MOTHER NATURE
Chris Bell
8 May 2005

Well, if you hadn’t remembered before I hope you have now remembered that it is Mother’s Day, if you have a card or some flowers to send…

I certainly haven’t been able to forget that Mother’s Day. First, I’m a regular NPR listener. And I have known I would be preaching on this day for 8 months or so, yet somehow I still managed to procrastinate getting the card in the mail until yesterday. I must confess I’m a bad son in the card and gift department.

I also haven’t been able to forget because I’ve discovered that a Mother’s Day sermon is not the easiest thing to write. I should have been clued in to that fact when one of our staff people told me recently, “oh, they always stick the intern with Mother’s Day.” Stick the intern?

Personally, I’m happy to be preaching on Mother’s Day. I am, after all, what in a less enlightened era was called a momma’s boy. My mother was very much my primary care taker, and I owe most of what is good in me to her, so I don’t mind a special day in her honor and in honor of all mothers. I will say, the more I’ve learned about Mother’s Day the less and less appropriate I think it is to have a man in the pulpit.

Yet as I’ve struggled to find my words for today I’ve become aware of why our staff member might have described this service as one to “stick the intern” with. Mother’s Day for all its seemingly simple goodness can provoke a lot of ambivalent emotion. Mother's Day can be painful for those among us who desperately want to be parents, but have been unable to do so. Couples struggling with infertility, or who never found the right partner, or whatever, do not hear good news in the message that "it's a gift to be a mother..." Not every woman has been, or has even wanted to be a mother, yet this holiday, which is our only really woman-centered holiday, lifts up only one particular aspect of what being a woman can or might mean. Furthermore, some people don’t have a mother: perhaps she has died, or perhaps they have two dads. Finally, as generous, steadfast, devoted and loving most mothers are, none is perfect. Neither are their children, I hasten to add, meaning that our relationships with our mothers are, at least, complicated, and maybe even troubled. There is more to being a woman than being a mother and Lord knows there is more to being a mother than a pink – invariably pink – Hallmark card can capture.

Let me be clear: I mean no disrespect to any of you moms out there. Today we do lift you up with our gratitude and respect and love. As a parent myself I’m at least partially aware of the sacrifices and energy that mothering demands, plus there is the whole baby coming out of the body thing, which I have been a witness to and before which I must give a bow of humility and respect. I was there!

The TV-ad version of Mother’s Day promotes a impossibly perfected image of motherhood and, indeed, of womanhood that can be disturbingly old-fashioned: Dr. Mom, Mom the wise shepherd of all her kids, including her husband, Mom who gets breakfast cooked for her because it’s assumed she has cooked it every other day of the year. Mother’s Day is steeped in cliché, and I don’t want to preach cliché. I can’t just stand up here and offer more of the platitudes that sell so many cards at this time of year.

Of course, the women who brought us our American Mother’s Day weren’t seeking platitudes. They didn’t want flowers or jewelry. They wanted respect. They wanted power. They wanted equality. And most of all, they wanted peace. I suspect you’ve heard this history before, but in brief…

Mother’s Day as we know it today is only the latest version of various days of celebration and honor of motherhood. Ancient cultures often had holidays devoted to mother goddesses or to the mother of all the gods. “Mothering Sunday” was celebrated in Britain beginning in the 17th century, a day when apprentices and servants could return home for the day to visit their mothers, usually bringing special cakes and sweets as gifts. This British holiday had almost completely died out by the 1800s. The earliest incarnation in this country began in 1858 in West Virginia when Anna Reeves Jarvis created “Mothers’ Work Days” to improve sanitation in her town. That might not sound like much of a foundation for a holiday. In my house we simply call “Mother’s work day to improve sanitation” Saturday. But Anna Reeves Jarvis wasn’t content to mother only her people. During the Civil war she extended her Mother’s Work Days to work for better sanitary conditions on both sides, and after the war she used those connections and actively worked for reconciliation. Reeves Jarvis used the role of mother as a vehicle for peace and understanding and to achieve a degree of activism that was rare for a woman of her time.

The great Unitarian Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), whose words we read together, continued the efforts toward establishing a Mother’s Day. As the UU historical society’s dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist biography puts it, “Julia Ward Howe is little known today except as author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, yet she was famous in her lifetime as poet, essayist, lecturer, reformer and biographer.” She worked to end slavery, helped to initiate the women's movement in many states, and organized for international peace—all at a time, when, as she noted in her journal, "when to do so was a thankless office, involving public ridicule and private avoidance."

