If that sermon title looks a little odd to you, I'll explain the first four letters in a bit. But I want to say that the reason I thought of calling this one the yin is that next week many of the women will be away, and then I'll preach on men, and we'll complete the necessary balance to keep the universe in harmony. So we're doing women folk this time and men folk next week to complete the picture.
If you haven't figured it out yet, it is Mother's Day, so if you need to discreetly leave to go get a card or some flowers or something like that, we'll just pretend like you're going to the bathroom or something and no one will know!
I'm happy to be preaching on Mother's Day. Though in some ways, it feels odd — absolutely wrong — to have a man up here saying anything on Mother's Day. This really should be a day for the proclamation of a woman who will celebrate that. I guess if I have any excuse it's that I'm what, in a less enlightened age, was called a "mama's boy". So maybe I've got a little something to say about it. It's now more true than ever, actually. My parents divorced when I was very young; my mother was very much my primary caretaker. I owe most of what is good in me to her, so I dedicate this service to her.
I also have to say that I did deliver a similar version of this sermon two years ago at First Unitarian Society in Newton (that will be relevant actually later on). Interestingly, there I said "Mother's Day — that should be an okay experience," and then the more I worked on the sermon at that time and again this time, the more I realized that for all its seemingly straight-forward goodness, Mother's Day is actually a very complicated day. It's a day that can produce a lot of ambivalent feelings in people, which is why the director of religious education there in Newton told me, as I was struggling with the sermon at that time, "Oh yeah, they always stick Mother's Day to the intern." Oh, well, isn't that gracious! Well, this is what came out of that.
Unless you want to do clichés and platitudes (which I do my best to shy away from), we have to acknowledge that anytime we're dealing with a celebration of family, we're dealing with something that's going to be complicated and contain some ambivalence. Mother's Day, for example, can be painful for those among us who desperately want to be parents but are unable to do so. Couples who struggle with infertility or who never found the right partner or whatever it might be do not hear good news in this continual elevation of the gift of motherhood. And not every woman has been or has even wanted to be a mother, and yet this holiday, which is really our only woman-centered holiday, tends to lift up only one particular aspect of what being a woman can or might mean. Some people barely knew their mother. They were given up for adoption; their mother has died; maybe they were raised by two dads. As generous, steadfast, devoted, and loving as most mothers are, none is perfect. Neither, I hasten to add, are their children. This means that our relationships with our mothers are at least complicated.
There's more to being a woman than being a mother, and Lord knows there's more to being a mother than any 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, and one who was the primary caretaker to Aaron in those first couple of years while Rita studied in graduate school, I'm at least partially aware of the sacrifices and energy that mothering demands. Though I simply have to bow with humility and respect before that key piece where a human being comes out of your body. That is remarkable — a remarkable thing.
As a dutiful Unitarian Universalist, I'm always seeking things that might cultivate our shared humanity, a sense of what we have in common: what might serve as the ground for our common moral and ethical vision; that would unite all people when we pull back ideology, religion, politics, and so forth, and we find the things that we all share outside of language and culture and time and place. I've preached this before and I suspect I'll preach it again: what remains is very basic. All people hunger and thirst, all people feel pain and pleasure, we all have the capacity for love, and all of us come out of a woman. I think there's something very powerful in just remembering that basic, sometimes messy, sometimes scary, always miraculous and wonderful fact. Every one is woman-born. Even if the relationship that comes from that may not be perfect. And generally I think all mothers — unless they have been shackled by mental illness or personality disorder or have endured too great a suffering of one kind or another or live under the threat of war — all mothers — if they are allowed to cultivate their mother nature — all mothers feel love for their children. And so much of how we live our lives can be shaped by remembering that fact. A lot of ethics might sit on - and need to be changed, if we just keep saying to ourselves "all mothers feel love for their children" — what does that call out of us?
