Transcript
Are you excited to bring your baby to Christmas Mass?
I think it’ll be fun. He’s a bit bigger now, so it’ll be his second Christmas. But I had this moment, I think last Advent, I was thinking about how much your life changes when you’re a mum. And I think particularly I was struggling with like, my prayer life and like, I just had this moment of like, oh, like my prayer is not invalid just because it looks different, like this time, this time isn’t invalid just because it looks different, and that maybe God is showing me more of Himself. Especially, like, yeah, as a baby and what it looks like that He came to the world as a baby, I think I just like, I don’t know, just realised like, oh, I think He wants to help me learn more of that through the fact that I have a baby. So I guess I’m excited for that. And hopefully he won’t be crazy at Mass, but if he is, you know what, it is what it is. I totally forgot that this is her first Christmas. I’ll probably just be thinking, this time last year I was pregnant with her. It’ll make me reflect more on, the Christmas story and on Mary’s position, because I don’t feel like I fully understood what she was going through until now. I think it’s difficult to fully understand, motherhood until you’ve experienced it. I think I will notice and empathise with Mary more this year for Christmas.
Could you travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem, while heavily pregnant?
It’s a long journey. 140 Km. I don’t know if I could do that. In this weather. But yeah, that’s incredible. I can’t even imagine, is it 140 kilometres? I can’t even imagine how long that is. like driving that would be hard enough. But she was on a donkey. That’s crazy. But I guess I don’t know. I guess in thinking about that you, I don’t know, you do what you need to do for your family, I guess. You know, and it’s not like they were doing that for fun, they did it because they had to. And I imagine that probably it was just a necessity to it. And so it’s hard but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Yeah, it’s incredible the strength that you can find when it’s something that you do for your kids and for your family.
Why do you think God decided to come to us as a baby?
There is such a vulnerability in babies hey, like, especially newborns, like, when I see newborns now. I can’t even remember really what Israel was like as a newborn. But when you see them, you’re just like, oh, man, you can’t do anything. And that’s crazy that God would do that for us, to let Himself come so close to us and be almost at our mercy. Babies are just an invitation to be loved and to be cared for. And that God would come to us like that so humbly, it’s so audacious, that He would put Himself at our mercy like that. That he would put Himself at the mercy of the world like that to come as a baby. And babies can really, truly do nothing at all but be loved. God is loving and pure and knocks on your heart to let Him in rather barges in, you need to, I think we needed to see that He came first as an innocent child, as a gentle, pure being.
How does Mary inspire you in your motherhood?
I think definitely just her, her ‘yes’ is something that I always think about. Just always saying yes to the hard things, yes to being open to God’s will all the time. In her motherhood as well, like, I’m sure she was a patient mother, a very loving mother, considering she was sinless. Yeah, I think I strive to be like her as a mother and to be patient, to be loving, to be a comfort, a guide. Just always being open. Always being open. Beautiful. Yeah, that’s really beautiful. I suppose when things get hard or maybe even like mundane in the day to day of being a mum or just being at home, I like to think of, I don’t know, like the humanity of Mary and what that would have looked like for her. Like, there’s almost like a solidarity to I’m sure she had days where she was bored. Do you get bored? I don’t know. You know, like as the mother of God, do you ever get bored? And I think I like to think of her in that and almost, like, feel a camaraderie of like, oh man, Mary did this, you know, like and she wasn’t just raising like a normal human person, she was raising God. And there’s grace in that, and there’s grace in this as well and all of the all parts of it, all of the mundane and all of the hard and all of the joy as well.