This year, on the birthday of my newly turned two-year-old son, Lorenzo I looked around the house, and I wondered what I could give a boy who is so lovely, has such spirit, loves us so deeply and has such fire.

As I swept the floor and set up the balloons, I asked myself, does my two-year-old really care if the floor is swept? And it led me down the path of - what am I really giving him this year on his birthday?

I often feel that my strongest desire for him, and all my kids, is that they know they are safe, loved and that they live in a Holy environment. That they eat well, that they know that their Papa and I would do anything to keep them alive, strong and protected. That they constantly strive for brotherly love between them.

Most importantly, I know my job is to show them the love of God. So maybe sweeping the floor can do that, maybe giving extra gifts can do that, maybe extra patience every day, even though right now I need that patience often, just a little bit, or an extra squeeze, or a smile, could be the best gift I can give him.

Mothers are often portrayed in both fictional and nonfictional literature in ways that reflect the complex demands they face in life. This literature often captures our imagination by portraying women of strength who face hardships and challenges with determination, strength, and a selfless love for the well-being of their children. This is indeed a significant part of being a mother – facing the adversities of life and preparing children to withstand them. For Catholics, the Blessed Virgin Mary is an inspiring model of both determination and joy who is not protected from the sorrow and anguish of being a mother.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 1172 emphasizes the maternal importance of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Church which stems from her care of Jesus, her Son, by stating that the “Holy Church honors the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, with a special love. She is inseparably linked with the saving work of her Son. In her, the Church admires and exalts the most excellent fruit of redemption and joyfully contemplates, as in a faultless image that which she desires and hopes wholly to be." The Gospel of John provides the account of the moment she becomes a mother to Jesus’ disciples and thus the Church, “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son. “ Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” (John 19: 26-27)  [CCC 964]

In his 1965 encyclical, Mense Maio, Pope Paul VI recognized May as the month for the Marian devotions, “May is a month which the piety of the faithful has long dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God.  …  For this is the month during which Christians, in their churches and their homes, offer the Virgin Mother more fervent and loving acts of homage and veneration; and it is the month in which a greater abundance of God's merciful gifts comes down to us from our Mother's throne.” 

Many of our parishes are named after Mary, others offer the Rosary daily during the month of May and they could erect an altar with a statute or a picture of Mary as a reminder of this Marian month.  It is a long-standing tradition to crown the statue of Mary during May to honour her faithfulness.  Additionally, the Feast of Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, was instituted by Pope Francis in 2018 and is celebrated on the Monday after Pentecost.  Mary’s example of trust, faith, and strength inspire us in the living of our faith.  

These devotions encourage us to imitate the Blessed Virgin Mary’s virtues in our own lives and to think of the women of faith and courage who nurture and inspire us – firstly, our mothers and grandmothers.  They have a vital, even irreplaceable, role in our lives.  Their love, faith, courage, strength, and humility guide us through the experiences of life so that we can follow God’s call and live our lives in service to others.  And then we think of the women who are maternal figures in our lives, the women who devote themselves to living an authentic and courageous witness of faith through acts of sacrificial love.

In his Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete Et Exsultate, On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, Pope Francis writes about women of faith saying, “Within these various forms, I would stress too that the “genius of woman” is seen in feminine styles of holiness, which are an essential means of reflecting God’s holiness in this world. Indeed, in times when women tended to be most ignored or overlooked, the Holy Spirit raised up saints whose attractiveness produced new spiritual vigour and important reforms in the Church. We can mention Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Bridget, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. But I think too of all those unknown or forgotten women who, each in her own way, sustained and transformed families and communities by the power of their witness.”  (GE, 12)
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In this month of Marian devotion, let us pray for and honour the women in our lives and in our Faith Tradition who have “sustained and transformed families and communities by the power of their witness.” (GE, 12)

​“Work is man's original vocation,” wrote St. Josemaria Escriva. “It is a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are sadly mistaken.”[1] This theological reality is communicated to us early within scripture. In the second chapter of Genesis, prior to the fall of Adam, we are told that the Lord “took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”[2]

Yet in our contemporary, modernized society, it is even rare for farmers to push ploughs with any regularity. Instead, as technology has expanded, more and more people have found themselves buried under a perpetual deluge of emails and invisibly tethered to their employers through their smartphones. Work as we know it bears little resemblance to the horticultural endeavor blessed in Eden. The passage of time seems to have transported the ennobling task assigned to Adam from the idyllic backdrop of Eden to the figurative Jerusalem of the industrial revolution as described by Blake: “And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?”[3]

Given the world in which we live, it is easy to understand why many often assume that the sin of Adam has deformed the nature of work in its very essence. The disparity between what was and what is has inclined many to think of work as something which ought to be overcome in order to pursue greater spiritual endeavours.

The Catechism, however, teaches us that “work is for man, not man for work.”[4]
Only through fulfilling both the social and spiritual duties attached to work do will fully cooperate with God’s plan. Rather than presenting a stumbling block to spiritual growth, work offers us solid steps upon which we can ascend closer to the Lord.

To engage in work in a way that will allow an individual harvest its spiritual fruits, one requires a deep understanding of the purpose and nature of work. In “Sanctify Your Daily Life: How to Transform Work into a Source of Strength, Holiness and Joy”, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski ably guides the reader by clarifying misunderstandings relating to the theology of work and offering concrete spiritual advice in everyday contexts.

Mentor and friend to St. John Paul the Great, Wyszynski demonstrates a personal understanding of the practical challenges of work: monotonous tasks, limited resources, intensifying responsibilities, time constraints, office politics, etc. Writing in post-war Poland, he also anticipated the challenges that have accompanied technological change, warning that as human work moves from a creative endeavor to one of procedural execution, technology descends from a “triumph of the human brain to being its enemy.”[5]

While systematically describing the spiritual virtues which are developed in work, Wyszynski also offers profound insights into the accompanying psychological and sociological hurdles which are present within our hearts, our minds and our work communities. As such, the text reads as a stimulating blend of both spiritual treatise and a business ethics guidebook.

Guided by Cardinal Wyszynski, the reader will come to understand that “the result of all human work should be not merely the perfecting of the thing produced, but also the perfecting of the worker; not merely external order in work, but also inner order in man.”[6]

[1] Furrow, 482
[2] Genesis 2:15
[3] William Blake, “Jerusalem”
[4] Catechism, 2428
[5] Page 27
[6] Page 141

In 1992 my husband and I were expecting a son, and at about 18 weeks into the pregnancy, doctors saw serious anomalies on the ultrasound. The baby’s kidneys were not developing, and there was serious concern about lack of enough amniotic fluid for the baby to continue to grow in time. We took a wait and see attitude, and we were now managing a ‘high-risk pregnancy’.

From the time you find out that you are pregnant, you become active parents. You start making decisions for that baby’s life right away.

Written by Moniqe Achtman, ​parishioner of Holy Spirit Parish, and Educational Resource Consultant for Calgary Pro-Life Association. www.calgaryprolife.com