Mother’s Day Reflection

I've never given a Mother's Day reflection until now. And why not, since this is the first year that my mother won't be part of celebrations?

I’ve never before done a Mother’s Day reflection on Mother’s Day Sunday, or on any other Sunday.  Very often, it seems to me, people ought to try something new and different for a change, and that includes me.  So this morning I want to talk about mothers, remaining very aware as a pastoral caregiver that not all relationships within families are ideal and that even relationships between mothers and their children can be rocky and bumpy, if not even worse from time to time.

Let me get this out of the way immediately: not everyone has a good or warm or caring or nurturing relationship with their mother.  In fact, at my previous church, something like ten years ago, this happened: a congregation member asked me if I would be willing to do a memorial service for her neighbor’s mother, since none of them were churchgoers.  “Sure,” I said.  Everyone should be entitled to a more or less professional sendoff, right?

I met in my office with the deceased woman’s son and her daughter-in-law.  I sat with a yellow legal pad in front of me, pen in hand, and invited them to tell me about the woman who had died, since I never knew her and had never even met her.  After an uncomfortable silence, I looked up to find them both looking back at me.  “The thing is,” the daughter-in-law told me, “we have nothing nice to say about her.”  “That’s right,” added the son, “no one has anything nice to say about my mother, not even her grandchildren.”  OK, I thought, this is going to be interesting.

In most of life’s situations as a pastor, it’s a good approach to be honest and truthful.  This I learned from my mentor, and so my eulogy, my good word about this recently deceased woman, amounted really to a confession about life’s difficulty.  No matter who we are, and no matter the range of our experiences, human life always proves challenging, troubling, and very often too painful to bear without cracking and even breaking.  In fact, I’m not afraid to confess that I regard myself as a broken and defeated man, although I never stop trying to turn the corner and recover a portion of the things I’ve lost to life.

In all honesty, no one knew the circumstances of this woman’s life, for she never shared its details with anyone else.  Consequently, none of us can judge her life, not even her unkindly ways, for no one knew what experiences and what humanly sorrows turned and twisted and distorted her spirit until she became only bitter and unpleasant.  Perhaps now, at her death, the best way to find peace might be to let go of hurt feelings.  As far as we knew, her bitter unkindness might even—somehow—have been justified.

Even in Jesus’s day people behaved inexplicably.  One answer to such bizarre and confounding behavior in the time of Jesus may have been demon possession.  Frankly, used figuratively, such an explanation still works for me in our troubled age: haunted or possessed by the mundane demons of human existence, some people can appear to be stricken with madness, and all of us find our hearts full of sorrow through an accumulation of losses.  In this sense, life’s demons are everywhere.

I don’t do brimstone and fire sermons in part because I don’t believe in the willful sinfulness of humankind, not as the church has taught it generally.  No, I trust in a merciful and compassionate God whose aim is to do right by us, God’s created children, for in the midst of life’s confusion how else should we feel but confused?  Jesus comes, the writer of John’s gospel proclaims, to interpret God the Father for us so that we might know God’s will.  And yet countless other messages, many of them truly seductive in character, compete for our attention.  And as we ache in our human frailty and yearn for better than we have and better than we know, then our confusion and befuddlement at life compound, for attaining what we hope to have can feel fleeting at best, and very often simply impossible.

And yet where would we be, broadly speaking, without our mothers.  Well, first of all, we’re all born of mothers—everyone of us.  No one comes from anything else but a mother.  Even Judaism around the time of Jesus understood the importance of this fact.  The faith’s tradition changed at about this time so that whether or not a person is Jewish comes from that person’s mother, not their father, as it had previously.  Why?  Well, of course, because you always know a child’s mother by birth itself, one tiny, new body emerges from its mother’s body, still one of the most miraculous things any of us can ever witness.  And Dad?—well, no one can really be certain necessarily—can they?—about who the father is.  That’s what the rabbis concluded anyway in an age of commonplace rape of women by Roman soldiers as part of the colonial practice of domination and humiliation.

And while we no longer live in such a brutal age as that of Imperial Rome, nevertheless, we are still aware of the possibilities of how a child comes into the world, and we often joke, a little nervously, about this reality.  I’ve heard more times than I can count the ribbing between men, “Well,” one friend says to another upon the birth of that friend’s new child, “we know who Mom is, that much is beyond dispute, but Dad?  Are we certain you’re really up to the task?”  Cue awkward guffaws.

