There is only mother love all the way down—Mothering Sunday 2026
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
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Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the child of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet I will not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands (Isaiah 49:15–16).
These two verses, found in the Book of Isaiah, speak of the manner in which the prophet conceives of God’s love for his people. Now, if you are able to maintain a belief that God exists and intervenes in the world in the way Isaiah seems to have believed, then these words will, I assume, suffice; you will require no further words from me, because Isaiah’s God has promised he will not forget the faithful. However, if, like me, you are not so inclined to believe, then these words will, perhaps, fall on incredulous, even deaf, ears.
Nevertheless, despite my own lack of belief in the supernatural, interventionist God of classical monotheism, these words still speak powerfully to me of something that seems genuinely real and trustworthy. That ‘something’ is the natural fact of mothering, visible in so many of the sentient creatures living on this planet. True, as Isaiah acknowledged, there are mothers—and, of course, fathers—who forget their offspring and treat them poorly, but Isaiah (and we) only recognise this as a tragedy because the norm is almost always otherwise. For nearly all sentient creatures, the norm is everywhere ‘good’, or at least ‘good enough’, mothering.
As an illustration of what I mean, here is a story told to me many years ago by my former philosophy tutor and great friend, Victor Nuovo, regarding something that happened to him one spring morning outside his house on the outskirts of Middlebury, Vermont:
Some weeks ago, I was loading a cart to carry my recycling down the driveway. It looked like rain, so I thought it advisable to cover it with a tarpaulin, to keep the paper from becoming rain-soaked and hard to handle. The tarpaulin lay rolled up beside the cart, where it had been for some weeks. When I unravelled it, I discovered that a mother mouse had made her nest in it; there she was nursing her brood. She was terrified, as were her nurslings, whose eyes had yet to open. They clung to her teats—not, in this instance, to suckle, but because they found security there. She tried to cover them with her body. They were as one being. It was a beautiful sight, and yet heartbreaking. I had absolute power over them. I could have killed them, and perhaps I should have. But I could not. Instead, I set them gently on a flat shovel, carried them to the edge of the yard, and set them down in some undergrowth. Once there, the faithful mother mouse moved away, her nurslings still clinging to her breasts, and found shelter. Oh, how I wished that I might make all beings in the world safe! But I am not the king of love, or a faithful shepherd. And there is no such power. There is only mother love all the way down.
Along with Victor, as we look down at the mother mouse, we immediately intuit that mothering really does seem to be graven into the nature of this small creature; it shows up as a natural process in which we can trust, something which genuinely gives life meaning and worth, and which indicates the best way for us to proceed. In the absence of belief in the monotheistic God of Isaiah, some of us find we can still sense, and say out loud, that mothering really does seem to be graven upon Great Nature’s (Daishizen 大自然) ‘hands’ in the form of the hands, paws, and claws—and, by extension, the fins, hooves, tentacles, bellies, and tongues—of Great Nature’s many sentient creatures.
But Great Nature is not a single conscious entity; it is a complex, endless, and creative process—it is, so to speak, ‘Nature Naturing’ (natura naturans). This means Great Nature is always bringing forth new forms that we can, metaphorically, call ‘children’. Yet what mothering looks like to a sentient creature such as ourselves, or the mother mouse, is not necessarily what mothering looks like from the perspective of Great Nature’s broader systems.
An obvious, and perhaps difficult, example is that child of Great Nature that we call ‘Mother Earth’. If we are to be honest, Mother Earth’s mothering includes the earthquakes, wind, and fire which can destroy a mouse or a human being in the blink of an eye. We cannot easily call an earthquake ‘love’ in any sense we would recognise. Nevertheless, the Earth remains our mother in a structural sense: she is the essential, wild matrix from which we emerge. Without the movement of her restless body—the very tectonic and atmospheric forces that occasionally result in tragedy—there would simply be no ‘good stuff’, no stable atmosphere or fertile soil, to sustain us and our children. Her mothering is not a sentimental intervention, but the fierce, indifferent provision of the only conditions in which life can take root at all.
We must be clear, therefore, that mothering cannot be reduced to a single formula at either the cosmic or the everyday level. Neither can mothers be reduced to a single, simple type. Mother Earth is not a human mother; she does not ‘worry’ over us. A human mother is not a mother mouse, and so on. But they are all participants in the same, creative, generative movement, each sustaining their ‘offspring’ according to their own nature. As I often like to say: ‘It depends.’
So, what is the point of my ramble through the complexities of mothering this Sunday? It is simply to say that, no matter how it often looks, we can say and truly mean—along with Victor—that there is only mother love all the way down.
And, as Victor reminded me all those years ago, this in turn teaches us that although we cannot all be mothers in any conventional sense, we can all learn to love like the mother mouse, or like Victor’s care for her—tenderly, faithfully, and steadfastly, in ways that set free, nourish, give life, and comfort.
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