“The members should have the same care one for another.

And whether one member suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it.” —

(I Corinthians 12:25-26)

If you had your choice of how and when you would meet your death — since, “for everyone it is appointed once to die” — what would you choose?

The philosopher, Epictetus, set down in writing his wishes about how and when he should like death to come for him: “I should like best that death should find me busy at something noble and beneficent and for the good of all mankind. But, since that is little likely to befall me, I should choose next to go out rendering what is due to every relation in life.”

Jesus Christ, in his dying, lived out and died out both of the philosopher’s aspirations. He gave Himself in His atonement for the sins of the entire world. He let loose in our tainted humanity, a redeeming spiritual power which has been responsible for more cleansing, and more healing, and more ennobling of individual lives and human institutions and national and world organizations and cultures of whole epochs of history, than all the other good influences in all the civilizations of the world. When death came to Christ, it found Him doing something great and good and big for all the world.

But in the agony of Christ’s world-encircling and history-encompassing work, the Savior was not so preoccupied with the big thing He was doing for all mankind that He neglected the smaller, more intimate relations of life. The gospel writer records in his narrative of the passion that Jesus, hanging on the cross, beheld His mother and said to His dear friend as He entrusted her to the friend’s care: “Behold, thy mother,” and to His mother: “Behold, thy son.”

Yes, would not most of us want, as did Epictetus, that whatever else we might be found doing when the end came, we, like our Master, should be found being true to our relationships, especially our nearest and dearest?

Now, this of course, is the chief glory of motherhood. Mother is the one above all others we have found majoring in relationships. No household duty was so absorbing, no social engagement so enticing as to beguile her into violating or neglecting her relationships with each member of her family.

As the memories of my own childhood crowd in upon me now, I remember the spells of sickness with measles and mumps and sniffles only with pleasure, because these were the occasions of long, uninterrupted visits with my mother, who was always at my bedside. And when disappointments and failures came and cracked me open enough to confide what was really in my mind and on my heart, always there was Mother, available, interested, and somehow hopeful and encouraging.

A newspaper columnist ran the reprint of a letter written on Mother’s Day by a young prisoner awaiting execution in San Quentin Prison. The text of the letter read: “A crime was committed and there was an arrest, and a boy was thrown into a cell. The crime was great, and the boy was young, and the cell was dark. Life seemed at an end and hell became a living thing. Then one day as the boy sat weeping in his cell, he looked up to see his mother. She was smiling. She opened her arms and said: ‘My boy, did you think I would not come to you?’ And suddenly the boy forgot his terror and found comfort in the magic circle of his mother’s arms. Through the dark that shrouded the hill of Calvary, a voice cried: ‘Son, behold thy mother.’ And Mary kneeled at the foot of the cross. That was a cross of glory, but had it been a cross of shame, Mary would have been there. For every son who crucifies himself on the pillars of hate, weakness, and greed, there, at the foot of the cross, you will find his mother. Your mother and mine. God bless them, here and beyond. They have known so much pain.”

Yes, for most of us, Mother means the one, who above all others, has majored in faithfulness to family relationships.

And by the same token, we must note in all honesty, that failure in relationships is the very essence of the demonic in human life. Stephen Cole, in an imaginative sketch, represented a devil giving a lecture to a gathering of devils on the subject of skillful tempting, and Cole has the devil say: “We demons are all individual creations — with a community of interests, naturally, but without that gluey element called, ‘blood relationships.’ I have no father, or mother, no brother or son. As a matter of fact, I haven’t a friend in the universe, for which fact I am profoundly thankful. It means nobody can touch me. Your loss is not my loss, nor is my gain your gain. Each of you can go to hell for all I care, and doubtless you will.”

Yes, aloneness, separateness, unrelatedness, irresponsibility for others, is the very nature of the demonic in human life. This is what is alien to and destructive of human hearts and human hopes.

Eric Fromm, the brilliant psychologist, wrote: “It is one of the characteristics of human nature that man finds fulfillment and happiness only in relatedness and solidarity with his fellowmen.”

So, for most of us, Mother, who majors in relationships, is both the symbol of the heavenly in our common life, and our most intimate earthly connection with heaven.

Therefore, we should not be surprised to find St. Paul in his Ephesian letter setting down the Golden Rule for family life in these words: “Be subject to one another out of reverence to Christ.” “A Christian family,” says the great Apostle, “The ideal family, is one where all the members assume responsibility for each other.” St. Paul indicates that this means different things for different members: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.”. . . “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.”. . . “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.”

The Golden Rule of family life, St. Paul says, can be summed up in the phrase: “mutual subjection.” For the wife and mother, this means subjecting her desires and personal interests to her husband and the need and good of the whole family. For the husband and father, this means loving sacrifice for the family’s good. The Christian husband and father must be ready to lay down his life daily for his wife and family as Christ gave himself for the church. For the children, this means obedience to the guidance and direction of parents.

Where the Golden Rule of family life is kept by all members, home becomes a little bit of heaven. Where the Golden Rule of family life is broken, wherever one or more members refuse personal subjection of self to the total good of the family and violate responsibility for doing one’s duty for the others, there the demonic emerges into personal life and into the family circle, and that home becomes a hell on earth.

The possibilities before every household are just two: to be a Christian home with its mutual subjections and joyously assumed responsibilities, each for the other; or, to be a boarding house where everyone is for himself and each is served his meals and furnished his lodging so long as he pays his part of the bills. Some homes are run like boarding houses with no sharing, no mutuality, no common planning, no sense of responsibility for each other; and some boarding houses, praise God, are run like homes, for by God’s grace, someone has introduced there the spirit of Jesus Christ and men and women begin to take up His cross of bitter-sweet, unlimited responsibility for each other.

How do we really want to live out our days here and come down to the end — like a devil — alone, shirking every responsibility to God and man, being aware in every relationship only of what we can get out of it for ourselves, and come down to the end of life having to say in summary of it all:

I lived for myself,

I thought for myself,

For myself and none besides;

Just as if Jesus had never lived,

As if He had never died.

Or, will we choose the way of the Holy Cross, which is set up not only on Golgotha, but on the boundary of heaven and hell and in the heart of every person? For to refuse the cross is to do violence to the very human nature which cries out for togetherness and belonging and someone else to live for. Your heart and Jesus Christ were made for each other as the fish were made for the sea, the birds for the air, as Mother was made for the home.