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The Perfect Mothers Day Sermon? The Reverend Mark Edmiston-Lange, May 8, 2005 A few weeks ago in my Spirituality class I used a guided meditation by Anthony De Mello that invited participants to recall what nurtures and sustains them—to seek anew the sources of refreshment and sustenance that our spirits need as much as our bodies. One section of the meditation asked them to recapture and relive the times when they felt loved, cared for and treasured. Since I was leading the class, I didn’t actively meditate on the images, but that night after the class I dreamed an almost indescribably sweet dream. I dreamed I was a child again wrapped in my mother’s arms. The dream was so pleasurable I didn’t want it to end; I resisted waking. But as I surfaced from sleep and the dream images began to fade, breaking apart like gossamer threads no matter how I tried to grasp and hold onto them, suddenly they were replaced by—not a dream—but actual memories. Perhaps it was the sounds coming from my alarm clock radio that evoked them, but all at once I remembered innumerable times as a child when my mother would sit on the couch in the living room listening to music and I would come and snuggle up in her lap. She would put her arms around me, hold me, and idly stroke my hair or my arm and I would rest suspended, motionless, in a sensual cocoon of peace and joy. Sometimes when she got caught up in the music she might rub the same spot of skin over and over until it became irritating—but still I wouldn’t move a muscle, unwilling to break the bewitching spell of being cradled safe and warm in my mother’s loving arms. My mother has been dead six years now and I still miss her. But it’s not a yawning, painful missing, rather a rich, fertile, even comforting missing. Because with the missing comes a sense of blessing—of how much she is still with me, of how much she gave me. That’s not to say that our relationship didn’t have its ups and downs, its struggles and failings—on both sides of the equation—but I loved her dearly and she loved me and I knew it and the gifts she gave me of physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual nurture now seem beyond measure. My relationship with my mother was close and deep, and so Mothers Day has most often been for me an occasion for feelings of love and gratitude. But I know that Mothers Day is not that for everyone. If your relationship with your mother was not loving, if it was fraught with abuse or neglect, if she abandoned you as a child, or if you feel your mother failed you miserably, Mothers Day can strike you as a painful charade. Or if you lost your Mother at an early age, or if you are still actively grieving a beloved mother’s recent death, Mothers Day can be achingly sad. The feelings and associations evoked by the word mother are not the same for everyone and so Mothers Day is not always celebratory. And for those who are mothers themselves, how you are feeling about your children or the state of your life in general just now can color how you experience this day—if, for example, you are the mother of several small children, struggling to keep your sanity and identity—small children, one of whom always seems to paychecks to get by. Mothers and mothering—they are a complex, multi-faceted, diverse experiences. And the minister who thinks he or she can deliver the perfect Mothers Day sermon probably needs their medication adjusted. What to do? I don’t know if you know this or not, but if you are a minister in a more traditional denomination, you can find all kinds of sermon aids on the Internet—jokes, anecdotes, even complete sermons themselves. These pulpit resources, as they are called, are useless to Unitarian Universalist ministers because they are either based on the lectionary or hopelessly conservative theologically. But every once in an idle while, I check them out just to remember how unique Unitarian Universalism’s approach to religion is. Curious as to what these sources might suggest as themes for Mothers Day, I did a Google search. I should have known! There were endless variations on the theme that a woman’s only true vocation is to be a mother; that all a mother ever needs is three little words—I love you; that God can’t be everywhere so he made mothers, and, the one I found the most offensive, the “Mothers Maintenance Manual” that suggested that we should at least take as good care of our mothers as we do our cars—and listed such maintenance rules as “mothers need a hot bath and a nap every 100 miles, a baby-sitter and a night out every 1,000 miles; when a mother’s carburetor floods it should be treated immediately with Kleenex and some extra spending money; a mother’s chassis needs to be properly maintained so regular exercise should be encouraged; a change in hairdo can also be helpful”—and so on—ending with the advice, “If these instructions are followed consistently, this fantastic creation and gift from God that we call MOTHER should last a lifetime and give good service and constant love to those who need her.” Just think—all this—and today you might even get brunch and a carnation thrown in for good measure! So, okay, I’m not going down that path. But how are we to acknowledge Mothers Day in the context of our Unitarian Universalist religious community—a religious community that recognizes and celebrates diversity—when mothers and mothering is such a diverse topic? Is there some common ground? Are there some common affirmations we all might make this day? Perhaps. Perhaps that common ground might start with simple thanks for being given the gift of life and for the woman who bore us—whether we knew her or not, whether we loved her or not, or she us. That we are here is her gift to us, however we came to be. Ellen Bass, in the poem, “For my Husband’s Mother,” writes: Those months I carried our daughter, I’d think of your mother, the woman who carried you though she could not keep you. This woman we do not know, this girl whose life was changed in ways we’ll never know, who wanted or did not want, who loved or did not love, who chose or did not choose, but, willing or reluctant, carried you. Easily, like the grass that sprouts the pasture green after first fall rains; or in great pain, volcanic, slow, the creaking, cracking of the earth, she birthed you. We do not know her name or what she thought as her fingers soaped her taut belly in the bath . . . . We do not know if she could keep food down, if her legs cramped, if she grew dizzy in the grocery . . . We do not know what (her) friends