Again, I'm not suggesting that there is some magical thing called motherhood or an ideal that comes down from the sky. One thing I know from social psychology — thank you Rita — is that parenting is not a one-way interaction. Mothering is not just a one person activity. Children, even brand-spanking-new infants, bring something to the relationship. There's not an ideal like some platonic thing that exists pristine and pink in a woman's heart. Instead, what mothering is, is a two-way, engaged, shared, emergence of the bonds of relationship. And I might suggest that the mother-child relationship or that parent-child relationship is the very basis of human morality itself. That's where we get our moral and ethical nature, because that relationship, person-to-person out of a person, is utterly foundational to our human well-being. We know this: if babies don't get attached to someone in those early days, they will struggle to find happiness and well-being over the course of their lives. We learn our fundamentally relational nature in the mere fact of having been born out of another, and in the longing we have, before we could ever give voice to it, to be mothered ourselves. So it's right that we treat this relationship with respect and power. Mother Nature is sacred. Indeed, what is Mother Nature, after all, but another word for God?
But that full and rich and complicated presentation that I'm suggesting is such a contrast on this day to the TV and advertising version of Mother's Day that we're usually subjected to right now, which promotes an impossibly perfected image of motherhood, and I might say as such - womanhood, at least as I see it, that is to me still disturbingly old-fashioned. I think of “Dr. Mom" whose husband can't even find the medicine cabinet, and yet she's there with just the right medicine in hand. Mom, the wise Shepard of all her kids, and on TV commercials in particular that always seems to include Dad. He's more often than not portrayed as a sports-obsessed doofus who can barely feed himself. Frozen pizza was apparently invented for men. I'm a sports obsessed doofus — I can cook. And of course the classic cliché: Mom who gets breakfast cooked for her because that's something special. It's assumed that she did the cooking every other day of the year, and we still see these images. And you reward mom with a piece of jewelry or some flowers.
But I want us to remember today that the women who brought us Mother's Day didn't want flowers or jewelry. They wanted respect; they wanted power; they wanted equality; and most of all, they wanted peace. Forgive me if you've heard this history before, but it's worth revisiting. Mother's Day as we know it today is only the latest version of a very ancient series of celebrations and honorings of motherhood. Ancient cultures often had holidays that were specifically devoted to a Mother Goddess or to a mother of all the Gods, a different kind of figure. In more contemporary times, in the 17th century in Britain, there was a day known as Mothering Sunday, which was the the single day when apprentices and indentured servants could return home to visit their mothers, usually bringing special cakes and sweets as gifts. I don't know why, though hopefully for improved labor relations.
But that holiday had almost died out by the 1800s, so we find a new incarnation in the United States in 1858 when Ann Reeves Jarvis created what she called "mothers' work days to improve sanitation" in her town. Now that might not sound like much of a foundation for a national holiday. In our home, "mother's work day to improve sanitation" is known as "Saturday"
But Ann Reeves Jarvis pushed it a little farther. She wasn't content to mother only her family or her own town. During the Civil War, she extended her mothers' work days to work for better sanitary conditions on both sides of the conflict. And after the war, she used those connections and actively worked for reconciliation between the enemy parties. Ann 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.
That spirit was taken up by one of my heroes, a great Unitarian named Julia Ward Howe. She lived 90 years, died in 1910. We'll hear her words shortly. Julia continued those efforts that were begun by Ann Reeves Jarvis toward establishing a national mothers day. She's little known today, perhaps except as the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but she was famous in her lifetime as a poet, essayist, lecturer, reformer, and biographer. She worked to end slavery, she helped initiate the women's suffrage movement in many states, and she organized for international peace. All at a time when, as she noted in her journal, to do so was a thankless office involving public ridicule and private avoidance.
The private avoidance of which she wrote was as close as her own bedroom. She did all of her amazing accomplishments over the course of a long marriage to Samuel Gridley Howe, who was enlightened enough to pioneer the teaching of the blind and deaf at the Perkins School, which is in Newton, Massachusetts; the school that trained Helen Keller's teacher, but he was not enlightened enough to support his own brilliant wife. Though I suppose, as Rita pointed out, he didn't stop her. So we have to take every blessing we can. But on her anniversary in her journal she wrote:
"I've been married 20 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 contemptable in his eyes, because it's not his way of doing things. I am much grieved and disconcerted."
