Lord, thou art hard on mothers: We suffer in their coming and their going

Good morning.

My calendar tells me that on this day in 1916, 109 years ago, after six days of fighting, Irish rebel leaders surrendered to British forces in Dublin, bringing the Easter Rising to an end. One of the leaders of the rebellion was one Patrick Pearse, a teacher, a barrister, a poet, a writer, a nationalist, a republican political activist, and a revolutionary.

Pearse came to be seen by many as the embodiment of the rebellion. One of his most celebrated poems, The Mother, was written the night before his execution, in which he imagined his mother’s feelings about his imminent death. He writes: “Lord, thou art hard on mothers: We suffer in their coming and their going”.

I think about my own mother often. She died some years ago, just as she was about to retire from work. It was a cruel twist of fate, for a woman who had worked so hard her whole life, and was only starting to smell the roses, after a lifetime of toil.

It’s funny, all these years later when something happens in my life, that I’m just bursting to tell people about, one of my first instincts is to ring my mother. Sometimes I even pick up my mobile… and then it dawns on me like a sudden kick to the stomach.

It’s curious – it’s not like I have forgotten that she has died, and she rests now in that stoney, grey soil of Killyclogher churchyard. It’s just like I have momentarily retreated, to how things were – and I’ll never delete her number.

So, today, I pray in thanksgiving for the blessing of mothers – and for the blessing to have known such love.

Amen.