She also did all of these over the course of long marriage to Samuel Gridley Howe, who was enlightened enough to pioneer the teaching of the blind and deaf at the Perkins School, but not enough to support this brilliant woman. The “private avoidance” of which she wrote was as close as her own bedroom. In her journal on her anniversary she wrote: "I have been married twenty years today. In the course of that time I have never known my husband to approve of any act of mine which I myself valued. Books—poems—essays—everything has been contemptible in his eyes because not his way of doing things. . . . I am much grieved and disconcerted."

They thought about a divorce, but Samuel’s threat to take her children, and her devotion to them, kept them together. Somehow, in spite of that relationship she found the will to do amazing things.

In 1868 she founded the New England Women’s Suffrage Association, and a year later the American Women’s Suffrage Association and became its president. In 1870, responding to the Civil War and the newly engaged Franco-Prussian war she wrote: “The question forced itself upon me, 'Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?' I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect."

She wrote her proclamation, which we read the bulk of together, in 1870 and sent it throughout the world, right at the same point in her life, I might add, when she became the founder of the New England and then the American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1872, she began promoting the idea of a "Mother's Day for Peace" to be celebrated on June 2, honoring peace, motherhood and womanhood. Such was her influence that in 1873, women in 18 cities in America held Mother's Day for Peace gatherings. Boston celebrated the Mother's Day for Peace for at least 10 years, but the celebrations died out when Howe was no longer paying most of the cost for them. A handful of celebrations continued for 30 years.

Today’s version of Mother’s Day was established by Anna Jarvis, daughter of Anna Reeves Jarvis, and well aware of the justice work of her mother and Julia Ward Howe. She swore at her mother’s gravesite in 1905 that she would establish a Mother’s Day to honor mothers living and dead. Through various efforts, the acts of Congress and the decree of the President it became a national holiday in 1914. She is quite an interesting character: she hated the flowers and cards – which she called “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write” – that came to represent the day and was in a life-long battle with the floral industry. She wrote, “I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not of profit.”

The point is, “the struggle to gain voting rights for women, the cause of peace among the nations of the world, the fight against poverty and the abuse of children, these were the central concerns of those who established Mother's Day. From the beginning this was a day not simply to remember one's own mother, but to find in the experience of such active, courageous mothers as Anna Reeves Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe, lessons that apply to all. These women were not celebrating the mere fact of bearing children, but lifting up ideals that the entire human family could support.” – from www.about.com

We’ve seen this special authority of mothers invoked in more recent days. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is credited with fundamentally changing our society’s attitudes toward drinking and driving. And the Million Mom March in Washington, D.C. for better gun control laws in 2000 took place on Mother’s Day.
There is some danger that the invocation of mother’s special authority, as such, may perpetuate a stereotype of women as “selfless non-partisan defenders of hearth and home” as a New York Times article on the Million Mom March put it.

My heart tells me that what the world needs more than anything else is “selfless non-partisan defenders of hearth and home.” What we need to do is take that lovely notion out of its special pink box, where the women who founded Mother’s Day had to find it, having no other place from which to claim their power and authority, and promote the “selfless non-partison defense of hearth and home” among all people.

As a dutiful Unitarian Universalist I am always seeking things which might cultivate a sense of our shared humanity, and which might serve as a ground for a common moral and ethical vision. It is useful to pull back, or peel away, all the structures of ideology, of religion and politics and so on, and find those things that all people truly, truly share outside of the confines of time and place and language and culture. What remains is very basic. All people hunger and thirst, all people feel pain and pleasure, and they all name pain bad and pleasure good. We all have the capacity for love. And all people come out of a woman.

There is something very powerful in bringing things down to our common humanness, finding the lowest, or perhaps the highest, common denominator. Everyone has a mother, even if that relationship isn’t perfect. And all mothers if they are not confined by mental illness or suffering or war, if they are allowed to cultivate their mother nature, all mother feel love for their children.

I live with a social psychologist, so rare is one of my sermons that is not peppered with wisdom from that discipline. One thing that modern developmental and social psychology has taught us over the last view decades is that parenting isn’t a one-way interaction. Children – even newborn infants – bring something to the relationship. There isn’t some ideal of motherhood that arrives in a woman’s heart from heaven, instead there’s this two-way, engaged, shared emergence of the bonds of relationship.

I believe the mother-child relationship is the common denominator, the basis of morality itself. That relationship is utterly foundational. It is where we learn our fundamentally relational nature. In the mere fact of our having been gestated and born out of another. And in the longing we have to be mothered.

