On September 8th, we recall and celebrate the birth of Mary, Mother of God, or in the Greek, Theotokos – God Bearer. There is a richness in pondering what it means for Mary to truly come to be God bearer and at the same time, to hear an invitation offered to each of us.

Theologian Elizabeth Johnson, in her book Truly Our Sister, writes: “Mary’s mothering has the potential to promote the ‘ripeness of maturity’ that enhances the dignity of all women who nurture and serve the life of others, whether biologically or in other ways. . . we are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.” At the heart of the image of God-bearer is a call to each of us to embrace this vocation in our lives as well.

How often do we take time to reflect on our own call to be God Bearer for our broken suffering world? In our very ordinariness, in our fragility, we can lose sight of the precious vocation to which we are all called.

Our late Holy Father Francis, offered us this reflection in 2019:
Mary’s gaze reminds us that faith demands a tenderness that can save us from becoming lukewarm. Tenderness: the Church of tenderness. Tenderness is a word that today many want to remove from the dictionary. When faith makes a place for the Mother of God, we never lose sight of the centre: the Lord, for Mary never points to herself but to Jesus; and our brothers and sisters, for Mary is mother.

And in his first speech, Pope Leo XIV reminded us that we want to be a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close, especially to those who suffer. Our Mother Mary always wants to walk with us, to be close, to help us with her intercession and her love.

We must never forget that to honour Mary is to take up our own vocation to be Theotokos – to embody tenderness for the world, in our prayer, in our presence and in our outreach.

Venerable Mary Potter recognised and claimed this vocation as the essence of our spirit, to be for others as Mary was for her Son on Calvary. It is our particular grace to find our place with the Mary of Calvary in a never ending act of love, lived again and again in the Calvary moments of our suffering world and its people, especially the most marginalised. In this moment, when the world is so in need, we can choose to say Yes to the unknown, just as Mary did. We can choose to let the spirit of the Mother of God shape and reshape our hearts so that we can truly bear the heart and hands of a Compassionate God to a broken world.

The Irish mystic, John O’Donohue understood the holiness of the ordinary every day,
We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens.

In this we are reminded that, sometimes, the challenge to be God Bearer is found closer to home than we expect. It often seems easier to hold tenderness in prayer and spirit for those in far off places and much harder to take up the call to be a moment of tenderness in the lives of my neighbours, those I meet by chance or indeed, those with whom I do not find a natural affinity. But the Calvary spirit does not discriminate. Mary’s gaze of compassion and solidarity on Calvary was not just on her Son, but fell also on the strangers crucified with him. Perhaps that, too, is our grace, the invitation to be tenderness in the ordinary, everydayness of our lives.