Tag: mothers

O God, you search me and you know me

Nursing mother. Rashid Mbago, Tanzania
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “O God, you search me and you know me” by Bernadette Farrell. By coincidence, it’s another setting of Psalm 139 (as on Friday last).  Unlike the Taizé chant, which was set for cantor and congregation, this is a more straightforward congregational hymn or metrical psalm in five verses.

There’s therefore not much to add to what I wrote a few days ago, other than that (maybe because it’s by a female composer?) she includes the verse “You created me and shaped me, gave me life within my mother’s womb”.  We who are not able to give birth obviously miss out on the joys, as well as the pains, of this experience common to nearly half the human race, but I presume it deeply affects any mother’s attitude to life, to have participated herself in bringing one or more people into the world.

Those who insist on referring to God only by male pronouns are missing much feminine imagery in the Bible of God as mother. As she spoke through Isaiah, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”

The Apocrypha in Lent – 9 March

If this is your first visit, please see my introduction to these Lenten readings.

9 March. Ecclesiasticus chapters 1-4

This book, the longest of the Apocrypha, is another book of wisdom sayings.  Wisdom in the biblical sense, of course, is closely connected with obedience to God and faith in Him.

As this weekend includes Mothering Sunday, I will look at the several references in chapter 3 to mothers (there are a similar number about fathers, too).  Some of them are positive:

“He who honours his mother is like someone amassing a fortune”; “He who sets his mother at ease is showing obedience to the Lord”.

Some sayings seem rather archaic – “The Lord upholds the rights of a mother over her sons”

Some are even negative, acknowledging that in real life some families are dysfunctional: “A mother’s curse tears up the foundations of the houses of her children”; “Whoever angers his mother is accursed of the Lord”.  Only recently  I saw a middle-aged man shouting aggressively at an old woman in a wheelchair who turned out to be his mother, and he turned angrily on me when I attempted to placate them.  There is a real need to both educate people in good relationships, and to pray for those who are caught up in bad ones.

The final reference compares mothers and God himself, both renowned for their unceasing love. “Be like a father to orphans, and as good as a husband to widows, and you will be like a son to the Most High, whose love for you will surpass your mother’s” (4:10-11)