home and the hardship of consistency and discipline and setting guidelines and consequences. For mom’s with a job and kids that go to traditional school, by the end of the day, exhaustion is the name of the game and it takes effort to in love pick up the pieces from both the good and bad days. We have entrusted the care of our little ones to someone else (daycare, teachers) to raise and educate our young. The children have reached their limit of good behavior and experience a let down with and in the place and people where they feel most safe. Mom experiences a lot of stress at the end of the day to pick up and get ready for the next day to do it all over again. It becomes an endless painful monotony if there is no purpose and it is not directed to self-sacrificing love for the household and to God.

Stay at home moms, or as a friend coined the phrase, home engineers, have a completely different task. They have taken upon themselves the sole responsibility of making the home and loving the husband, preparing the framework for the family to thrive and flourish. They form their children both academically and spiritually and physically and if that stay at home mom homeschools, even more so. (This is not to diminish working moms because they have the same role, it is just that they have taken on two jobs, one home and family, and two their workplace.) I don’t believe in balance, I believe in intentional management of chaos which are two different approaches. One always chases after unrealistic perfection and an unachievable goal and intentional mayhem means we intentionally choose to do the best that we can in any given situation with the resources we have. This approach takes patience and intentionality. It requires us to sit back and reflect on the graces, strengths, and weaknesses that we possess and try to mitigate the best possible outcome. Sometimes there are still dirty dishes in the sink. Other times we are a bit too sharp when gentleness would have been better and a bit too gentle when firmness would have solved it. Our failures and our strengths can both be used and this requires a greater trust on God to provide and us to cooperate.

Then we have the real treasures that I highly esteem and hope to support and that is single moms, adoptive/foster moms, and special needs moms. They have taken on three jobs and have a lot of trauma to mitigate and still maintain calm and a semblance of order. They receive the most punches and need the community to step up the game in support and assistance. They have to deal with fear of abandonment, behaviors, anxiety, and a lot of PTSD. Genetics and pre-born/post born wounding really names the game. They do everything normal moms do but times 10. A gentle, caring, spirit is really needed and a toughness of character to suffer the storm and carry on. We all need this resilience and gentleness and calm and have a lot to learn from them. We build the community around us and form it. This gives us the greatest responsibility. If mamma ain’t happy, nobody happy is sooo true. Everything rests on our shoulders to carry the cross/load of our family. We are the heart and soul of the home that supports the mind/leader of the husband. We share his mission and carry it out in the home. Where the rubber hits the road. He also supports and does his mission. He supports and carries too but in a different way. His burden is heavy and he is blessed to have you as his companion and helpmate. He carries us and dies for us.

We have one further vocation of motherhood to reflect upon and that is a spiritual mother. All women are called to be this. We must mother those around us to fill the need in their hearts for love, affection, and nurturing. This brings me to the special spot I have in my heart for women religious and those suffering from infertility. We are faced with what feels like an insurmountable challenge. But God sees us and tries to fill our hearts with His loving presence to give and fulfill us. It is a true ache for those who have been trying to conceive and cannot. But God is with them in a special way to provide and fulfill. He carries them and gives them the grace to fulfill this vocation. Spiritual adoption is a thing especially if one is not strong enough for physical adoption. Women religious/single virgins are the bride of Christ who promise to carry the world and assist others to become holy. They carry much. God wants to fulfill us and give us a peace that is beyond the world's understanding. It is these that most treasure the miracle of life and help up to also embrace what we have and treasure those given to our charge.

Now let me take you to our story for today with these principles in our minds.The Greek commander desecrated the altar and the temple and the King issued a command that the people all become one people. Is that the worst thing? No. But there was a deadly catch. Unity is good and being one but what the king really meant, as a gymnasium was being built for naked games and baths ect. for the men, was for everyone to become Greeks…to join the elitist of the elite and abandon the ways of their fathers. This was met with mixed reactions. Some people quickly followed the king's command and others held fast to the traditions of their fathers and succumbed to great torture and punishments. I’m talking like Elizabethan martyrdom like the English. 

