Listen To Your Mother
UU Church of Ogden
5/11/2008
Rev. Theresa Novak
Happy Mother’s Day!
Mother’s day is a day to celebrate your mother, to thank her for all that she has done. How do we do this? Maybe breakfast in bed, a sentimental card, a box of candy, flowers, a dinner out. I read in the paper that restaurants are hoping for a full house today to help make up from the losses they are experiencing due to a faltering economy.
But like all holidays, Mother’s Day is not as simple as the greeting card business would have us pretend.
Mothering is a complicated business, and a holiday that is filled only with accolades for the sainted mothers of fantastic perfection, can leave some of us feeling like we somehow don’t measure up.
Maybe we feel that we were and are, not good enough to our mothers, that we have failed them somehow. We want to do better, be more understanding and more generous with our time and our gratitude, not just once a year, but all the time. We want to make our mothers proud. How can we ever measure up to that loving expectation?
We might also feel that our mothers were and are, not good enough to us, and we long to be taken into the arms by someone who will mother us in the way we longed for as a child.
That longing for a mother’s arms, a mother’s acceptance never really fades. Even those of us who are old, whose mothers may have died many years ago, we may still long for that comforting embrace. “You are loved.” “I love you, no matter what happens, no matter what you do or don’t do, I will always love you.” Those are holy words, words that can penetrate through the many layers of hurt and despair that can collect as we lead our lives. They are the words of blessing. “I love you, no matter what happens, no matter what you do or don’t do, I will always love you.” My own mother said those words to me, and I have said them to my children. For those of you that never heard them from your own mother, or who have not heard your mother say them, or words like them, recently, please hear them now. Let us say them together, for ourselves, for each other, and for our children of body and of spirit. “I love you, no matter what happens, no matter what you do or don’t do, I will always love you.”
Those holy and healing words of blessing resonate well with our Unitarian Universalist values. Believing that all life is worthy of love and of care, we try to live that way in our daily lives.
But like many things we try to do, this isn’t easy, and we fall short in our human way so often. Loving “no matter what” doesn’t have mean we have to love what people, even our children, even our mothers, do. Any close human connection can bring heartache. I am thinking of the mothers and fathers here who have lost children to addiction, to destructive behaviors. Serious mental illness can also make it hard to stay in loving relationship.
Parents too can be destructive and even cruel. Sometimes you have to save yourself, to save the other people you care about, and just love, if you can manage to do that, from a safe distance.
Most relationships are not one extreme of the other. Loving someone, parent or child, even, I would say, a spouse or partner, can easily contain a certain measure of at least occasional irritation and aggravation. That reality does not diminish the value of that loving; it just makes it real and human.
We can celebrate our human mothers on this day, the women and also the men, those who raised us, who guided us, who inspired us, and those who still today, no matter our age or the biological relationship, parent us with their concern and their acceptance.
There is a larger image of mothering, however, an image that is gender neutral, an image I was thinking of when I decided to name this sermon, “Listen to Your Mother.” There are times that you shouldn’t listen to your human mothers. Sometimes they are wrong. There have been times when I have been glad that my own children did not listen to me, times when I was wrong. But when I say, Listen to Your Mother, I am not talking about your actual mothers, mothers like me, mothers like you, but the great mother, the force of life that is both nurturing and fierce.
The celebration of Mother’s Day may date way back to ancient Goddess worship, where the earth itself was seen as giving birth to all life.
But in the United States, Julia Ward Howe is responsible. Her Mother’s Day Proclamation that Robin read, was a call for activism, not boxes of chocolate, but it was the beginning of Mother’s Day in the US.
Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819-October 17, 1910) also wrote, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and 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, she noted, "when to do so was a thankless office, involving public ridicule and private avoidance." She also wrote, "I studied my way out of all the mental agonies which Calvinism can engender and became a Unitarian."
Julia Howe was a real mama bear kind of mother. She was fierce, protective, not only of her own children, but of all the children in the world. She wanted peace and an end to war. She had just lived through the civil war and mothers throughout the land were grieving for their sons who had been slaughtered. No sentimental cards for her about sweet self-sacrificing mothers, always patient, always kind! She embodied a great spirit of mothering that I think we need to listen to more carefully.
