Mother’s Day and the Foolishness of Speech

This essay was adapted from a talk given for the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies. 

Reading a children’s book of the Gospels one evening, my son and I found the story in which Jesus heals a blind man with clay and spittle. “Why did he spit?” my three-year-old asked. He had been learning hard lessons about spitting in public recently, so this was a pressing question. Before I answered, I smiled at the thought that the greatest interpreters of Scripture have asked this same question of John 9:6. 

My roles as a theologian and a mother often intersect in contemplating Christ and the mystery of the Incarnation. On this Mother’s Day weekend, I am especially aware of how the life of grace makes even the smallest of acts of motherhood a participation in this mystery, giving an eternal significance to the many, daily, menial tasks of being a mom.   

St. Thomas Aquinas spends a great deal of the Tertia Pars of the Summa Theologiae explaining the mysteries of Christ’s life in the Gospels. And here he says, “Christ saves us not only by divine power, but also through the mystery of his Incarnation.” In other words, among the many ways God could have brought about salvation, he saw fit to do so through the mysterious union of divine and human natures in Jesus, the Word made flesh. This is a crucial point for Thomas, who claims that everything Christ did and suffered in the Gospels is salvific. The Gospels recount Jesus praying, weeping, thirsting, sleeping, spitting in the dirt, tracing lines in the sand, and turning over tables. These are not details to be passed over, as though the real message were somewhere else in the story. These are details to be probed, to be lived into. What kind of God weeps? What kind of God heals not with divine power alone, but with clay made from spittle? 

One of Aquinas’s most well-known teachings on the Incarnation is that it is not necessary, but fitting. God could have brought about salvation another way but chose this specific way. In his Commentary on the Johannine Prologue, Aquinas says that one of the reasons for the fittingness of the Incarnation is that, due to sin, humans could no longer come to know the Creator through looking at creation.  

For creatures were not sufficient to lead to a knowledge of the Creator; hence he says, through him the world was made, and the world did not know him. Thus it was necessary that the Creator himself come into the world in the flesh, and be known through himself. And this is what the Apostle says: since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God by its wisdom, it pleased God to save those who believe by the foolishness of our preaching (1 Cor 1:21). 

Christ came to save us in a manner we could receive, stooping down to our level and meeting us through the senses. St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, called the work of the Incarnation “the foolishness of speech,” or “the foolishness of what was preached.”  

Aquinas cites this line from 1 Corinthians in his Commentary on John, as we just saw. It is worth looking further at this Scripture passage: 

The word of the cross (verbum crucis) is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of preaching (per stultiam predicationis), to save those who believe (1 Cor 1:18, 20–21).  

John the Apostle, who quotes this passage in his prologue, implies a resonance between the act of speaking, “the foolishness of preaching,” and the identity of Christ as the Word of the Father who became Incarnate, suffered, and died: the Word of the Cross. The second person of the Trinity, the Word of the Father, entered human life and language in the Incarnation. The perfect God became a human and assumed human defects; the singular, perfect Word became human and spoke many words.  

This idea spans the tradition in patristic and medieval sources from the East and West. John Chrysostom compared it to the way a great rhetorician might stoop down to babble with a baby.   

Augustine of Hippo speaks eloquently of it in De Doctrina Christiana. He writes that we would be incapable of knowing and enjoying the truth unless Wisdom itself had adapted itself to our infirmity and given us an example of how to live as a human being. “Since Wisdom itself is our home, it also made itself for us into the way home.” Human speech resembles this work of Wisdom, the Incarnation:

How did Wisdom come, if not by the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us? It is something like when we talk. For what we have in mind to reach the minds of our hearers through their ears of flesh, the word which we have in our thoughts becomes a sound and is called speech. And yet this does not mean that our thought is turned into that sound, but while remaining undiminished, it takes on the form of a spoken utterance . . . That is how the Word of God was not changed in the least, and yet became flesh, to dwell among us (John 1:14). 

This is the kind of God we have, and the kind of love God shows. And God has established the vocation to marriage, with its predisposition toward begetting and rearing children, to be a sign of this love. 

Yet such wisdom is prattle to the world. Christ’s is a seemingly foolish self-emptying, in which he reveals the divine Wisdom from within the messiness of human existence. His mission, by some standards, was an embarrassment. It ended in public failure, and in the eyes of the learned and powerful, it was definitely a waste of time. 

Raising children, too, is a colossal waste of time. If you want to get ahead in this life, don’t have kids! Or if you do, make sure you time it right so there is as little sacrifice involved as possible. You should not have to compromise your career or your freedom because of your children. Approach the decision to have a child as you might approach the decision to adopt a new pet: some work and expense will be required, of course, but at the end of the day the child will enter your world and fit into your vision of a comfortable, prosperous life.   

This is the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of Christian motherhood and fatherhood is very different and, like the Incarnation, often confounds such worldly wisdom.  

Here’s an example: my husband and I are fairly well-educated. We are the “Doctors Peters.” Between us we speak or read seven languages. We publish articles. We travel and give talks. But our kids don’t care about any of this. They want my husband to wrestle with them, and they want me to snuggle with them. They want us to read them the same stories over and over again. The primary text I’ve been reading most of late is not anything by Thomas Aquinas. It’s the Magic Tree House series. 

Kids want to learn in a fun way. This has led to our making up very silly songs, such hits as “Clean up your Toys,” “Everybody Poops,” and “Socks for Every Occasion.” Kids want to feel safe; —this means they are constantly testing your boundaries and doing things that are completely unreasonable.— You find yourself saying the stupidest sounding things. Things like: 

“You can’t use your icons by the bed as coasters.” 

“We don’t just eat tuna by the handful.” 

“We don’t shoot people on the toilet. It’s undignified.” 

“Even priests need to brush their teeth.” 

“Stop breathing into your muffin.” 

“No robot liturgical chant at the table.” 

[and my personal favorite] “For the last time, do not call me bro.” 

“Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world?” (1 Cor 1:18.). Certainly not at the Peters household. Parenting is a foolishness of speech, a self-emptying of the things we cling to that make us feel important and powerful.  

Yet for all the satisfaction that academic research brings, for all the joy of teaching, these aspects of life cannot compare to the absolute delight and trial of being a mother.  

As a mother, I have been robbed of nothing I deserve, and I have been given everything I did not deserve (1 Cor 4:7). I am coming to understand more concretely—and thus more deeply—what self-emptying love must look like, and thus I am coming to appreciate Christ’s coming more deeply. It turns out that what I saw as freedom as a young, single person was only a simulacrum of the kind of freedom of the divine love that God himself reveals and asks us to participate in. 

Today, I am thankful that the one who made himself the way home for me asks me, too, to be a home for my sons. I am looking at the youngest—just two days old— as I write this. He is newly home from the hospital, and his big brothers, six and three, are barreling home from school to greet him with more love than he’ll know what to do with.  

Image by Yulia Sugarbox and licensed via Adobe Stock.