Many Things on Mother's Day!

My aunt Denise spent a couple years as a religious Sister before she married and raised six kids. One day I was sitting with her in the kitchen as the sounds of fighting children came up from the basement.

She grinned at me and sighed, "I should have stayed in the convent."

Of course she was only kidding. But just in time for Mother's Day, I stumbled across a new book about women who do wish they'd never had kids.  It's called Regretting Motherhood: A Study, and it interviews with women who see no advantages in motherhood, or who judge that the negatives outweigh the positives.

It's a funny book to talk about on Mother's Day, but it helped me think not only about mothers but about fathers and even God himself.

It brought to mind two points.

The first is that that love can be a choice. None of us is lovable all the time--and yet our parents keep loving us, at least most of the time. Even the women in the book Regretting Motherhood seem to keep loving their children, despite their quiet regret.

The women in the book are a small minority for whom I feel sad, but they are heroes in their own way--I only read a short summary of their interviews, but it seems they care for their children much like other mothers. Making up your mind to love when you don't feel like loving is a tremendous thing.

And the second point is that love can be messy sometimes. Mothers aren't perfect. Children aren't perfect. Feelings, too, can be flawed and confusing.

Oddly enough, these thoughts turned my mind to today's Gospel. The Good Shepherd loves his sheep because they're his. He protects them because the Father entrusted the flock to him. What belongs to the Father belongs to the Son.

A sheep who strays doesn't forfeit God's love any more than a child forfeits a mother's love. God speaks through the prophet Isaiah, who writes "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."

God's love for us is a perfect love. But in the messy realities of a sinful world, he expresses it through imperfect people, particularly our priests, whom we think about on Good Shepherd Sunday. They are ordained to tend his flock, but sometimes they nod off, and in the worst cases even join the wolves.

Yet the deeper reality is there despite the confusion and sin of life, despite priestly and parental failures. The second reading reminds us that the Lamb of God is the real shepherd of the flock, the unfailing guide to springs of water and of life.

Somehow God is there amidst the sorrows and pains all of us experience some of the time, standing by to wipe away every tear, like a caring mother does for her child.

We face a challenge as members of Christ's flock and as members of human families. We need to live with our own human imperfection and with all human imperfection--without losing touch with the love that is all around us, sometimes unseen. As the Letter to the Hebrews says, we need to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.

Because if our parish, the archdiocese and the universal Church aren't about Jesus, they're not about anything worth supporting, especially at a time of so much public failure and scandal.

This Sunday we kick off our annual Project Advance campaign.  This year's parish theme, "Open Wide the Doors to Christ," is connected to some of the things I've just said. 

In the first place, the theme reminds us of our desire to open the doors of welcome to all. The campaign will support Alpha and other ways we invite people to walk in and feel at home here.

In particular, we want young people to feel at home in the parish, so one of our major projects is refurnishing and refurbishing the youth room and adding modern audiovisual equipment.

In the second place, this year's Project Advance will open the door of generosity to a flock that's larger than our parish or even our Catholic community. We will make a grant to Harvest Project, the North Vancouver charity that offers "a hand up rather than a handout." We will give an equal amount to L'Arche Vancouver, in memory of L'Arche's founder Jean Vanier, who died this week.

And to express our commitment to the protection of the unborn and vulnerable, we will be making a donation to National Campus Life Network, which helps educate university students to deal with the so-called "pro-choice" arguments that dominate their campuses.

Finally, our theme of "Open Wide the Doors to Christ" was chosen to connect with our most visible project for this year: replacing the aging outside doors of the church, and adding window panes to all interior doors.

The new front doors are a necessity, since they are weathered and worn out. But completing the job of adding windows on all inside doors is both practical and symbolic of the need for a new spirit of transparency in the whole Church.

We'll talk more in the coming weeks about all the good your contribution to Project Advance does throughout the Archdiocese, but charity begins at home so I wanted to start with our own projects. There's lots more information about this in the bulletin and on the website.

Speaking of the bulletin, it has an insert with the annual financial report for the parish. We can't expect your support for Project Advance without showing you how money is spent at Christ the Redeemer, not to mention demonstrating our financial needs.

If you look at the report, you'll see that we are more than $700,000 in the hole! But don't be thrown by that for a second. Almost every penny of that was our contribution to the reconstruction of St. Thomas Aquinas High School, and we had it already in the bank--thanks, in no small measure, to your past generosity to Project Advance.

If you have any other questions about the report, one of the finance council members or I would be more than happy to provide an answer.

I don't want to exhaust you by talking about so many things at once, but I have one final word about money. And, as always, it's not really about money--it's about an aspect of the Church's mission of which money is necessarily a part.

I'm referring to the fact that we have a second collection today for the Work of Vocations.

Today is not only Good Shepherd Sunday but also the world day of prayer for vocations. Support of the second collection, which helps educate future priests for the Archdiocese, comes second to prayer for them, but both are important. 

Rebuilding the Church will take a new generation of shepherds who will carry on Christ's work of guiding and guarding his flock. No present discouragement should overshadow our confident prayer that the Lord will give us such shepherds, formed in his own likeness.

The Church can disappoint us or weary us. Sometimes we have to choose to express our love for her. But like those disappointed mothers I mentioned at the beginning, we can make that choice, trusting that there’s something here much bigger than our feelings.

And on this Mother’s Day, let’s thank God—and our mothers—for their choice to love us.