HomeGood morning!
Happy Mother’s Day!
Before I begin my Mother’s Day sermon proper, I am moved to say a few other words.
I pause this morning and my heart feels grief and sorrow for so many mothers. Mothers whose children—of whatever age—are threatened by war or violence in Iraq, the Sudan, the Philippines, Chechnya and other places on the big, beautiful, tragic planet.
I grieve for those mothers whose children are the ones in the photographs who have abused Iraqi prisoners.
I grieve for the mothers who do not know whether their children are the ones in the photographs being abused in that jail.
My heart is full this morning of sorrow for those mothers whose children sit on death row anywhere in this world.
My heart reaches out to those women, like my mother-in-law, who for the last nineteen years of her life spent Mother’s Day thinking of the child who had died.
My heart reaches out this morning to those women who, despite their deepest desires, do not and never will have children.
My heart is full this morning for everyone whose mother or mothers have passed out of this life.
My we remember these even as we celebrate this beautiful day.
When I was a child, back in the 1950’s, Mother’s Day was easy to celebrate in the church we attended in Queens. The minister said some nice words about mothers and motherhood, and about love and tenderness; every mother present was given a corsage; some more nice words were said; and we all went home.
It was a very pleasant, very tender and very touching day.
Today, I find preaching about Mother’s Day to be more complex, more difficult, but, perhaps, more honest.
The operating assumptions in the nineteen-fifties were that we all had one mother; we all had one father; the distinctions between being a mother and being a father were clear; we all—mother, father and children--lived together in one household; and we all were in happy, loving families.
Leave It To Beaver; Father Knows Best; and Ozzie And Harriet; these were modeled upon and were the models for those basic assumptions.
These were not the reality for millions of people, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that we sold ourselves on the image, on the myth, and pretended it was reality.
The fact remains that for many people, the word “mother” does not evoke easy memories of love, nurture and support; rather it conjures up feelings of abandonment or pain or anger. And it is that which partly makes this day so difficult to preach to.
I also stress that biology is not the sole criteria for determining who our mothers are; it counts, of course, but anyone who has nurtured, comforted or cared for us also counts.
In years past I have suggested that our mothers, both biological and otherwise, have done the best they could with the resources they had available to them, resources both inner and outer. I have therefore suggested that we acknowledge at least the gift of life they gave us. They may have had terrible faults, but we are here today because they bore us and chose to give birth to us or because they fed and clothed us.
I also want to remind everyone that most of us have wonderful memories of childhood. It may not have been perfect, and our mothers may not have been perfect, and yet, we love them and are glad that they were or are in our lives.
I want to suggest this morning that if our mothers were not perfect mothers, it may also be that some of us were not perfect children. And that is the aspect that I want to focus on today.
My memories of my young childhood are plentiful and golden.
I had a working mother, but because of the career she was in, her schedule varied greatly and she had long stints of time when she was at home all day.
As a young child I felt enveloped in love and warmth. There never was any doubt about love in my home.
My parents were both believers in letting a child express itself; so I really was terribly spoiled and bratty.
I was. I was.
My mother did everything she could to make my life happy and to be sure that I had everything I needed to ensure that.
In my later years, my mother and I had a great deal of friction, for many reasons.
Let me mention a small piece of that which falls upon my shoulders; my mother had many faults, and in my wide and wise eyed youthfulness, I could see them all. And I guess I felt that she was unaware of these faults, because I took it upon myself to describe each and every of them to her.
Today I recognize how easy it is for any of us, especially children, but any of us, to magnify the faults and failings in people, especially the people most directly in our lives. Things that seem small “over there”, become huge when they are immediately around us.
And, of course, in the mind of a child, parents are more than just “immediately around”. In many ways they define our lives, or define the things we have decided we do not want to have in our lives. Or, at least, so we think then.
And that is part of the issue with the so-called faults we see when we are children; so many of them really are not when we view them from the distance of time and greater age and experience.
Part of the job of a child is to define itself as a separate entity from its parents. That is part of “growing up”, at least it is part of “growing up” in our Western culture.
In order to define oneself as separate, one must to some extent reject whatever it is that our parents represent in our minds. Later in life we may take it back, we may reclaim it, but in our natural adolescent rebellion, we must reject it in order to become who we are to be.
And because we are only adolescents, we tend to reject not only whatever quality or practice we decide we do not like; we tend to reject the person as well.
And because we are young we tend to reject them actively and loudly.
Now that rejection may not be total; it may come in fits and starts, in moments of anger or hurt. But it is common.
As a parent myself, I now know how deeply such anger and rejection can cut, how much it can hurt.
I know that even though I knew before it happened that it would happen, and even though I knew that it was just part of the necessary process of defining self.
When that self-defining was at its height, I was able to recognize it for what it was. But it still hurt.
I have said in the past that it is a kindness to our parents for us to recognize that they did the best they could, and to forgive them for the times when their best seemed insufficient.
For those of us who had relatively healthy parents, most of us knew years ago that we were forgiven for whatever pain and hurt we had inflicted upon them. In many cases, there was no forgiveness necessary because our parents never took offense; they forgave us in advance. And they took great joy in our presence, in our lives, in our growth and development.
Even so, or maybe because of that, most of us owe our parents a deep and lasting and unpayable debt.
At their best, our parents--our mothers--have a god-like quality: they teach us unconditional love and unconditional forgiveness. They teach it by giving us the experience of it.
How does one repay that? One does not. But we can give those same gifts to others.
But with that in mind, the Biblical commandment to Honor thy Father and Mother takes on a special, meaning.
We can honor them by granting to them the forgiveness and love that they offered to us.
There is another point for most of us: Our mothers see or saw in us qualities of goodness and ability that there has never been any hard evidence for.
Whether our mothers are still alive or have passed out of this plane of existence, we can honor them by being the best person we can possibly be. That will never match the vision they had of who we were and what we could be, but it would still make them proud.
For all of those who nurtured us, cuddled us, cared for us, took pride in us, sent us into the world, let us give thanks.
Let us do more. Let those of us who feel capable of doing so, honor them by naming the people who have been our mothers, either biologically or by the love they gave to us.
(NAMES - at this time, members of the congregation spoke out names.)
We have named the women (people) who are or were our mothers. They brought us into the world, or raised us in it or prepared us for it.
We name them today that we may remind ourselves to honor them, to cherish the memories we have of them, to thank them for the gifts of life and love that they gave to us. May we carry them in our hearts always.
So let it be.
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