By the design of God, the first second of our existence passes in a dark place, the womb of our mother. We remain in the darkness for three quarters of a year, growing, making the transition from an embryo to a fetus to an infant. Finally, the day comes when we emerge into this world and we get to see for the first time what sort of world we are born into. Our vision is at first very blurry and is limited to a range of about half a foot. The infant’s perception of reality, of the world that he has newly entered, in his narrow range of sight, is dominated by one figure: his mother. She is the one whom his feeble sight is most often able to perceive. She is the one who always seems to be around when he is awake: the one who feeding him, the one clothing him, the one speaking to him, the one holding and kissing him. This is how God designed things for His human beings: that, coming out of the well of nothingness, we should spend nine months in the womb of our mothers; and then, coming into the world, our whole perception of that world should be dominated by the face and contact of our mother. God made it to be that way for us. And He made us to need it to be that way. If such is the way it is in the natural world and with our natural life, it should not be surprising to us that God should want something similar to be true for the supernatural world and our supernatural life. God wants us to have a mother. At the moment of our baptism, the first moment that our souls lives a supernatural life, the first moment it exists in the supernatural order, we receive the Church as our mother (we become members of the Church) and we receive Our Lady as our Mother. We go to our Mother the Church to receive our supernatural life. We get the sacraments from her, which nourish our soul. Especially confession and Communion. But God also gives Our Lady, His own Mother, to be our mother. She is a human being like us, but she is a human being who has been given a crucial role for the human race, the role of being the New Eve, the new Mother of all the living. And just as we saw with the natural order, so too must we say of the supernatural order: God made it to be that way for us. God has made us a supernatural world where we have Holy Mother Church and we have a human mother, the Mother of God, to be our mother. God made it to be that way for us. And He made us to need it to be that way.
