Go

The Great Commission for Mothers

This week I started the graduate classes that I hope, in half a decade, will lead to a doctorate in ministry. I’ve read over 150 pages of commentary on the Gospel of John (some of it while at Disney World because I contain multitudes) and written about two thousand words in discussion posts. This is just the beginning and I’m so excited. I missed school.

Not everyone has been enthusiastic about my decision to go back to school. Mostly, people are puzzled. Why put time and money and effort into this degree? What will you do with it?

I shrug at this question. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I’ll have the degree. But most people only see degrees (and knowledge in general) as levers to produce income.

I’ll make a home and mother my children and teach a random baptism class when the deacons are on vacation. Basically, what I do now but with more books read and ideas well-thought.

I’ll go.

When my three big kids were all in elementary school, I struggled to keep all the plates spinning. I craved (have always craved and still crave) an active ministry life, but I couldn’t find an avenue of service that allowed me to keep my vocational priorities in the right order.

I told this to an older woman at my parish, someone I always saw at Daily Mass, someone who I thought would get it. I expected her to encourage me and maybe give me some advice.

Instead, she scoffed, “You’ll have time later, when you’re older, to do these things you want to do. But you won’t have any time, for at least a decade or two, to really make any difference.”

I wonder if she heard my internal scream. I have a terrible poker face, so I bet my horror registered on my face. I didn’t say anything out loud. I didn’t know how to express that her words felt like someone had kicked me while I was already down.

But I’m thankful she said it. Sometimes you have to hear a lie in order to refuse it. And I reject that being a mother of children means that’s all I can do. Even if it’s messy or haphazard or less than I want to give, I won’t stop serving.

I’ll go anyway.

Jesus doesn’t give the Great Commission with an exception for mothers. Motherhood is discipleship; it is a going.

Jesus could have said, “Go, moms, and make disciples of all your children, baptizing them and teach them, and also cooking them breakfast, wiping up all the sticky things, reading them stories, and tucking them in at night.” Go and mother.

In my master’s degree program, when our professors assigned papers with practical application, I wrote about motherhood instead of my parish ministries. Intentionally Christian motherhood, motherhood that starts and ends every day with the Lord, is much more ministerial than any children’s program in any parish. Parents lay a foundation for their children to discover God’s ever-present love for them. Or they don’t. And every good thing and every wound grows from there.

Jesus mandates that mothers go.

About five years ago, my husband and I went on a zipline adventure with a group of other tourists. This was a bucket list activity for me and I couldn’t wait.

The guys running the zipline obviously expected many of the women to refuse the higher courses and longer drops. They constantly offered less thrilling alternatives such as waiting on the ground. And some did just that.

Here was my thought process: I paid for this, I may never get another chance to try it, and I don’t think they would let me die on purpose. So, I decided to tried everything. I climbed a rock face. I flew like Superman. And I hung upside down. Every time those guys offered an activity, I said yes.

I loved it. Being suspended and held, floating, seeing the world like a bird above the trees.

Some of the other women would attach their line to a rope, but then hesitate and step away. They couldn’t give themselves permission to go, even on an activity they had chosen and paid for.

I know this was just a three-hour tourist activity, and I don’t want to overly spiritualize it, but I wonder how often we hesitate our way right out of the thing we’ve discerned to do. We prepare, but then we look at the drop and retreat. We stay in the familiar and never experience the freedom of stepping out into the unknown.

Going is a part of the discernment. Going is joyful obedience.

One time, when my son Tim was almost two, we had to make two long drives in one day. In the last hour on the return trip home, he had had enough. He took off his shoes, threw them at the car window, and cried, “Go outside! Outside!” All I could do was drive, stroke his chubby shoe-less foot, and coo, “Me too, buddy. Hang in there. Me too.”

Sometimes we can’t go. Or sometimes we’d rather not go where God calls us. I spent most of my free time in 2022 and 2023 going to doctor visits for evaluation and going to bed for a nap. So many times, I cried to the Lord, “Free me from this pain! Let me go!” I sounded a lot like my toddler on that long drive.

This hard road, the path we don’t want to take, is also a form of obedient going. We go and we suffer and we don’t get to choose the fun adventure we can see from the window. This is the white martyrdom of surrender for us ordinary folk.

We can yell for release and still walk in the direction of pain. Both can be a part of how we go.

Jesus tells us to go and, as disciples, we stake our lives on that.

I’m just stepping off into a tantalizing leap, wiggling my toes in the breeze and daring myself to jump. Going back to school, again, in my forties with four kids and a million other things to do. I’m surrounded by school books and printed syllabi. I dug around in our junk drawer for my favorite highlighter. It didn’t dry out! Woohoo!

The future holds what God wills. I’ll never regret going, no matter if I have to stop or change direction. But I know I would regret not going. And I would regret waiting for the decade when my house is empty and my life is simple (which I don’t think is how it’s going to work out, anyway). I’m itching to actually go on an adventure after the years when my going was mostly suffering.

Perhaps the more we go, the more we are prepared to go. All the ways we practice our discipleship ready us for ministry, adventure, and suffering. And those ministries, adventures, and sufferings ready us to leap.

Just go.

Readings for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (Year B) on the USCCB Website