Daily Reading, May 12

Some of our mothers taught us what it was like to be loved. Some others of us grew up with mothers who couldn’t really teach us much about love, because they’d never really learned themselves. We tend to idealize mothers as the perfect dispensers of love.

Sometimes mothers do their best work by getting out of the way, or by leaving. After all, children need that to grow up, too. After all, even Jesus gets out of the way so we can try his way for ourselves.

When Jesus is getting ready to leave his disciples, he begins to tell them good-bye. It’s not so different from the speech a mother on her deathbed might give the kids: “Now children, I won’t be with you much longer. You are going to keep looking for me. . . but you can’t come where I’m going. I’m giving you some new instructions: love each other, just the way I’ve loved you. Everybody will know whose family you come from if you love each other.”

The kids get a remarkable challenge—now it’s time to put to work everything they’ve been taught. Love one another, as I have loved you.

What does love look like? Getting out of the way, so another person can try. Blood, sweat, and tears. Feeding one another. Above all, love liberates, love sets us free to be more than we thought possible. Love one another as I have loved you. Befriend the stranger. Engage your enemy in love. Challenge the unlovable. Go hunting for the unloved.

From “Mother Love” in A Wing and a Prayer by Katharine Jefferts Schori. © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

On View: Beggarwoman, Photograph by Diane Walker.