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Monday, May 10, 2010
A Mother’s Heart
By Rev. Cindy Bates
Scripture: I Corinthians 13:1-13
1If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.4Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.8Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
As a child, I started observing Mother’s Day at a very early age. I somehow sensed it was a day for celebration, so on a very special Mother’s Day, several decades ago, I made it clear to my mother it was time for me to celebrate life, and I sent her to the hospital in labor pains. Even though I have never had the blessing of being a mother myself, Mother’s Day has always been a day for me to celebrate the blessings of life.
I really had a good time this week doing a little research about Mother’s Day to see how the day has evolved into what we celebrate today. The earliest celebrations date back to Ancient Greece, in honor of a goddess named Rhea, who was worshipped as the Mother of the Gods. Later, during the 1600’s the Christians in England began celebrating a day to honor Mary, the Mother of Christ. It was eventually expanded to honor all mothers in England and it was named “Mothering Sunday.” During this time, many of England’s poor worked as servants, and lived away from home in the houses of their employers. On Mothering Sunday, the servants were given the day off and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their mothers. A special cake, called “the mothering cake,” was often brought along to add to the celebration.
As Christianity spread throughout Europe, the celebration changed to honor the “Mother Church” seen as giving our faith life, and protection from harm. Over time, the church festival blended with the Mothering Day celebration and people began honoring mothers as well as the church. Later in the United States, Mother’s Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was first suggested as a special day in this country by social activist Julia Ward Howe who wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. She was horrified by the death and destruction of the Civil War and the Franco- Prussian War. In 1870 she began a one woman peace crusade and made an impassioned “appeal to womanhood” to rise up against war. She composed a powerful plea in Boston that year and that is considered to be the original Mother’s Day Proclamation in this country. Howe’s idea was taken a step further by a woman named Anna Jarvis who succeeded in introducing Mother’s Day in the sense that we celebrate it today. Her mother, Ann Marie Jarvis had been an Appalachian homemaker who did much to improve sanitation and provide clean water for the rural poor. She was also instrumental in bringing together mothers of both Union and Confederate soldiers following the Civil War. When she died, her daughter, Anna, felt children often neglected to appreciate their mother enough while she was alive and so she dedicated her life to establish a Mother’s Day” to “honor mothers living, and dead.” She hoped a national Mother’s Day would increase respect for parents and strengthen family bonds. As a result of her efforts, the first Mother’s day was officially observed May 10, 1908 by a service in the Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, which was the church home of the Jarvis family. It is now the home of the International Mother’s Day Shrine. (Who knew….Andrews Methodist Church?) Mother’s Day observances grew from there and on May 9, 1914, (96 years ago today) President Woodrow Wilson made the first official announcement proclaiming the second Sunday in May as a national holiday, encouraging love and reverence for all mothers in this country. (And here I thought this was all a brilliant marketing scheme of Hallmark in cooperation with F.T.D.!)
Actually, I did read that the National Restaurant Association is very happy to report that Mother’s Day is the most popular day of the year to eat out. So “good luck” if you don’t have a reservation today. Someone’s going to be putting a chef’s hat on at home! Seriously, I really found it interesting to learn about how this day of celebration made it into our congregations and into our lives. Mother’s day certainly has its roots in the church and in bringing about peace and reconciliation. It has also been away to honor and respect the ideal of the power of love in each of our lives.
I would imagine if we could all share the history of Mother’s Day celebrations in our families, it would be a great mixture of loving celebrations, bittersweet memories and even days of disappointment and frustration, like a microcosm of our lives. We all know that being a parent, not just a mother, but a parent, is probably the most difficult, challenging responsibility anyone can assume. And, because it is so challenging, so all consuming, idealism is never the outcome. Someone said, “No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-age children for signs of improvement.”
Even though today we are specifically celebrating Mother’s Day, I know not everyone here is a mother, but dads, I hope you can hear some of what I am saying from a father’s perspective. And even though not all of us have been blessed with the title of mom or dad, we all have been children, and know how immensely our child/parent relationships have affected us, even to the point of how we may or not be able to imagine God as a loving parent. So my prayer is that whoever you are today, as we talk about mothers and our relationship to God, you will find yourself.
When I entitled today’s sermon, A Mother’s Heart, it seemed like a good beginning, because it is where we all have our beginning, no matter what our relationship with our biological mother, we all began in that same location, right next to our mother’s heart. The sound of her heartbeat was the first sound we heard.