They actually thought about a divorce, but he threatened to take the children. She was totally devoted to them and that kept them together and somehow, in spite of the public ridicule and that private avoidance, she did all those amazing things. I think that's why the women, the liberal women of the 1800s, are so much more my heroes than their male counterparts. The fellows did a lot of great writing and a lot of great work, but they did not have to overcome all of those stereotypes and expectations in order to become the powerful public figures that people like Julia Ward Howe were.
In 1870, still stinging from the horrors of the Civil War and looking at the newly engaged Franco-Prussian War in Europe, Julia Ward Howe wrote:
"The question forced itself upon me…[is] 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?"
She writes:
"I had never thought of this before, and suddenly the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect."
She also wrote an appeal to the womanhood of the earth, her famous Mother's Day Proclamation. We'll recite it ourselves shortly. She wrote it in 1870 and sent it right around the world at the same point in her life when she was also founding both the New England and the American Women's Suffrage Association. And in 1872 she began promoting the idea of a Mother's Day for Peace. This was to be celebrated on June 2nd; honoring peace, motherhood, and womanhood. And her influence as a public figure was so great that the following year women in 18 cities in America did hold Mother's Day for Peace gatherings. In Boston, they celebrated it for at least 10 years, though the celebrations died out when Julia herself was no longer paying the cost for them. A handful of celebrations did continue elsewhere for about 30 years or so, and I'm fascinated — why did they die out? Too radical? Is the message too depressing to hear? It's hard to say.
Nevertheless, time moved on, and today's version of Mother's Day was established by Anna Jarvis, who was the daughter of Ann Reeves Jarvis and who was well aware of both her mother's justice work and the legacy of Julia Ward Howe. She may have had some issues with her own mother as inquiry reveals. She swore at her mother's grave site in 1905 that she would establish a Mother's Day to honor mothers living and dead. Her initial proposal was her own mother's birthday as the national holiday. So I don't know what feeling was driving that. But she was successful. She meant business. And through various efforts, acts of congress, and finally a presidential decree it became a national holiday in 1914. And Anna — again, quite an interesting character — was remembered in particular for how much she hated the flowers and cards that came to be associated with Mother's Day. She called the flowers "a poor excuse for the letter you're too lazy to write." (I did call my mom this morning.) In fact, Anna was in a lifelong battle with the floral industry — just a relentless critic because she declared, "I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not of profit." So perhaps if you picked your own flowers you're off the hook. 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 were the central concerns of the women who established Mother's Day. From the beginning, it was not a day simply to remember one's own mother fondly, but to find in the experience and example of such active, courageous mothers as Ann Reeves Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe lessons that would apply to all. They were not celebrating the mere fact of bearing children but lifting up ideals that the entire human family could support.
Again, I'm intrigued in particular — Why did that earlier one fail, and how did mother's day come to be so "Hallmark-ized" or whatever the word would be? She spoke of sentiment, but there's sentiment and then there's sentimentality — maybe not really real or substantive. I think in Julia Ward Howe's case it was because she tried to do her work at a time when women's moral influence was confined to the home. The ideal was that it was women who would teach lessons of charity and mercy and friendliness to their children, particularly their male children, who would then take that out into the wide world and make do of it what they would. I think Julia was a little bit disappointed in what they were doing with it. So there was some special moral authority that was given to mothers, but it was really confined to the limited sphere of the home. And when women dared to take that out into the world it may have simply been too much for the culture.
Without invoking maybe some of those old stereotypes, I think it's worth wondering "Do mothers still have a special moral authority?" When they invoke it, it can be very successful. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, is credited with fundamentally changing our society's attitude toward drinking and driving. In the year 2000, there was a Million Mom March in Washington, DC for gun control laws, if you'll recall that. We have to be wary of invoking mother's special authority, lest it seem to root her down in the home, as a characterization of that stereotype was put by the New York Times when they were writing about the Million Mom March. They portrayed women as "selfless, nonpartisan defenders of hearth and home." Now, clearly there are many women who do not fit into that category — some of them are on Fox News. But also, before we laugh too much, maybe there's something in there, though:
"Selfless, nonpartisan defenders of hearth and home".