It is that great spirit of mothering that both gives life and protects life, nurturing and guiding so that life flourishes, so that it is not stunted or cut short.
Most mothers know what that is about, fathers too these days, you try to protect and guide your child but you do so knowing that for the child to flourish, he or she must also have freedom, must grow beyond you in some way.
Most children love to climb trees. I remember well looking up and seeing all three of what seemed to me to be my extremely tiny children very high up in the branches of a gigantic tree. Twenty feet from the ground they giggled at me, and I had to stop myself from screaming, “Get down now, before you break your necks!” Instead, I held my breath a bit, let it out, and said as calmly as possible, “Wow, you really climbed high, would you like any help getting down again?” I could do that, because I saw some value in climbing a tree, in stretching that kind of limit. My reaction would have been very different if they had been playing in traffic, having fun dodging the cars and trucks on a freeway.
Listen to your mother, be courageous, but value your life, spend it wisely, in a way that enhances not only your own life, but also improves the world. There is a lot to see from the top of a tree, a lot to learn, a lot to appreciate. Be careful, but don’t be afraid to explore.
“Sowing seeds of gladness, day is breaking in my soul,” we sang this morning. Cheyenne and Beth sang of a parent’s love for a child. Listen to your mother, but the message is not just in words.
If we had listened to Julia Ward Howe back in 1870, if we had really listened, and created a congress of women dedicated to peace, and if this group really had taken over the resolution of international conflicts, what a different world we might live in today!
Mothering is sometimes about peacemaking, in the family, teaching siblings to get along. Again, it doesn’t always work perfectly but it helps to resolve conflicts if you truly love everyone involved. It is hard enough to love our actual brothers and sisters sometimes, how much harder to love our enemies, but that is a sermon for another day and time.
I do truly believe that love is the answer, but I also believe that love needs to be fierce at times. That mama bear kind of love is in all of us, and is something we need to recognize, respect and use. We need to listen to the mother spirit within us, the spirit who knows that damage is being done to her children. There are times to be furious. We should be furious as this war that has gone on too long, a war that is hurting the Earth’s children now, and is making the world a much more dangerous place. We should be furious that there are hungry children, abused children, and neglected children, anywhere in the world. We should be furious that we don’t have better schools and that some children have no schools at all. We should be furious that profit usually trumps the environment, that convenience is more important than responsibility. The health and well being of the world’s children is in danger. We should be furious that there are children who are told everyday not that they are loved, but instead that they are bad.
We should be furious that some human beings are diminished, seen as less than worthy because of their immigration status, their income level, their language, or their physical and mental abilities.
There is so much that can make the Great Mother in us angry, but it is an anger always guided by love, by the desire to protect and to nurture. A desire to teach is a part of it, as is a desire to learn. It is a love that embraces all, that relishes joy and brings comfort in sorrow, a fierce love. Listen to that love, listen to your mother. Listen now to this prayer, called,
A Prayer for All Who Mother by Victoria Weinstein
We reflect in thanksgiving this day for all those whose lives have nurtured ours.
The life-giving ones
Who heal with their presence
Who listen in sympathy
Who give wise advice ... but only when asked for it.
We are grateful for all those who have mothered us
Who have held us gently in times of sorrow
Who celebrated with us our triumphs -- no matter how small
Who noticed when we changed and grew,
who praised us for taking risks
who took genuine pride in our success,
and who expressed genuine compassion when we did not succeed.
On this day that honors Mothers
let us honor all mothers
men and women alike
who from somewhere in their being
have freely and wholeheartedly given life, and sustenance, and vision to us.
Dear God, Mother-Father of us all,
grant us life-giving ways
strength for birthing,
and a nurturing spirit
that we may take attentive care of our world,
our communities, and those precious beings
entrusted to us by biology, by destiny, by friendship, by fellowship or by fate.
Give us the heart of a mother today. Amen
The heart of a mother, it is within us all. We have only to find it, in ourselves and in each other. And after we have found it, that fierce brilliant core of steadfast, enduring and tender love, love of each other, love for all creation. Then we need to listen to the beat of that heart, listen carefully, and let it guide our actions in the way of love. It is that mother spirit that will save and bless us all. Listen to your Mother! Amen and Hallelujah!
benediction
May you go in peace this day and may you listen to the great mother light of love, letting it shine through all that you do.
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