The Waiting Mothers
May 10, 1964
In The Blue Bird, By Maurice Maeterlinck, there is a heart-searching scene, as the children leave their home in heaven to be born on earth. As they depart from their pre-mortal life, there is both anxiety and anticipation. Some don’t want to leave their friends; some fear to come to earth; and as they approach, the voices of the children are heard in the distance: “The Earth! The Earth! I can see it!” they say, “How beautiful it is! How bright it is! How big it is!” then there is the sound of a distant song—a song of happy expectation. “What is it?” they ask. It is not the song of children singing, but the song of mothers coming out to meet them…1
The song of mothers coming out to meet the children sent form their heavenly home—this is a moving and momentous theme! Form out of the pre-mortal past they come, for the experience of life on earth, even as Wordsworth, with profound poetic insight said it
“Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home…”2
What a blessing and a sacred trust are children. What a blessing and an everlasting influence are the mothers who fulfill their honored missions and when we honor mothers we honor ourselves, in unforgotten love and thoughtfulness. Let none of them be left in unremembered loneliness.
Now to return to Maeterlinck’s message of the waiting mothers, those who are, those how are about to be—and young mothers who may find the days heavy, the evenings weary, the chores multiplied, the problems perplexing—but the rewards so wonderfully rich— this we would say to them in some moving words borrowed from the pages of the poets: “There will be a singing in your heart; there will be rapture in your eyes; you will be a woman set apart; you will be so wonderful and wise,”3
And “Thou, while thy babes around thee cling, shalt show us how divine a thing a women may be made.”4
1Maurice Maeterlinck, The Blue Bird, Act V
2William Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality”
3Robert W. Service, “The Mother”
4 William Wordsworth, “to a Young Lady”