A few days before Easter during my senior year of high school, I sat on a creaky metal chair in the unshaded open of St. Peter’s square to attend Mass alongside hundreds of fellow pilgrims. As the sun glared down upon us, I strained to hear the readings. Through the translation of a fellow pilgrim, I heard the exhortation of St. Paul in Romans 12:1 saying, “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.” Though I had heard these words before many times, they fell on my ears with fresh meaning as I attended Mass in the Eternal City, the epicenter of my beloved Church. It was as if an echo had been set off within my heart causing me to never forget the call to offer my body as a living sacrifice to Christ. These words stirred in me a desire to pursue something beyond myself, a call to follow Christ more radically than ever, giving nothing short of my entire life for his purpose.
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Only a few days later, I contracted pneumonia and fell into a feverish state of delirium for two days, causing me to miss out on precious sightseeing during the brief 10-day pilgrimage in Rome. By God’s providence, my chaperone was a competent doctor who confidently nursed me so that I was able to make it through my last days in Rome out of bed. A few days after the Lord had stirred me with those words from Scripture, I found myself once more on a creaky metal chair, this time inside St. Peter’s Basilica during the Easter Vigil, struggling to keep my weakened body awake during the lengthy Paschal liturgy. The Scripture from Romans reverberated in my head as my body ached and my eyes drooped. Offering your body as a living sacrifice was no walk in the park. Yet I knew the Lord was showing me that taking up his cross would fulfill my deepest desires while requiring all my strength.
A challenging vocation
When I returned home from my Italian adventure and graduated high school shortly after, I carried these words with me, inspired by the idea of sacrificing myself for Christ. I headed to college ready to seek and find this path, with little clue as to how things would play out. Nine years have now passed since that sweltering day in St. Peter’s square, and I am now a wife and a mother to two children, with one on the way.
When a Catholic thinks about giving his or her life to Christ, the call to religious life or the priesthood often first comes to mind. While these vocations are a total surrender to God in a uniquely radical way, the longer I live the vocation of marriage, the more I realize the profound nature of this call as well, particularly for women. Motherhood stretches a woman in every aspect. Physically, she sacrifices her body for another, offering her womb as God’s canvas through which he creates a new person. Emotionally, she surrenders her heart to love this child with an irreplicable intimacy. And mentally, she takes on the responsibility of raising and educating this person to live independently and hopefully reach his or her eternal reward.
Our world today despises so many of the crosses of motherhood, especially the physical burden of childbearing, because it misunderstands the whole point of human existence. We exist for God. Our lives were never our own, and we are made to share the sacrifice of the cross alongside the glory of the Resurrection.
As a mother, carrying a child for nine months and then giving birth is a living sacrifice of the body in the most literal sense. After having my first child, I remember feeling enormous relief when the birth was over while at the same time feeling incredibly empowered. I felt a fire and strength that can only come when you know you are living out God’s call for your life. And the longer I am a mother, the more this desire to totally surrender myself burns within my heart. “You were made for this,” it seems to say, pressing me to continually offer myself back to God. In a world where a pregnant woman is often viewed as the exact opposite of what it means to be beautiful, I’m here to say that the contrary is true. A woman with child represents the archetype of feminine beauty because she is living out the call of the Creator to offer herself as a living sacrifice for another.
Surrendering to sacrifice
In her book, “The Privilege of Being a Woman,” Alice von Hildebrand writes: “The special role granted to women in procreation … is highlighted by the fact that as soon as she has conceived (and conception takes place hours after the marital embrace), God creates the soul of the new child in her body. This implies a direct ‘contact’ between Him and the mother-to-be, a contact in which the father plays no role whatever. This contact gives the female body a note of sacredness, for any closeness to God and one of His creatures is stamped by His Holy Seal. This divine ‘touch’ is once again a special female privilege that every pregnant woman should gratefully acknowledge.”
As von Hildebrand points out, the sacrifice a mother makes is indeed also a privilege, allowing her an irreplaceable intimacy and correspondence with God that no other creature has. Tied together in the role of motherhood, we find a call to suffer and sacrifice that is enveloped in a rare type of feminine beauty.
So, to any woman who may be struggling with or fearing the call of motherhood, I encourage you to surrender yourself to the sacrifice you were made to offer and give yourself to Christ through the beauty of the cross that is motherhood.
