Mothers, Mystics, and Priests
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Why I Am Choosing the Name (and Vocation) of Mother
As I prepared to preach this Mother’s Day and as I stand only weeks away from ordination, I found myself reflecting deeply on what it means to become “Mother Nicole.” It is a title I have sat with quietly for a long time now, turning it over gently in prayer and conversation and contemplation. And the closer ordination comes, the more certain I become that this is not simply a preference in language, but a vocation within the vocation itself.
From the earliest days of my discernment, the image that has remained with me whenever I have imagined priesthood is not that of a leader standing ahead of people, but of a midwife walking beside them. Again and again, when I have imagined what it means to serve as priest, I have felt drawn not toward authority as dominance, but toward accompaniment, tenderness, discernment, and presence.
Priests are invited into some of the most intimate and vulnerable spaces of human life: birth and death, grief and reconciliation, doubt and hope, joy and heartbreak. We are entrusted with people’s stories, their wounds, their questions, and the deepest longings of their souls. To me, priesthood has always felt less like commanding and more like midwifing—helping people labor toward healing, transformation, belonging, and new life in God.
Over the past few years, I have also grown close to a priest who embodies spiritual fatherhood in one of the healthiest and most beautiful ways I have ever witnessed. Through him, I have seen how a priest can become a healing balm in places where people have been wounded by the Church. I have watched him create genuine spiritual intimacy and community, not through power or performance, but through abiding presence, compassion, and care. He has helped me understand more deeply what it means for priests to stand in persona Christi—in the person of Christ—for others.
But he has also helped me realize something else: that priests do not only embody Christ for people. We also embody the Church itself for them. We become, in many ways, the face of Mother Church—carrying both her beauty and her brokenness, her tenderness and her failures. And for many people, especially those who have experienced spiritual harm or exclusion, the Church has not always felt like a nurturing mother. Sometimes she has felt distant, harsh, withholding, or unsafe.
What if part of priesthood now is helping people encounter another face of the Church? A mothering presence that nurtures rather than controls, accompanies rather than coerces, listens rather than silences. A Church that is capable of tenderness again.
And perhaps that is part of why the title “Mother” feels important to me as a reclaiming of something ancient within the Christian imagination itself. The Church has long been described as Mother. The mystics spoke of God with maternal imagery far more freely than many of us tend to today. In recent days, I have been dwelling deeply with Julian of Norwich, whose feast day we celebrated just this week, and I continue to be shaped by her breathtaking vision of divine love. Julian dared to write, “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.” Her writings are startling not because they abandon Christian tradition, but because they reveal dimensions of God’s tenderness and nearness that have always been present within it.
The Church needs fathers. But I believe it also needs mothers. It needs the wisdom and balance of both patriarchy and matriarchy held together within the Body of Christ. If priests can boldly claim the title Father as an expression of spiritual care and relationship, then perhaps women priests should not hesitate to claim Mother too.
And so I carry all of these reflections with me into this Mother’s Day sermon and into this final month before ordination. I carry my own experiences of being mothered and nurturing others. I carry the image of priest as midwife. I carry the words of Jesus: “I will not leave you orphaned.” I carry Julian’s vision of divine motherhood. I carry the longing so many people have simply to know they belong and are beloved.
And somewhere in the midst of all of that, I am slowly becoming Mother Nicole.
Listening with you,
Nicole
Sermon: I Will Not Leave You Orphaned
John 14:15-21 6th Sunday of Easter / Mother’s Day May 9, 2026 Church of the Nativity
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Today, as we continue our journey through Eastertide, we also pause to honor those who have mothered us in some way. And Mother’s Day always arrives carrying more than one story. For some, it is a day marked by gratitude and tenderness. For others, it comes with grief, absence, or longing. And for many people, it holds all those things together at once. Human love is rarely simple, and our experiences of family, nurturing, belonging, and loss are often layered and complicated in ways we do not always know how to name.