This is where our story picks up. A family of seven brothers and their mother was captured. The king basically went to each son and said, “Eat pork and I will save you and give you positions of power and riches.” Each son in front of their mother refused and chose to embrace God’s law over man’s. And what did the mother do? The mother was especially admirable and worthy of honorable memory. Though she saw her seven sons perish within a single day, she bore it with good courage because of her hope in the Lord. She encouraged each of them in the language of their fathers. Filled with a noble spirit, she fired her woman’s reasoning with a man’s courage, and said to them, “I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of man and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.”

 Antiochus felt that he was being treated with contempt, and he was suspicious of her reproachful tone. The youngest brother being still alive, Antiochus* not only appealed to him in words, but promised with oaths that he would make him rich and enviable if he would turn from the ways of his fathers, and that he would take him for his friend and entrust him with public affairs. Since the young man would not listen to him at all, the king called the mother to him and urged her to advise the youth to save himself. After much urging on his part, she undertook to persuade her son. But, leaning close to him, she spoke in their native tongue as follows, deriding the cruel tyrant: “My son, have pity on me. I carried you nine months in my womb, and nursed you for three years, and have reared you and brought you up to this point in your life, and have taken care of you.* I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed.* Thus also mankind comes into being. Do not fear this butcher, but prove worthy of your brothers. Accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may get you back again with your brothers.” 

While she was still speaking, the young man said, “What are you* waiting for? I will not obey the king’s command, but I obey the command of the law that was given to our fathers through Moses. But you,* who have contrived all sorts of evil against the Hebrews, will certainly not escape the hands of God. For we are suffering because of our own sins. And if our living Lord is angry for a little while, to rebuke and discipline us, he will again be reconciled with his own servants. But you, unholy wretch, you most defiled of all men, do not be elated in vain and puffed up by uncertain hopes, when you raise your hand against the children of heaven. You have not yet escaped the judgment of the almighty, all-seeing God. So he died in his integrity, putting his whole trust in the Lord. Last of all, the mother died, after her sons. - 2 Maccabees 7:20-35, 40-41

Wow! Just wow! What a strong woman! Tough as nails and gentle as a dove. We are called to imitate this integrity. Thankfully, in this tough time in our world, we can make a difference by raising our children to follow God and not man. This does make a difference. These souls entrusted to us are like a quiver full of arrows meant to decimate and destroy the strongholds of the enemy. St. Edith Stein says, “Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help, and thus we are able to recapitulate in the one word motherliness that which we have developed as the characteristic value of woman. Only, the motherliness must be that which does not remain within the narrow circle of blood relations or of personal friends; but in accordance with the model of the Mother of Mercy, it must have its root in universal divine love for all who are there, belaboured and burdened.”

I have one further modern day example of how the influence of the mother helped to bring about a victory just like this Maccabean mother. That is the mother of St. Jose Luis Sanchez Del Rio during the Cristero Wars. He was captured after giving his horse to the general whose horse was killed so he could escape. Jose was held prisoner in the local church turned into a stable. The people of the village secretly visited him to give him strength and his aunt brought him communion to strengthen him for his death. The soles of his feet were cut off and he was forced to walk on the road to the cemetery where he was shot unless he should rescind his belief in God. He kept shouting the cry, “Viva Christo Rey!” “Long live Christ the King.” The government officials where trying to do this secretly and silence him so as not to create a martyr for the people to rally behind.The more they tried to silence him the louder he cried. His cries awakened the townspeople and his mother who instantly rallied behind him. “Jose, do not give up! Stay faithful to Jesus. You will go to heaven. Do not give up! I am here and I love you! Do not give up!” Tough as nails, gentle as a dove. This wasn’t easy. Her heart was torn in grief but it was more important to her that her son make it to heaven than worldly riches and having a compromised son who was still with her on earth.

My encouragement is to discern where you are called and to live it faithfully. Take stock of your strengths and weaknesses and live your life in faith and love. Do not be ashamed of what you cannot do but do what you can! Live your charism and make a difference in the world.Thank you so much for joining me for this time together! I have some exclusive Merch for you for this episode. Check it out here! Three designs to help you grow that are related to this topic! Know I am holding you in prayer. You can always reach out to me either on my website, www.twoheartstruehealing.com or email me at twoheartstruehealing@outlook.com . I am on a lot of social media platforms now and you can find me there. Including Substack so you never miss any posts! Subscribe now! Until next time, God Bless!