or family thought . . . We know only there was a woman who gave you the food of her blood, the bed of her flesh, who breathed for you. We do not know if anyone ever thanked her.” Perhaps we can start with simple thanks for the gift of life, for whether our childhood was blessed with loving care or stressed by dysfunctional dynamics, for whether golden and buoyed or bruised and battered, here we stand—and that is something is it not? The poetess Sharon Olds goes back in fantasy to a day before she was born: “ I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges . . . I see my father strolling out under the ocher sandstone arch . . . I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the wrought-iron gate still open behind her . . . They are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do (hurtful) things to children . . . I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, his arrogant handsome blind face turning toward me, . . . but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like male and female paper dolls and . . . say: Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.” Simple thanks for the gift of life—that at least we can give. And if we were lucky and were nurtured well and received love in sufficient measure—whether from her we call Mother or from some other nurturing figure who stood in her place, perhaps our hearts can fill and swell with gratitude this day as we think of her who, in the words of still other poets, “bore love’s pressure on the walls of her heart;”1 who “rocked us at her rhythmic breast and which we have now become but long for still;”2 she “whose name Mother we can wear like a shield to protect us all these years;”3 who, “even at six, believed in our powers”4, and who “to every celebration matched a flavor’”5; she, “whose fragrance, almost forgotten, still warms the deepest dreams of us all;”6 she, who “before we were ourselves made us, made us with love and patience, discipline and tears, and gracefully, as dancers when the last sweet cadence nears, bit by bit stepped back to set us free to sail upon our own seas.”7 And perhaps here in this community which celebrates diversity we can find the ways to acknowledge that motherhood itself is a changing, multi-faceted experience and that the mothers among us have differing needs, wants and desires. Perhaps here we can create a container for various experiences, truly listen to and hear what each other’s experience is like rather than assuming, and so learn from, support one another. Whether one’s experience of motherhood is one of pain and regret or joy and pride—hear it and hold it and value it. For those mothers among us who are paddling as fast as they can, worried if they are doing enough by their children perhaps we can gently remind one another that even child psychologists say children don’t need perfect mothers—what they need is “good enough mothering.” And maybe those who have been through it can remind those still in the traces, that there is, in mothering, as in so many aspects of life, a certain amount of grace involved. Even when you do all you can, even when you give your best, there comes a point when you do have to entrust your children to sail upon their own seas. And yes, even good enough mothering doesn’t always save, but the wondrous thing, the time-attested, grace-filled thing, is that most of us, even in hard circumstances, do get enough to see us through, to survive, even to thrive. And for the parents among us struggling with teenage battles over autonomy, perhaps those who caused their parents similar grief can testify that your teenagers need you more than they can say just now and there is hope that a day will come when they can say it —a day when they will echo the sentiments of this poem written by a twenty-nine year old daughter for her mother who raised her all alone in Chicago, one of the nation’s toughest cities: “Words could never describe what that woman has done for me. How she begged, cried and almost died all just to make sure that in my youth, I’d hold a book, and not a baby, that I’d embrace a pen and not a gun, That I’d appreciate the life God gave me and the way God saved me. And she did this alone—by herself. ‘Single parenthood,’ however you choose to call it. It’ll still never change the fact that that Lady’s tears kept me clean, her eyes saw through me, her arms embraced me, her hands kept me straight, and her heart gave me faith, and her life gave me life, all, so that one day I’d make sure others see, her love through me.” (Author unknown) And maybe for all of us, men as well as women, we can recognize that in the end mothering is not something that has to be constrained by our actual relationships with our real mothers or by our ability to give birth or raise children; that mothering is not limited exclusively to nurture of the next generation. Mothering is something we all can do if we view the essence of mothering as loving and caring for others. Mothering is, at its best, the creation of an expansive circle of love that meets others where they are and then provides the space which allows them to grow into their fullness. Maybe here, in this religious community, we can all be mothers to one another. In the last weeks of her life, my mother suffered a series of small strokes which rendered her unable to walk, even to sit up. Her ability to talk was severely limited; her hearing was almost gone. And so her pleasure in music was gone also. And then, in the last days, even her pleasure in eating deserted her. But she still seemed to respond to being held—and so I would crawl into the bed with her, spoon my body next to hers and cradle her in my arms, hold her as she had once held me, and try to communicate my love for her in language beyond words. Love—that’s what it’s about, in the end as in the beginning, isn’t it? That’s what we all can celebrate on Mothers Day—whatever measure of love we received that enables us, moves us, to love in return, to create space for sustaining connections to grow. Love that creates the desire in us to give something back for being given the gift of life itself. Love is our common ground—today, all days. --------------- Notes: 1. From Andrea Potos, To My Still-Unconceived Daughter 2. Author unknown 3. From Lucille Clifton, February 13, 1980 4. From Alison Townsend, Signing My Name 5. From Florence Weinberger, The Power in My Mother’s Arms 6. From Robin Morgan, The Network of the Imaginary Mother 7. Paraphrased from Nicholas Gordon, Before I Was Myself, You Made Me |
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