As long as we can extend that, as long as we don't want to confine that to just quiet teaching of children in the living room, maybe that's not a bad thing. My heart tells me what the world needs more than anything is selfless, nonpartisan defenders of hearth and home, but that's a job for all of us. What we need to do is take that notion, that idea, out of that little pink box that it was confined in during those early years when being a mother and being a woman was the only way that Julia Ward Howe and those others could actually gain a public voice, by invoking a special authority of motherhood. Well, let's take it out of that, and demand it and express it among all people. Mother Nature, loving nature, human nature is something we need in the world now more than ever.
We need strong women who will defend hearth and home across boundaries. Because the situation that Julia Ward Howe was confronting is one that we face today. I don't mean to bring you down, but I have to remind you — we're at war. We need strong women calling for peace. I want to throw a few numbers at you: 3,384 US military service people died since the beginning of the war in 2003, all but 140 of them since combat officially ended. That's 96% since the fighting ended. Another 25,000 or so wounded. And to each of those numbers I ask you to add that person's mother. Since the beginning of military action in 2003, there have been a minimum of 63,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. That's 42,000 more than when I preached this sermon two years ago. The actual number may be much, much higher depending on how you measure it. It's impossible to tell how many of that group comprised enemy combatants, if you will, because we stopped counting the enemy dead in 2003. By the time those bodies make it to the morgue, it's very difficult to tell the difference between a civilian and an insurgent.
One last humbling piece: last month our nation was shocked by the random killing of 33 people at the college at Virginia Tech. In April, 2500 Iraqi civilians were killed, 140 died last Sunday; 42 of them in a Baghdad market. I could truly go on and on. That's a lot of grieving mothers. And on this day, when we're lifting up the joy of motherhood, the power of mothering nature, I just want us to remember to put whatever good might come out of that war in one hand and the suffering of all those mothers and children on the other and ask, "Where do those scales tip to?" Of course then we feel frozen, we feel crazy, and we feel numb; we see apathy in our culture. The thing is so far away our own sense of helplessness leaves us wondering what to do. Well Charlie Clemons, who is the head of our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, says when he starts to feel that way — as I feel right now even naming those numbers and saying those words — for that occasion he bought himself a WWJD bracelet. And — as any of you with a Christian background might know — that for most folks that means "What Would Jesus Do?" For Charlie, he says he asks himself "What Would Julia Do?"
What would Julia Ward Howe do? Well she'd do what she did. She would speak and act. She would turn that outrage and that suffering into presence and power. She would demand that life, not death, be brought into the world. Here are her words from the preamble to her Mother's Day Proclamation:
"Again, in the sight of the world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again, have the sacred questions of justice been committed to the fatal mediation of 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 battlefield. 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 lives to her suffering. That word should now be heard and answered to as never before."
And I couldn't agree more. That word must be heard; that feminist word; that eco-feminist word; that Mother Earth-loving, environmentalist word; that word that says "happiness is more important than power"; in the writings of Marilyn French, that word that says "right relationship is the ethic that must guide us"; that word that reminds us again and again: mothers love their children and war kills children. We need more mother nature in the world today — mothers and children of mothers. We need you. For you, too, were forged in that basic and universal smithy of human kind, born with that special authority that comes from our connection and relation and creation. I know it's a lot to ask, particularly on this special day, but if you mothers could help end this war, I will definitely come and make you breakfast in bed.
So here's to Mother Nature, our mothering nature. And I just ask that today, as you honor and remember your own mother, honor and remember all mothers. Make a commitment to one real act of peacemaking that you will do this week and do it for your mom. That's what Julia would do. No better way to honor mothers than to honor life and peace.
Happy Mother's Day.