The story of a priest and his mother draws us closer to understanding how being born from above can free our lives. The priest’s mother, widowed sometime before his ordination, lived in the same parish where he had been assigned to minister. It was a mixed blessing; it was nice to see her every day in church, but she, widowed and alone, began to lean heavily upon him in terms of wanting his time. He, the dutiful son, now had to spend all his free time with his mother, taking her for meals, taking her for drives, and being her one vital contact with the world outside the narrow confines of the seniors’ home within which she lived. During their time together she reminisced a lot and not infrequently complained about being alone and lonely. But one day, on a drive with her, after a period of silence, she said something that surprised him and caught his deeper attention: “I’ve given up on fear!” she said, “I’m no longer afraid of anything. I’ve spent my whole life living in fear. But now, I’ve given up on it because I’ve nothing to lose! I’ve already lost everything: my husband, my youthful body, my health, my place in the world, and much of my pride and dignity. Now I’m free! I’m no longer afraid!” Her son, who had only been half-listening to her for a long time, began to listen. He began to spend longer hours with her, recognizing that she had something important to teach him. After a couple of more years, she died. But, by then, she had been able to impart to her son some things that helped him understand his life more deeply. “My mother gave me birth twice; once from below, and once from above,” he says. He now understands something that Nicodemus couldn’t quite grasp. We are not self-sufficient, which means genuinely recognizing and living out our human dependence upon the gratuitous providence of God. To do that is to be born from above. Fr. Raymond E. Brown puts it this way: To be born again from above means we must, at some point in our lives, come to understand that our life comes from beyond this world, from a place and source beyond our mother’s womb, and that deeper life and deeper meaning lie there. And so we must have two births, one that gives us biological life and another that provides us with eschatological life. Nicodemus couldn’t quite get past his instinctual empiricism. In the end, he didn’t get it. Do we?