“In a mother two of the great spiritual laws are united into one: love of neighbor and co-operation with God’s grace – and both of them are applied in a unique way. For love of neighbor, to anyone except a mother, is love of a non-self; a mother’s neighbor during pregnancy is one with herself, yet to be loved differently from the self. The sacrifice sometimes involved in neighborly love now takes place within her flesh: the agent and the object of her sacrifice are both contained within her.
And the co-operation with grace in a mother, although it may be unconscious on her part, yet makes her a partner of Divinity: every human mother is, in a sense, “over-shadowed by the Holy Ghost.” Not a priest, and yet endowed with a kind of priestly power, she, too, brings God to man, and man to God. She brings God to man by accepting her mother’s role, and thus permitting God to infuse a new soul into her body for it to bear. She brings man to God in childbirth itself, when she allows herself to be used as an instrument by which another child of God is born into the world.
If motherhood is seen as a matter involving only a woman and a man it is seen too astigmatically, and without the honor that is its due. For to comprehend the real significance of motherhood, we must include the spiritual element that goes to make a child – we must see the human woman co-operating with her husband, the father of the human baby, and with God, the Father of a soul that is eternal, indestructible and unlike any other ever formed throughout the history of the world.
Thus, every human motherhood involves a partnership with the Divine.”
— Source