I have been thinking this week about the women who shaped me. I come from a long line of strong women, three of whom lived with me in my formative years, including, of course, my own mother, my older sister, Amanda, and my maternal grandmother, who moved in with us when I was 10. Each of them, in their own ways, was outspoken and fearless and taught me strength and tenderness in equal measure.
I was raised by women who nurtured fiercely and endured faithfully, and this Mother’s Day, I give thanks for that. Alongside them, I was also deeply loved by the men in my life, especially my father, whose steadiness gave me an early sense of safety and belonging.
Because of that, I grew up understanding something about love that abides, and yet, even with those experiences, speaking about God as a loving parent was never entirely uncomplicated for me. There were still parts of me that struggled to trust divine tenderness, struggled to believe deeply that I was held by a love that would not disappear.
It was not until I became a mother myself that something shifted in me in a way I could not have anticipated. Loving my children opened something in me that felt both deeply human and deeply holy.
I began to understand love not simply as affection or commitment, but as this fierce and immovable attachment that says: there is nothing you could do that would make me let you go, nothing that would make me stop loving you. And as that realization deepened in me, I began to wonder how this glimpse of parental love was also revealing something about the heart of God.
The truth is, whether our experiences of family have been beautiful or painful—or, more often, some complicated mixture of both—they shape the way we imagine God. The language we use for God is never abstract. Words like father, mother, parent, protector, comforter, provider—these words touch something deep and personal in us because they are bound up with our earliest experiences of love, belonging, safety, and loss.
And so the question underneath so much of the spiritual life is often not simply, “Do I believe in God?” but rather: Can I trust that God is good? Can I trust that divine love remains? Can I trust that I am held, even when life becomes uncertain or painful or lonely?
I think that is part of why today’s Gospel matters so deeply. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is speaking to disciples who are beginning to sense that everything familiar is about to change. This conversation takes place during the Last Supper, on the night before his death, and underneath all their confusion and fear is the deep human anxiety of abandonment: What will happen when we are left alone? What happens when the one who has guided us, loved us, and held us is no longer physically here?
And what is striking about this passage is that Jesus answers that fear, not with explanation or certainty, but with relationship. Everything in this passage is relational. Jesus speaks of love, of the Father sending the Advocate, of the Spirit who will abide with them and dwell within them. This entire passage moves in the language of belonging, communion, and abiding presence.
In many ways, this is one of the most deeply Trinitarian passages in all of John’s Gospel, not because it gives us a doctrine to solve, but because it reveals the very nature of God as relationship itself. Father, Son, and Spirit exist not in isolation, but in an eternal movement of love and self-giving presence. And what Jesus is telling the disciples is astonishing: you are not outside of that love. You are being drawn into it.
“I am in my father, and you in me, and I in you,” he says. This is the language of family and intimacy. Jesus is not giving the disciples a theological system to master so much as inviting them into a reality to inhabit, and the center of that reality is abiding love. Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus returns repeatedly to this language of remaining: Abide in me as I abide in you. Make your home in me as I make my home in you.
And perhaps that is why Jesus begins not with fear or obedience, but with love:“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Not because love must be earned, but because love is the beginning of all of it.
The commandments Jesus speaks of are not burdens placed upon anxious disciples trying to prove themselves worthy. In John’s Gospel, the commandment Jesus gives is ultimately this: Love one another as I have loved you. In other words, remain within the love you have already received.
And then Jesus promises that this love will not disappear with his physical absence. The Spirit will continue the very presence of God among them—not distantly, but intimately. “He abides with you,” Jesus says, “and he will be in you.”
There is something profoundly tender to me about the fact that Jesus speaks these words to people who are frightened and confused and who do not yet understand what is unfolding around them. The disciples are not models of perfect faith in this moment. Before the night is over, one will betray him, another will deny him, and most of them will scatter. And yet Jesus speaks to them not with condemnation, but with reassurance.
“I will not leave you orphaned.” That word orphaned carries more than the literal meaning we often assign to it. To be orphaned is not simply to lose parents. It is to lose the sense that we are held by someone, connected to someone, claimed by someone.
