This
is the profoundly reality that God who IS Love, creates us to be His beloved
and infuses within us the capacity to love, to love Him, to love one another
and through Jesus this love is sanctified when in particular a man and a woman
make the gift of self one to another in holy, Sacramental marriage wherein they
cooperate with God Himself in the generation of new life, the life of another
beloved person.
The eternal mystery of
generation, which is in God himself, the one and Triune God (cf. Eph 3:14-15),
is reflected in the woman's motherhood and in the man's fatherhood. Human
parenthood is something shared by both the man and the woman…….Although both of
them together are parents of their child, the woman's motherhood constitutes
a special "part" in this shared parenthood, and the most
demanding part…..It is the woman who "pays" directly for this shared
generation, which literally absorbs the energies of her body and soul. It is
therefore necessary that the man be fully aware that in their shared
parenthood he owes a special debt to the woman. No programme of
"equal rights" between women and men is valid unless it takes this
fact fully into account.
So
many women throughout the world often find themselves callously abandoned by
men, abused by them, left to care for their children as single mothers, often
in extreme poverty; other women live in countries where distorted notions
rooted in disordered cultural/religious traditions continue to view women as a
type of property; other women, mothers, struggle to care for their children in
places of war and extreme violence, frequently living under terrible conditions
in overcrowded refugee camps.
As
men we need to put more effort into encouraging our brothers, especially young
men, to take seriously the duty of fatherhood, to take seriously being
husbands, to take seriously what self-gift to other really implies.
Motherhood involves a
special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the woman's womb.
The mother is filled with wonder at this mystery of life, and
"understands" with unique intuition what is happening inside her. In
the light of the "beginning", the mother accepts and loves as a
person the child she is carrying in her womb. This unique contact with the new
human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude towards human
beings - not only towards her own child, but every human being - which
profoundly marks the woman's personality. It is commonly thought that women are
more capable than men of paying attention to another person, and that
motherhood develops this predisposition even more. The man - even with all his
sharing in parenthood - always remains "outside" the process of
pregnancy and the baby's birth; in many ways he has to learn his own "fatherhood"
from the mother.
