The wisdom of women

I had the great pleasure of attending a friend's baby shower today (her baby girl is due October 7!), and have since been thinking about the three great transitional moments of a woman's life. First a girl becomes a woman; then she becomes a wife; then she becomes a mother. At each moment more traditions are handed down, more memories are passed from one generation to the next - one generation receives the knowledge of all the generations before them, a scroll, so to speak, aged and fragile, colored with the stains of time, bearing our mothers' wisdom. And we read it with eager eyes of anticipation - and then we read it again, with desperate eyes in the frantic stress of life, and we cry our hearts out because all that wisdom cannot solve our problems or make our lives comfortable.

But when we have cried all our tears, and come to the eerie quiet at the bottom of sorrow and struggle, we are reminded that our mothers never promised that their advice would fix all the hardships in our lives. They never claimed that their wisdom would make the situations in which we walk any easier to travel. Rather, they made the even greater claim that if we lived by that wisdom, we would change - that we would be able to bear the burdens life laid upon us, and be able to find peace and strength even in the midst of hardship and grief.

Change hurts. It isn't comfortable or pleasant to undergo the kind of pressure that will actually affect lasting transformation! But at least as women we have the accumulated wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers to guide us through that pressure to the beauty of a changed life. We do not have to walk the path of faith alone; all the women who have walked it before us lend us their support, and freely give to us the grace and knowledge they have won through fire.