And most people carry some version of a fear of being orphaned, whether consciously or not. We fear abandonment. We fear being forgotten. We fear that if we fail badly enough, grieve deeply enough, wander far enough, or become wounded enough, we may somehow find ourselves outside the reach of love. But Jesus speaks directly into that fear and says: That is not the truth of your life in God.
You are not abandoned. You are not outside of divine love. You do not cease to belong because circumstances change or because suffering comes or because your faith falters. Because the life of God itself is a life of continual presence and communion, and through Christ we are drawn into that communion.
Years ago, when I began practicing Centering Prayer more intentionally, I would sit each day quietly with the sacred word “beloved.” At the time, I was struggling deeply to believe that word could possibly apply to me. I understood God intellectually. I understood grace theologically. But receiving love at that deep, interior level felt much harder.
And then while living in Bangladesh, I learned something about language that slowly began to reshape my prayer life. In Bangla, the word for father is Abba, and the word for mother is Amma, almost identical to the intimate, Aramaic words Jesus used for mom and dad, Abba and Ema.
But what struck me deeply was discovering that there is not a separate word for “parents” as we have in English. Instead, in Bangla, the two names are joined together as one: Abba-Amma: Father-Mother.
In English, “parents” becomes an abstract category, almost administrative. It is a collective noun that smooths over relationship into a single unit. But in the language of Abba-Amma, you can hear the two voices inside that word. The child does not encounter “parenthood” in the abstract; the child encounters mother-and-father together as the first experience of love, safety, provision, and belonging.
And slowly, without even fully realizing it, my prayer began to shift. This became my new centering word. I began praying to God as Abba-Amma, the One who held together every expression of steadfast love I had known and every place where human love had fallen short. The One who remained present. The One who called me beloved long before I knew how to believe it myself.
And as I continue to explore these images and relationships within the life of God, I am increasingly aware that this way of speaking is not new, even if many of us are sometimes less comfortable with it now than the mystics often were. Just this past week, the Church commemorated the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century English mystic who wrote during a time of plague, uncertainty, and suffering. Julian spoke of the tenderness and nearness of God with remarkable freedom and intimacy, writing, “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.”
I think what Julian and so many others were trying to express is that no single human image can fully contain the love of God. And yet, through all these images—father, mother, comforter, advocate, beloved—God continually reveals divine love as nurturing, steadfast, intimate, and abiding.
What changed over time was not simply the language I used for God, but the way I began to understand relationship itself. I began to see that the spiritual life is not fundamentally about earning closeness to God but awakening to the closeness that has already been there all along: “You in me, and I in you.”
That may be one of the most important lines in this entire passage because Jesus is describing something far deeper than belief or religious obligation. He is describing mutual indwelling, a life of communion in which we discover that we already belong within the love of God.
Which also means that Christian community is meant to reflect that same kind of abiding presence in the world. Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and in John’s Gospel, those commandments are always rooted in love of neighbor.
If we are not orphaned, then we are called not to leave others orphaned either. We are called to become people who remain present to one another. People who create belonging. People who embody patience, compassion, forgiveness, and steadfastness in a world that is so often marked by isolation and disconnection.
And perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts mothers and mother-figures so often give to us at their best—not perfection, but presence, the steady, ordinary faithfulness of showing up again and again in love. So today, we give thanks for all those who have mothered us in ways large and small—for mothers, grandmothers, stepmothers, foster and adoptive mothers, godmothers, mentors, friends, and all those whose steady presence has helped shape our lives with love.
Today, we honor that love wherever we have encountered it, and we also entrust to God all the places where human love has been incomplete, fractured, or absent. Because ultimately, the Gospel points us beyond even our best human love toward the deeper reality underneath it all: the abiding love of God that does not let us go.
And that, I think, is the promise Jesus is offering his disciples here on the night before everything changes—not that suffering will disappear, or that grief will be avoided. He is not telling them they will always understand where God is leading them, but that they will never be abandoned by the love at the center of all things.
He gives them this promise: they are not orphaned. And neither are we.
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