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For good or ill, we learn what the word love means from our childhood. The attachment style we have acquired, often from our Mothers, is something that’s programmed within us, often for the rest of our lives. Sometimes this serves us well, sometimes it doesn’t. Which is why tomorrow’s Mother’s day can often be emotionally complicated as well as celebratory. For one of the things we have learnt from the psychologists of the twentieth century – as well as from the novelists of the nineteenth and the writers of the Bible itself – is that love is so overwhelmingly powerful a force that it can pull us out of shape in many different ways. This is partly why religious traditions value marriage as lending love a sense of discipline. It gives it some sort of grounding and structure and it is the same reason why I welcome today’s historic extension of marriage to people who are gay. For the truth is, the Bible is not a manual for the propagation of the nuclear family. Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. And the list of those who practised polygamy represents a “who’s who” of the Hebrew scriptures: Abraham, Jacob, David. Conversely, in the New Testament, most of the main characters were not actually married at all, including, of course Jesus himself. Indeed St Paul wrote: “it is good for a man not to marry.” My own take on these words is that St Paul, like many Jews back then, believed that he was living at the end of time - that the end of the world would soon arrive and therefore it made little sense to make long term plans. Of course, we don’t think like this anymore – though at moments of intense political or environmental crisis we can have some intimation of it. But the real point here is not that the end of the world is likely – rather that the idea of it can flush out what is most important in life. Like for instance, being told that you have a few months to live can dramatically flush out what it is in life that you value the most. For people facing the end don’t think in terms of career or money – they talk of saying sorry to the people they have wronged or telling the people that they love that they love them. This is what the Bible powerfully points to: a reawakening of priorities. It’s not a book about marriage, it’s a book about love. But if religious traditions have tended to promote marriage above all other domestic arrangements it is because the nuclear force of love benefits from the resilience that is offered by a widely respected social architecture – and that is often is the nuclear family, so to speak. But there is nothing necessarily religious about the specific social architecture we have chosen, and it has changed substantially over time. And today it is changing again. Marriage is valuable as the hardware of a relationship. The all-important software is always love itself. Which is exactly the same reason why I am going to shamelessly steal this opportunity to say - Mum, if you are listening - Happy Mother’s Day. I love you lots.