Spiritual Motherhood: The Unexpected Gift of Surrendering to God’s Plan
On a warm spring evening recently, I stood outside the entryway to the chapel on campus while one of my students said good-bye to me. When I first started in campus ministry, he was the one I was most worried about. He was withdrawn, overwhelmed, and barely spoke to me the first semester of my ministry back in Spring 2025. Now there he stood, thanking me for everything I had done to help him over the course of the last 1.5 years. He made a point to look directly into my eyes while he listed each moment that had profoundly touched him. He then said: “You have been like a second mother to me.”
This theme ran throughout my campus ministry in this final semester with the students before I returned to being a stay-at-home mom. All my closest students started calling me their spiritual mother. They had met some of my spiritual children who are priests or seminarians, and a couple of my spiritual daughters along the way. It turned out these students didn’t need a buddy; they needed a mother during one of the most difficult transitions in life—from adolescence to adulthood.
This is not how I expected my life to go. Looking at where I was 15 years ago, when I was newly married and a new mother to a baby girl, I couldn’t have predicted this path. My husband and I believed we would have a large family, homeschool, and I would stay home. When we stood in front of the altar on our wedding day, conferring the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony upon one another, we had no idea what lay ahead.
The first 11 years of our marriage were marred by grief, loss, death, and sickness. We lost our first baby, our daughter’s twin, 3 months into our marriage. The same pattern would emerge for 11 long years as I battled debilitating hormone issues. We lost 5 miscarried babies in total.
One morning, seven years into our marriage, my husband woke up coughing up copious amounts of blood into our sink. Long time readers know we endured three arduous years of serious illness while my husband battled Wegener’s Granulomatosis. I slept next to my husband in the ICU, took him regularly to the ER, and we both wondered if he would die. He has been in remission for 7 years now, and we found out recently that his lung CT scan shows remarkable healing. We believe Our Lord healed him for mission.
These long years of trial, tribulation, and suffering were a training ground for both my husband and me. This was the crucible to prepare us for the souls the Lord wants us to minister to in His Divine Plan. To get to this place with my student, I had to die to my own will and desires. I had to know the deep pain of the loss of my children. My heart needed to be cut open so deeply that I didn’t think I would survive. This was the only way the Lord could expand my motherly heart to love beyond the borders of my own blood family and to enter into the lives of suffering souls.
The call to become a spiritual mother to others came during the height of my husband’s illness. It started with the priests who were undergoing the agony of the clergy sex abuse scandal in 2018 and, in my own diocese, a string of priests leaving the priesthood. It was a very painful time for the presbyterate. The Lord, through His Sorrowful Mother, saw fit to call me to spiritual motherhood at the foot of the Cross with these men.
In fact, it was only through Our Sorrowful Mother at the foot of the Cross that my call to spiritual motherhood could manifest. My particular calling as a spiritual mother is to the suffering and the lost. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, whose writings were some of the first to help me understand spiritual motherhood, wrote on Good Friday 1938:
Today I stood with you beneath the cross and I felt more clearly than I ever did that you became our mother only there. But those whom you have chosen for companions to stand with you around the eternal throne, they must stand with you beneath the Cross, and with the lifeblood of their bitter pains, must purchase heavenly glory for those souls whom God’s own Son entrusted to their care.
The suffering of losing five unborn babies paved the way for me to love others in need. My own grief opened my heart in profound ways to look upon others with compassion and a tender motherly love that I had never previously known. I didn’t understand God’s plan at all because I was overwhelmed with grief, but He saw all the souls He would entrust to my care down through the remaining years of my life.
His plan began to unfold when I gave my yes to His call through Our Lady of Sorrows to be a spiritual mother. One by one, the souls in need of my prayers and those who needed to be ministered to directly came into my life. Every single person needed not only my ministering, but my perseverance in long suffering to help them. My previous years of suffering prepared me for the toil and difficulties in helping those who suffer or are lost.
I never expected so many spiritual children to be sent to me. It started with multiple priests and seminarians, with one seminarian years ago sending me a Mother’s Day text because I had been like a mother to him. I had no idea at the time how the Lord had used me in this young man’s life. Multiple priests started telling me the same thing, then the spiritual daughters came in the great disguise of Our Lady of Sorrows as I walked with them through immense pain and trauma.
I walked for years with someone who was legitimately demonically possessed. It was long suffering with Our Lady of Sorrows at the foot of the Cross trying to find this person help, but in God’s amazing plan I got to witness a miracle in their life when they were liberated on the spot by a living saint through the power of Christ. They are completely changed and will reach heights of holiness well beyond me. It is awe-inspiring to behold.
I celebrated my spiritual granddaughter’s second birthday a couple of weeks ago with my spiritual daughter. As we walked around the zoo, she joked about whether being called a grandmother made me feel old. I answered it didn’t at all. I only feel my mid-forties age now because of the death of my father, but being a spiritual grandmother is a gift I never dreamed of being given.
As I leave campus ministry to return to my family for a time, I have been given more spiritual children than I ever expected. I joked regularly that multiple students of mine and I had so much in common that they were my long-lost sons. Their parents are my age, so they grew up with the same music, movies, etc. as me. I was shocked when they understood many of my cultural references but realized it makes sense given their parents are my peers.
The greatest gift any of the young men and women at the college gave me was their trust when they shared with me their struggles and sorrows. Love must share in the Cross. An authentic and deep relationship is not fair weather, and it does not remain on the surface. I would consider my ministry a failure if everything stayed superficial and I knew nothing of the interior struggles of my students. Only a mother can truly love with a pierced sorrowful heart when she sees her natural or spiritual children suffering.
All of this is to say, that in periods of immense suffering it can be difficult to see God’s plan. When the path grows dark as night and we do not know where we are going, the Lord is using that time to form us for His plan and the work of saving souls. I miss my five children in heaven. My daughter has suffered tremendously without her brothers and sisters here on earth.
I’ve had to meditate hard on the truth that to have my five children here on earth, all the spiritual children given to me would not be in my life. If I was a homeschooling mother of six, I wouldn’t have had the time to focus on the priests, seminarians, and young men and women I have served. I wouldn’t have been able to walk with them in their sorrows because I would have been focused elsewhere. The hallmark of my spiritual motherhood is suffering with others, which requires a lot of time that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
This life is about learning to surrender to God’s will over our own. We must learn to trust that He knows what is best for our salvation and the salvation of others. In His mysterious plan, there are couples and singles who never have children, or in my case, have one child here on earth. We are all called to spiritual parenthood by virtue of our baptism. This means couples struggling with infertility or singles can live spiritual motherhood and fatherhood for the good of others. There are souls right now in need of our loving attention. In fact, it is a beautiful, glorious, and rewarding vocation.
There are so many people who are suffering and alone who need our love. Yes, it is difficult to relinquish our plans. This is why Invitro-fertilization (IVF) is such a demonic temptation. It is a demonic grasp at power and control rather than a surrender to the Cross and God’s plans. How many souls could be saved if we surrendered to His will and sought to help the souls He wants to entrust to our care? It doesn’t mean it will be easy. It doesn’t mean we won’t miss our children or the dream of children. Our hearts will always be pierced with Our Lady of Sorrows because of our losses, but it is precisely in that piercing where we can love others in need. In fact, it is this Crucified Love the Lord uses to bring resurrection in other people’s lives and in our own.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