When I asked members of our staff, their thoughts regarding the phrase, “a mother’s heart”, I received some amazing responses. A mother’s heart is …”much more vulnerable than before…never her own again after having children…feels things more deeply…only as happy as her most unhappy child...grows immensely large holding her newborn…sometimes does without…gives us life…just “knows”. A mother’s heart...absorbs so much, love and laughter as well as sadness, disappointment and grief…soft as whipped cream and hard as nails.” I am sure you would have your own description, depending on what has affected your own heart, whether you are a mother or not.
None of us are naïve enough to believe motherhood is all joy, nor our relationships as mothers or children ever perfect. Just this week I picked up a national bestseller entitled “Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace.” The author is Ayelet Waldman who wrote the popular novel, Daughter’s Keeper. In this latest book, she writes of the perils and challenges of being a mother in today’s culture. Her premise is that the expectations of being a good mother are so great that even wonderful mothers end up feeling like huge failures at times. She rather sarcastically says, “If you work, you’re neglectful; if you stay at home, you’re smothering. If you discipline, you’re buying them a spot on the shrink’s couch, if you let them run wild, they will be into drugs by the seventh grade. Is it any wonder so many women refer to themselves at one time or another as a “bad mother”? I don’t necessarily agree with everything in Waldman’s book, but I do think it is important to acknowledge that being a mother is an incredibly difficult role, innate with immeasurable responsibilities and some mothers are far better equipped than others to avoid the label “bad mother” whether the title is given by self or others.
I think of my own mother who was married at seventeen and became a mother before she was eighteen. She learned often by her mistakes how to be a good mother. And she often made decisions about what she communicated to me and my four brothers out of her own fears. The only “whipping” I can ever remember receiving from my mother was when I was six years old and was asked to watch my little brother in our front yard. When he ran into the street and my mother saw him, she ran out of the house, grabbed him, and then took a branch from the tree to whip me. I can still remember the confused, hurtful feelings of disappointing my mother but not understanding why it was my little brother who ran into the road, but I got punished. (Please don’t try to analyze this for me. I think I get it now.) But, I don’t think you can be parent or child without learning very quickly that all loving relationships have to be held together with the ability to forgive and come to an understanding that to be human is to make mistakes and to have regrets. I think I had a good relationship with my mother, but as a young adult, just about the time I was old enough to figure out my part in having a more mature, loving relationship with her, she developed Alzheimer’s disease. We both missed a lot.
It is not surprising to me that there are so many images in our scriptures ascribing “mothering” images to God. When God is angry because of injustice in the Book of Hosea, it is like a “bear robbed of her cubs.” In Deuteronomy, God’s protection is like, “an eagle hovering over her young.” In Matthew and Luke when Jesus weeps over Jerusalem he longs to gather the people together like “a hen gathers her young under her wings.” I think it is because the love of a mother is an image, in its purest form, of a fierce, tenacious, never letting go kind of love, that helps us begin to understand what God’s love might be like for each of us.
I was struck with sadness the other day when I read in the paper about the record number of suicides in Colorado, especially in a more isolated section of Park County. I am sure some of you read the same article. A study attributed not only geographic isolation but a “rugged frontier mentality that promotes self-reliance, discouraging seeking assistance from (others). We are not meant to live in isolation. We were made in the image of God, to be in relationship with one another. We were wired for love and companionship. If nothing else Mother’s Day should underline and be helping us to understand and celebrate we need one another, no matter what our life situation. Mother’s may be lifted up as the ideal image of God’s love, but we all are called by God to learn to love. As spiritual author Jack Kornfield said, “The spiritual life is not about knowing much, but about loving much.” Whether it has been mom or dad, grandmother or grandfather, the neighbor down the street or a Sunday school teacher, God wants us to experience love, that we might love one another, that we might understand more of God’s love for each of us. I believe that the love of God is most clearly discovered and understood in and through those in life who have learned to love. And they have passed that on to us so we may pass that on to others.
The scripture this morning from I Corinthians 13 is probably the most beautiful, mature description of the kind of love God would desire for each of us. It would seem to be a message for us from God’s heart to ours. Our life truly is about learning to love. Paul Tillich, one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century said, “In every moment of genuine love we are dwelling in God and God is in us.” When we celebrate Mother’s Day, whoever we are, whatever our experience has been, may we be able to celebrate the kind of love that God desires for us.
A little boy forgot his lines for a Sunday School presentation. His mother was in the front row to prompt him. She gestured and formed the words silently with her lips, but it did not help. Her son’s memory was blank. Finally she leaned forward and whispered the cue, “I am the light of the world.” The child beamed and with great feeling said, “My mother is the light of the world.” Maybe so, at least in part. Whatever has been your experience in life related to Mother’s Day…painful memories, lingering regrets; joy filled memories, continuing celebrations …it is still not too late for each of us to share God’s kind of love with one another. Happy Mother’s Day!