As much as children need food to grow, of course, they need nurture and a great deal of close, cuddling touch if they are to thrive.  Mothers are supremely designed for this, since they can carry their children inside their wombs and then feed them upon delivery from their own bodies.  Again, a miracle of sorts that may feel utterly natural to a woman, but makes many men feel inadequate by comparison, which may explain why we spend so much time standing together clapping each other on the shoulder.

Probably as a result of this commonplace miracle, of physical birth, the earliest religions seem to center around fertility, and the earliest gods seem often to be female.  The Asherah that show up frequently in the OT were fertility figures that represented fertility gods, and they surely challenged the commandment about having no gods but Yahweh.  In the OT, God’s prophets often assail the people for their idolatrous worship of Asherah.  Probably, we get the impression from reading the OT that this kind of idolatry got eliminated, completely wiped out, since keeping  Asherah displeased God so much. 

On the contrary, however, archeological evidence suggests that these household fertility figures remained widespread throughout different biblical ages.  When it came to divine assistance in the making of more children, everyday folks turned not to Almighty God for help, not necessarily, but directed their prayers instead to curvy female Asherah, who seemed to know a thing or two about conceiving and delivering healthy children.

In fact, for all the talk out there about biblical family values, there are few biblical role models of mothers.  I mean, can you think of a character from the Bible that you would want as your mother?  Jesus’s mother, Mary, comes close to being exalted, as Jesus himself is, made very nearly into a goddess, and yet her role in the story, apart from the beginning and perhaps also the end, feels remarkably small.  In Mark’s gospel she even worries that Jesus has lost his mind, wondering perhaps what he hopes to accomplish in this unusual Galilean ministry of his.  Why not just settle down and rest content with being a carpenter, meet a nice girl, have some darling children?

Mary’s elevation and near exaltation result, not from biblical evidence, but from logical conclusions transformed into creedal certainty by majority vote of different councils.  If she’s the vessel through whom Jesus enters the world, the later church asserts, then she must be especially pure, even snugly adjacent to godliness itself, and many in the church will give her the title of Mother of God.  All the same, in the Bible itself she tends to get portrayed ambivalently, with a healthy human blend of strengths and frailties.  As Mother of God, after all, she hardly outshines the disciples, who routinely get depicted, depending upon the gospel writer, as bumbling, a bit slow on the uptake, and even incompetent, although they make up for it perhaps by being eager and mostly loyal.

I lost my mom this month last year.  And most of you lost your mothers a few or many years ago.  In my estimation, the world feels like a different place, and a lonelier place, without our mothers in them.  For regardless of whether they are ideal or not, our mothers loom large in our lives, our very souls perhaps knit in some strange way from the substance of our mothers, just as their mothers’ souls contribute to theirs too, making a kind of symbolic stream or river that flows backward and forward through countless generations, strings us all together as family, and can never run dry for it is fashioned from life itself and seeks always after regeneration.

I reflect on the countless mothers I’ve known in my life.  I’ve witnessed the worst in mothers, of course, for such a thing cannot escape our human reality.  I’ve also seen mothers in action who made me yearn almost to tears that they had been my mother—doting, tender, unfailingly present in times of deepest need.  Oh, our mothers must bear so much expectation from us, and from all the world.  How can any mother live up to the hype?  We demand that they be everything we want and need, caring for us in ways we don’t even comprehend fully.  In this regard perhaps we expect of our mothers what we expect of our gods—too much.

Importantly, in spite of the cruel expectations, our mothers symbolize God’s will for humanity.  We do not enter the world alone and cold, but always to a mother, whose warm body welcomes us and nourishes us and hopes better for us than we can ever know.  We are social creatures from birth, interdependent, and our earliest life lesson, when we are too young, too innocent to appreciate it, teaches that we cannot live and cannot thrive without the help of others.  Indeed, our lives are never our own, for we belong to each other.

Like all of you, I had an imperfect mother.  And yet she always loved me the best she knew how and from a heart that toiled and suffered in making its own way in our troubling world.  And later in life, when she saw that gaps existed in our relationship, surprisingly and munificently, she told me that she was grateful for her mother’s love in my life, who never gave my mother what she needed and wanted, but managed somehow to give it to me instead. 

And this, I believe, captures the spirit of the good message that Jesus proclaims: we can never accomplish alone what we can do together.  And so on your behalf, as well as on my own behalf, I give thanks for our mothers and to those good women who gave us mothering.  And I acknowledge the truth that if we seek to spread the love of Jesus comprehensively, then we should help all mothers to do what they would if they could, if they lived in an ideal world without such troubles, and we should, like them, do our best to love their children too, in addition to our own.  Amen.