A few years ago, I was asked to give the commencement address at Providence Academy High School in Plymouth MN. I wanted to support the young men and women in their maleness and femaleness. This is a short excerpt from what I said to those high school seniors. “The first thing I know about you is that each of you is called to become a mother or a father. Each and every one of us is called to give of
ourselves and to be a gift to other people. Giving birth and taking lifelong responsibility for the care of children is only the
most obvious way in which people make gifts of themselves to others. And some of you no doubt will do exactly this: get married and have children.
But even those of you who never give birth to or father a single child, have the opportunity to act as spiritual parents to those around you. By spiritual
parents, I mean people who care for the young, as well as the helpless and the needy of any age or station of life. You may have already acted as spiritual
parents to your younger siblings, to
friends in distress, to teammates trying to master a skill. If so, you know that giving of yourself in this way is one of the most satisfying things
you can do. Teaching the lesson to a struggling classmate can be more rewarding than mastering the lesson yourself. If you have had experiences like
these, then you have already experienced spiritual parenthood. Actually, I shouldn’t use the generic, gender-neutral word, “parents.” There is
no such thing as a generic parent, any more than there is such a thing as a generic person. There are only men and women, mothers and fathers.
You are not a gender-neutral, generic person and you won’t become a gender-neutral, generic parent either. Male and female are two different
and complementary ways of being human. And mothers and fathers are two different and complementary ways of caring for the young, and the needy
of whatever age. Now you might think this is a little far-fetched, to think that even single people or infertile people or religious people are called
to spiritual motherhood or spiritual fatherhood.
Actually, I got the idea from one of the great celibate men of the twentieth century: Pope John Paul the Second, and his Theology of the Body. And
he certainly wasn’t a generic parent: he acted as father to the whole world. He told us the truth, called us to be the best we could be, and
defended us from error. And we called him Holy Father. How odd it would be to refer to him in some gender-neutral way, like our Holy Progenitor.
And think what the world would have missed if an unmarried woman, a nun from Albania, had not realized her calling to spiritual motherhood. The poor
of Calcutta knew her as Mother Teresa, not Parent Teresa.” You can request a pdf of the entire address at info@ruthinsitute.org. You can listen to the live event here. When you are satisfied that this is a great message for the graduate in your life, you can purchase a gift card version of the talk, by going to the Ruth Store, here.
