For those who struggle with negative images of God, Julian
offers a welcoming image of coming home to a God who is
accessible, familiar, and courteous. God's familiar love is
described as a source of joy encompassing the unity of all
our earthly relationships. To describe the gentle
compassionate love of God, she uses the image of God as
mother.
As truly as God is our Father,
so truly is God our mother
And he revealed that in everything
and especially in these sweet words
where he says,
"I am the power and goodness
of fatherhood,
I am the wisdom and lovingness
of motherhood.
I am the light and grace
which is all blessed love."
from Julian
of Norwich
by Sylvia Maddox
All That We Can Be
The commitment of Christ is
always to see what our possibility is. He never
looked at an individual that he didn't see potential there,
because he knew that through God's grace that person
could become less of what they had been and more of what
God would have them be.
If we treat our little kids as they are, they'll drive us crazy.
We'll make them worse. If we look at them and see the
potential and see them for what they ought to be and treat
them that way, we help them to become all that they can be.
from Beyond
Nothing But to More Than
by The Rev. Dr. Brooks Ramsey
Mary, Mother of Jesus
…in recent decades we have come closer than ever
to knowing the historical person, Mary of Nazareth.
Archaeology, sociology, and historical investigations into
first-century Judaism and the role of women have helped
us to paint a picture of who she might have been.
There is Mary (or Miriam, as she would have been called in
Hebrew) the Mother of God, the object of devotion and the
subject of numerous minutiae of Roman Catholic theology,
but there is also Mary, the simple woman who became the
mother of Jesus.
from
Strange Heaven: The Virgin Mary as Woman, Mother, Disciple,
and Advocate
by Jon M. Sweeney