That longing to be mothered has a deeply spiritual aspect, reflected in the many feminine images of God that we find in the Bible.

In her powerful and provocative book, "She Who Is," Elizabeth Johnson who teaches at Fordham University, weaves these ancient biblical texts together. She points out that within the Bible, the wisdom of God was often personified as one in whom there dwells a compassion that is clearly maternal. And so Johnson traces these biblical passages in which God as Wisdom "cries out in terrible labor to deliver the new creation of justice (Is 42:14), where God suckles the newly born, teaches toddlers to walk, bends down to feed them, and carries them about, bearing them from birth even to old age with its gray hairs (Is 46:3-4).

Writes Johnson, “The religious experience of divine mercy is made luminous in maternal metaphors. The compassion of God the Mother insures that she loves the weak and dispossessed as well as the strong and beautiful. We do not have to be wonderful according to external norms to elicit her love, for this is freely given by virtue of the maternal relationship itself. God looks upon all with a mother's love that makes the beloved beautiful.”

But let me bring it back to earth with a story about my mother.

I recently took a trip to Washington, D.C. with (naturally enough), my mother and Aaron and Rita and Aaron’s best friend Adolph. Now I love Washington, D.C., I love the idea and ideals of Democracy, I believe in the people of the United States. But I know too much history. I know there is another side to every story that is memorialized in the capital, and it makes it difficult for me to throw myself in whole-heartedly. We looked at all the monuments – there was a clear sense for me that they were built by the men of the country for the men of the country. There is something incomplete about them. Most of them are about men. Almost all of them were built before women could vote, which I’ll remind you occurred only 85 years ago. I asked my son what he thought about Washington, D.C. and he said, “Everything seems to have to do with a war.”

While we there we looked at the murals at the new World War II memorial, which tell the story of the war. Each mural contained a woman – serving the war effort at home, serving as nurse, and so on. One mural depicted the victory gardens, which as I’m sure you know were gardens that individuals planted in their yards to raise vegetables so the output of the farms could go overseas to soldiers and allies. At one point in the war these victory gardens were responsible for 40% of the nation’s produce! What a remarkable display of awareness and commitment!

Another thing struck us, as we sat there by the murals watching the tourists stroll by, eating our ice cream, planning our day, thinking about the energy and sacrifice and effort that it took to win World War II. My mom looked around at the balloons and the tour buses and said, “Hmm, you wouldn’t even know there was a war on now, would you?” Yes, there was added security around many of the buildings, and metal detectors to go into the Smithsonian. But it was just another week of tourism in D.C. as far as I could tell. The few protestors we saw were well away from the mall. There were no headlines in the paper about the war that week. All that could be seen on the TV was endlessly repeating cycles about the selection of the new pope.

Well, there is a war going on.

As of Saturday, May 7, 2005, at least 1,592 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. 1,454 U.S. military members have died since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. That means that 91% of the U.S. casualties have occurred since the fighting ending.

Since the beginning of U.S. military action in 2003 there have been a minimum of 21,000 civilian deaths in Iraq directly related to combat operations or the ongoing difficulties with the insurgency. 308 people have died in Iraq in the last eight days. It is numbing. Add to this the toll of over a decade of sanctions and we are talking about a lot of broken-hearted mothers.

When I consider the war, and put it on the scales of justice, in the one hand I put whatever good might come from it, and in the other the suffering of mothers, of women and children. How do we respond to that?

Faced with the apathy, with the distance, with our own despair, we may be left wondering what to do. Charlie Clements, from the UUSC, told a story once that he bought a WWJD bracelet. And for him this means not what would Jesus do, although that is a relevant question, but what would Julia do? What would Julia Ward Howe do?

Here are her words, from the preamble to the Mother’s Day proclamation: “Again, in the sight of the [Christian] world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle-field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.”

That cry must be heard now. Mothers and children of mothers – we need you. You, too, were forged in the basic and universal smithy of humankind, you were born with the authority of connection and relation and creation.

Mother nature, mothering nature – that’s human nature. Today, as you honor your own mother, honor all mothers. That’s what Julia would do. There is no greater way to honor mothers than to honor life and peace. To preach peace, to work for peace. To be peace.

If we elevate and sustain that power of love and connection, that mother nature that is at our core, we are more powerful than anything. We are more powerful than the media, more powerful than the politicians, more powerful than the military. Let’s do what Julia asks us to do: “to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

Indeed. Thanks, Mom.