Mothering the World

The power of love in a world hijacked by fear.

On Saturday night, my friend Chrissy invited me to her house for a conversation with Julianne Smith, the former U.S. Ambassador to NATO under Biden and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights defender and the head of the Center for Civil Liberties. (If you’re thinking that this seems like an unlikely invite, I agree—but Chrissy is a TV writer and she’s been assembling screenwriters and TV writers to confer with NATO about both stories and storytelling. I was happy to be invited along for the ride.)

Salus Populi Romani, brought to the Vatican by Pope Gregory I in 590 A.D. (the same Pope who assigned the Cardinal Vices to Mary Magdalene. This icon of Mother Mary hangs in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, where Pope Francis asked to be entombed

I got stories—stories that broke my heart. Did you know that between 20,000 and 35,000 Ukranian children have been kidnapped and sent into Russia for forced adoptions, where they’ve been stripped of all identifying factors? (Not only this, but apparently Trump asked the State Department to stop help tracking them.) Putin is attempting to rip the heart out of the Ukrainian people and strip it of its future—along with its capacity to retain its culture. The one story of hope I heard involved a Ukrainian father and his three children, who were kidnapped in Ukraine—once separated, the father was tortured and then dumped into the Russian hinterlands. The oldest of the three kids managed to communicate their location to a family member back in the Ukraine, along with the message that in five days the children would be separated—miraculously, the father pulled off a physical rescue, before he lost his children forever.

The next morning, my own kids (kind of) helped Rob make me breakfast for Mother’s Day and I thought how lucky we are to live where we live, with the rights we’ve become accustomed to expect. And then I opened Instagram and watched video montages of ICE breaking peoples’ car windows and dragging people out of their backyards, in suburbs like our own. We are watching the rise of authoritarianism and the emergence of a new axis of evil. As Matviichuk explained, the shells are Russian, the drones are Iranian, and there are now North Korean soldiers commingling with Russian troops. Here, in the West—Ukraine and Israel are the front lines of Democracy, front lines that are feeling increasingly less far away.

As many of you have noticed, there are a lot of women across the country using their bodies as human shields, surrounding people ICE is dragging away. Another friend flew to Arizona last week to sit in immigration court. As she told me, she went “to witness the rocket dockets—ICE is deporting eight kids under the age of ten tomorrow, without legal representation or anyone they know or love present. I know if I had to do something as brave as sending my babies to another land in hopes they'd live free, I'd spend every night praying that other mothers in that land would show up for my babies and take care of them.” Amen. There are women like Matviichuk on the ground in Ukraine, documenting human rights abuses and war crimes as they happen; women like Former Ambassador Julianne Smith who has devoted her life to service and quiet diplomacy. There are people protesting outside of Congress right now, using their bodies as dissent, because of the massive cuts intended for programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP. (I rely on

Jessica Yellin

to titrate my news for me, though at moments like this, it’s hard to titrate anything.) There are legions of people showing up around across the globe, mothering for all of us—in big ways and small ways and important ways all. Men too.

Because this is the thing about mothering—we do a great disservice when we relegate this powerful, archetypal energy of nurturance, love, and care to a gender and a biological function. Some of the finest mothers I know have never given birth to a baby; some of the finest mothers I know are not women.

The etymology of mother is one of my favorites: It’s mater, or matter. Related to material. I wish it were so tidy that the etymology of father were “spirit,” though that’s certainly the functional role that we gave our big old dad in the sky—and all the men who are apparently crafted in his image. Culturally, we relegated the “heady” spiritual, this “rational” masculine, to rule over the base material, or the “irrational” feminine. (Satya and I got into this in last week’s episode of Pulling the Thread: “Understanding Synchronicity and Consulting the I Ching”—and it’s part of the chapter on the creation of patriarchy in On Our Best Behavior.)

Collectively, we’re terrible to the feminine—look at the way we treat the planet, our “mother,” as an example of how we take what we want, often with little care, and expect it to just be there…supporting our devastating whims without complaint. Look how shocked we are when there’s any type of blow-back, or the planet claps back. Look at the way so many are content to rescind women’s rights, to treat us like baby-making vessels who shouldn’t leave the confines of the home. This energy is here, and making itself very apparent.

If the divine or archetypal feminine is love, nurturance, creativity, care, the divine or archetypal masculine is structure, order, law—it’s typically more external, the disciplining arm. (The etymology of discipline is discipline, or “instruction, knowledge.”) If we are to seek and achieve wholeness as humans, our archetypal masculine and feminine must be balanced—in each one of us. We do a great disservice to our children and our world when again, we try to relegate these energies to a gender, to run ourselves half-mast: We are both. We need both. Desperately. As developmental psychologist Robert Kegan writes in The Evolving Self, “the most developed parents would both be champions of both sides of this fundamental human tension, and their parenting roles might each reflect confirming and contradicting, nurturing and limit-setting.”

