Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.

In this deeply personal episode, I share the story of sitting beside my mother as she died, the complicated longing for a mother that can remain with us throughout our lives, and how our earliest experiences of love can shape the way we imagine God. I also explore the unexpected role Mary, the mother of Jesus, played in helping me discover a God who had been there all along—holding, nurturing, giving birth to something new, and mothering this motherless child.

Draft

Why would a Protestant pastor become so drawn to Mary? In this episode, I explore what Christianity may have lost by pushing Mary to the edges of our spiritual lives. I look briefly at the history of Marian devotion and the rosary, the Protestant Reformation’s concerns about excesses surrounding Mary, and the very different excesses that can shape American Christianity today—militant masculinity, domination, scapegoating, and fear. But this is ultimately not an argument about becoming more Catholic or less Protestant. It is an invitation for all Christians to rediscover the Mary we meet in Scripture: a woman who listens, questions, ponders, waits, nurtures, suffers, and remains open to God even when she does not fully understand what is happening. We need Mary more than ever—not as a replacement for Christ, but as a teacher who can help us recover tenderness, compassion, contemplation, courage, and the motherly dimensions of a God who transcends gender.