I really like the theme of this year’s Annual Diocesan Appeal, “Count Your Blessings.” Is there a more healthy spiritual practice? Yet, when was the last time we actually tried to list our blessings? We tend to be grateful in spurts. We appreciate our blessing of health when it’s threatened; our blessing of employment when someone we know loses a job; the blessing of nature when we see or smell glorious May flowers; the incredible blessing of Eucharist when we witness a First Communion.

On any day, the blessing we think of first in such a count might be different. But on this Sunday, we all share a common Number One blessing.

Thank you, God, for our mothers.

Maybe a good way to spend part of this Mother’s Day would be to count the ways our mothers are or have been blessings to us. It’s easy to buy a card that says something sweet and appropriate. But how much more meaningful would it be for her to hear or see a list of specific ways her love and example have blessed us? Write down a few of them. My guess is it won’t take very long.

How those of us whose mothers are no longer living wish we could have such a conversation or deliver that list in person, or even over the telephone. But we’ll do so in prayer. I’ll tell my mother thank you for the blessing of music in our lives. She was a parish organist and some of the happiest family times I remember were around our piano. I’ll thank her for the time at 3 a.m. she listened to my sobs after a break-up with a girlfriend. I’ll thank her for making her seventh child feel as loved as any of the others. (Well, maybe not as much as my sister, the only girl.)

I’ll thank her for the precious gift no one else could have given me, my life itself. And for being my first teacher about Jesus by both word and example. As St. Augustine once prayed, “If I am Thy child, O God, it is because Thou gavest me such a mother.”

Yes, we should count our blessings every day. This Sunday, let’s start with the blessing of our mothers. And then let her know, in whatever way possible, who is Number One. — Thomas J. Dermody, editor-in-chief, The Catholic Post