We acknowledge that we are living in a world where the masculine is out-of-control—to restore balance, this will need to be countered by a femininity that is equally out-of-control. Honestly, this is a terrifying prospect and equally destructive. We don’t want this. We can achieve balance with less pain, terror, and destruction. This is what we are being asked to do.

We need a resurgence of mothering—of nurturance and care. But it won’t just come from the women. It must come from the men, too. I get so frustrated when women are admonished to behave more like men. (Most of the women I know are pretty balanced between their feminine and their masculine.) It is well time that men behave more like women.

The world needs our collective mothering—we need to be spiritual warriors of peace. This is not a passive activity, or “soft.” It is fierce: It starts by being able to hold and contain suffering and to integrate it, without offloading it onto other people. Only the most evolved people are able to do this. (I wrote about “the offensive power of peace” in this newsletter: “How to Be a Spiritual Warrior.”)

In Quest for the Grail, Richard Rohr writes about the relentless search for the mother—particularly in men, particularly in a patriarchal culture that severs so many boys and men from their inner feminine (Jung calls this the anima)—this quest becomes about tryig to recover their feelings, sensitivity, a desire for deep relationships, and their soul. He writes, “In almost all mythology, the cup is a feminine symbol, a vaginal symbol, the great opening the man is always seeking, someplace where he can again be contained and held. The scariest place in the world and the most wonderful place in the world. It harks back to the eternal yearning for the mother. It is no surprise that we named most of the eight hundred cathedrals in France Notre Dame. Because our religion was so patriarchal, we made Mary, for all practical purposes, into a God. We needed the feminine face of God: pure grace. The more macho a culture, the more the men will worship Mary.” (If you missed it, you can hear my podcast conversation with Father Rohr here: “Putting Action Before Contemplation.”)

I was feeling weepy—and hopeful—about Pope Francis and Pope Leo last week. (Didn’t you love Conclave? It represents what I’m trying to express here so beautifully and Gnostically.) I think it is deeply meaningful that Pope Francis chose to be buried in a candlestick closet in Santa Maria Maggiore instead of St. Peter’s—on the morning he became Pope, he went to Santa Maria Maggiore to pray, returning there more than 100 times during his papacy to ask Mother Mary for help.

It also feels deeply meaningful to me that Pope Leo XIV gave his first speech on “the day of Supplication to Our Lady of Pompeii.” He continuued, concluding his remarks: “Our blessed Mother Mary always wants to walk with us, be close to us, she always wants to help us with her intercession and her love. So let us pray together for this mission, and for all of the church and for peace in the world. We ask for this special grace from Mary, our mother.”

In his speech, Pope Leo used the word “peace” nine times, and “love” five. He mentioned “evil” only once, calling us to move forward “without fear” twice. Richard Rohr told me that “be not afraid” is the most commonly repeated saying in the Bible, which is stunning to me—particularly at moments like this, when so many of us are so very, very scared.

Fear is deeply human; it’s our primary survival instinct. It’s hardwired into our bodies. (For more on this, please listen to my conversation with professor Kurt Gray, one of my favorite of the year: “Navigating Different Systems of Morality.”) It can drive us to our worst behavior, often the darkest parts of the masculine: We lash out, we hurt, we try to control. You might think that its opposite is bravery or “fear-less-ness,” but that’s really the opposite side of the same coin—the more light-filled version of the masculine. I think the counterpart to fear is courage, which comes from the latin word for heart. Yes, the antidote to fear is love. It’s mothering.

Before I go, I want to leave you this passage from Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, by the late David Hawkins, which I think is profound. We’ve been schooled in the belief that we only take action out of the negative—but I don’t think this is true. I keep going back to what Carissa says, which is that the energy you power in the world, is the energy that powers you. Let’s be powered by love, not fear.

“We have the unconscious fantasy that fear is keeping us alive; this is because fear is associated with our whole set of survival mechanisms. We have the idea that, if we were to let go of fear, our main defense mechanism, we would become vulnerable in some way. In reality, the truth is just the opposite. Fear is what blinds us to the real dangers of life. In fact, fear itself is the greatest danger that the human body faces. It is fear an guilt that bring about disease and failure in every area of our lives.

“We could take the same protective actions out of love rather than out of fear. Can we not care for our bodies because we appreciate and value them, rather than out of fear of disease and dying? Can we not be of service to others in our life out of love rather than out of fear of losing them? Can we not be polite and courteous to strangers because we care for our fellow human beings, rather than because we fear losing their good opinion of us? Can we not do a good job because we care about the quality of our performance and we care about our fellow workers? Can we not perform our job because we care about the recipients of our services, rather than just the fear of losing our jobs or pursuing our own ambition? Can we not accomplish more by cooperation, rather than by fearful competition.”

May peace be with you.