sermon

INTRODUCTION: Last month, in the midst of planning my sermon titles for the month of May, I drew an absolute blank on Mothers Day: Nada. Zero. Being that we had just that month formally affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association, I wondered to myself about what other UU ministers might be preaching on that day

So I accessed the ever present Google for “UU: Mothers’ Day sermons.” And guess what: One of the first ones to show up was a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange at the Emerson UU Church in Houston, Texas. And the title was: “The Perfect Mother’s Day Sermon.”

Wow! That seemed not only a made to order great title, but a rather courageous minister to presume that she or he could preach a “perfect” sermon on any topic. And when I first scanned the actual sermon, I thought, “Great.” Though there were parts that were personal to Becky, there were other parts that were quite substantive and all good. So I e-mailed her and asked if I could share parts of it with you and she agreed and even sent me what she felt was a better version of it. I did however change the title slightly: to “The Next to Perfect Mother’s Day Sermon.” I mean the “perfect” one has already been done, right!

So let’s talk about Mothers and Mothers Day. My Mother was born in 1905, in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, in what was then still known as Indian Territory. That of course refers to the treaty drawn between the White Man and the Red Man, in the 1820s, which was supposed to last “as long as water runs and grass grows.” That was about 1907, when Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma.

Mother attended public schools and graduated from what the West called “Normal School,” which were designed by the federal government so as to develop teachers across the nation. Mother taught English and French, and later Greek. Dad was one of her students in the Pentecostal Holiness Church’s early colleges in Checotah, Oklahoma. They married, she had six kids, and has been gone now since 1990.

Before we proceed further, we need to note that some of us never knew our mother, some were reared by step mothers, some had great relationships, and others had painful ones. So bring out the flowers, send the cards, and eat the candy, but also know that Mother’s Day is a mixed blessing – good for some, and not for others.

As Becky writes, “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.

As an example, I learned something like that this week in my own family circle. One of our extended family’s young mothers of two, who is pregnant with a third, had to leave her own family and fly to her mother’s hometown to forcefully hospitalize her mother; otherwise, she might have acted upon her threats to take her life. The same young mother flew back home yesterday so as to be with her own children on Mothers Day.
As Becky writes, “Mothers and mothering—they are a complex, multi-faceted, diverse experience. And the minister who thinks she or he can deliver the perfect Mothers Day sermon probably needs their medications adjusted.

Becky shares that when she Googled this topic to write her sermon on the subject, “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 Google resource she found the most offensive was the “Mothers Maintenance Manual.” It suggested that we should at least take as good care of our mothers as we do our cars—and listed such maintenance rules as:

n when a mother’s carburetor floods it should be treated immediately with Kleenex and some extra spending money;

n a mother’s chassis needs to be properly maintained so regular exercise should be encouraged;

Then in a particularly sexist closing: “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 what should be our response in the context of our liberal religious attitudes, especially since mothers and mothering are such a diverse topic? Is there some common ground? Are there some common affirmations we all might make this day?

Becky suggests 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 has written a poem entitled, “For my Husband’s Mother.” It’s not only the poet’s mother-in-law, but the mother who had given her son up for adoption. The poet writes to her husband, this poem:

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 know only there was a woman who gave you the food of her blood, the bed of her flesh, who breathed for you.

Becky suggests in response that perhaps we can start with simple thanks for the gift of life, 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?

She then quotes the poet, Sharon Olds, who goes back in fantasy to a day before she was born:

“I see my mother and father standing at the gates of their colleges . . . I see my father strolling out under the 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. Because without them where would I be, and 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;” who “rocked us at her rhythmic breast and which we have now become but long for still;” she “whose name Mother we can wear like a shield to protect us all these years;” who, “even at six, believed in our powers”, and who “to every celebration matched a flavor’”; she, “whose fragrance, almost forgotten, still warms the deepest dreams of us all;” 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.”
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, and 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, women as well as men, 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.

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.

[1] A Mothers Day sermon given May 08, 2011, at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation (Unitarian Universalist), located at 2756 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne A. Robinson, Minister. Drawn from resources, and in italics, provided by the Rev. Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange and her sermon of the same name, May 8^th, 2005 at the Emerson UU Church of Houston, Texas (with permission).