"It's Not Easy Being Mom"
A sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
May 9, 2010
READINGS ANCIENT AND MODERN:
Our ancient reading this morning is Chapter 4 of The Tao Te
Ching, by Lao Tzu, as translated by Lin Yutang:
[The] Tao is a hollow vessel,
And its use is inexhaustible!
Fathomless!
Like the fountain head of all things,
Its sharp edges [are] rounded off,
Its tangles untied,
Its light tempered,
Its turmoil submerged.
Yet dark like deep water it seems to remain.
I do not know whose [child] it is.
[It is] an image of what existed before God.
Our second reading is the poem, The Journey, by contemporary
poet, Mary Oliver:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.
SERMON:
Mother's Day 2010. It's been a very long time since I've preached
here on Mother's Day. I have to admit it's been a careful and intentional
avoidance on my part. It's not that I don't like mothers; don't
get me wrong. I do. Some of my best friends are mothers. It's now
been something a little over three years since my own mother died
and I think maybe I have gained enough perspective to give this
a go. We'll see.
I'm going to jump around in time just a bit here, as I begin. The
first stop will be at Tortilla Flats, a supper club in Moline, Illinois.
It's late spring, 1987. I'm the hired entertainment for that week
at the Flats, and my parents have come out to hear me sing. Break
time rolls around and I join them at their table.
I might note that my father, who had played the part of primary
antagonist for much of my earlier life, had abandoned that role
a few years earlier following a couple of strokes. Often in his
later years he wasn't much of a participant in most discussions,
which meant he was quite a different character than the one I'd
known growing up. All of this is to say that he did not play a major
part in the conversation that took place, there at the table in
Tortilla Flats. It was mostly between my mother and me.
She knew that, at the time, I was considering possibilities for
what might be the next career venture in my life. At the age of
36, I'd already had opportunities to do all kinds of things. When
I think back on that now, sometimes I wonder how I ever got away
with some of the things I'd done. I'd traveled the world; lived
in large cities, and way out in the country. I'd been a social worker,
an entrepreneur, a tire man, a salesman and an elected official.
My most important lifetime job to that point, being an at-home father
to my three children in their early years. That era was about to
end as Shana, our youngest daughter, would soon be packing her book
bag and heading off for Kindergarten.
"I think I know what you should do next," my mom said,
a few minutes into our conversation.
"What's that?" I asked, somewhat suspicious.
"I think you should go into… radio," she said. "Think
about it. You have all of the qualities of a good radio personality,
a good sense of humor, the gift of gab, and you know about lots
of things." I knew a compliment when one came from my mother!
That was much more complimentary than she often was.
"Well, I've been thinking about a lot of different possibilities,"
I said. "And funny, radio is one of the things I've thought
about. But the truth is," I went on, "I have finally discovered
what's next for me, and that isn't it."
"What is it?" my Catholic mother asked.
"I'm going to start seminary this fall and I'm going to become
a Unitarian Universalist minister."
Silence. I don't know what might have been going on in the busy
restaurant around us, but all I could hear was silence. And I watched
as my mother's face sort of twisted into an expression of horror.
It was not my mother's custom to be quiet in moments of significant
agitation. When I had told her years before that I would no longer
be a practicing Catholic, she did not hesitate to tell me that I
was a great disappointment, and that she had not raised me so that
I might throw my life away and go straight to hell. She had not
hesitated, when I told her that I was applying for status as a Conscientious
Objector, to tell me that she'd rather see me dead in a uniform
than dishonor my family, especially my brother who was just home
from serving in Viet Nam, in that way.
It's not like she thought about saying things like that and then
used them as weapons. It's more like she didn't think about them
at all. She merely hurled them out as some kind of self-defense,
a protection against threatening circumstances that she didn't understand.
I did not then and I do not now presume that it's easy being mom.
That's especially true for my mom who was mother to ten children,
but true, I suspect for all moms.
So there we were at Tortilla Flats; I was sitting on the cusp,
on the juxtaposition of two worlds. I was the guy many of the people
in that room had come to hear sing. And I was the guy waiting for…
whatever would be my mother's response to this news I'd just given
her. I did not know what was coming next.
Maybe it was because she found herself in a room full of strangers
that she did hesitate this time. I don't know. What happened though
was that over the course of some kind of eternity, which probably
lasted one or two minutes, I watched my mother's face slowly let
go of its contortion. When she was finally able to speak, she sort
of smiled an acquiescent smile and said, "I think you'll make
a good minister."
A year later my father died. Another three years after his death,
on the day of my ordination, my mother took me aside and said, "I
want you to know that I understand now, that all the things you've
done in your life, things that I didn't understand before, I now
know you did because you believed that you were doing was right,
even when it wasn't easy. I'm proud of you."
In some very important ways, my mother and I both came of age that
day. We no longer needed to blame each other for anything. We were
able to forgive each other for lots of transgressions, large and
small. Nancy Friday, author of several books on female sexuality
and liberation once wrote, "Blaming mother is just a negative
way of clinging to her still."
Beyond cleaning, there are so many things that could be said, maybe
should be said on Mother's Day. I don't think anybody needs to pretend
that their mother was something she was not. But our mother was
the bearer, the conduit through which each of us came from not being
into being. And for that we each have plenty of reason to be grateful
today and every day.
Having a day designated for honoring mothers is a great opportunity,
not only for honoring our own mother, but for honoring motherhood,
which is a step in the direction of the spiritual realm. Moving
from not being into being is a spiritual event of the greatest magnitude.
I'm not suggesting or denying the pre-existence of an eternal soul
here. I am saying that this is the only life I know, and I've never
met anyone who could assure me of any existence, other than the
one we are occupying here. Even if the soul enters countless reincarnations
though, it is still good old mom who provides the means for that
transportation, that transformation.
Motherhood is our gateway to being. The person in each of our lives,
who fills that role for us, is most often much more to us than just
another person. In many ways she is the goddess archetype, the standard,
the definition of motherhood. And by that standard, we set the course
of our spiritual journeys. Some goddesses, like the Madonna, are
long-suffering on behalf of their children. Some, like the Hindu
goddess Kali Ma, the Dark Mother, devour their offspring.
An archetype is something that exists within us; it's a part of
our psyche. Mother, the archetype - however we might conceive her
- is an internal aspect of who we are. Mother, the person, often
represents that archetype for us, but she is actually quite someone
else. Part of growing up, a part I suspect some of us may never
fully accomplish, is differentiating that external person from our
internal archetype.
The task is, I think, that each of us is left to become our own
mothers. We don't need to do in the person or the memory of the
person that gave us life and whom we love, and for some of us even
detest. Although, I think Buddhists might suggest that that's exactly
what we need to do in the saying that if one meets the Buddha on
the road the correct response is to kill it. That seems a little
extreme to me.
But we do need to own for ourselves all of the angst, all of the
blame we might have regarding our mothers. They aren't the ones
responsible for the ways in which we've turned out. We each are
responsible for who we are and for who we are becoming. Maybe an
appropriate celebration of Mother's Day would be more of a commemoration
of an independence day. Maybe it could be a day in which we accept
the archetypal mother as an aspect of ourselves - the mothers that
we would each aspire to be for ourselves. It could be a day in which
we come to own the blessings and the flaws of the lives we have
managed to form. It seems to me there's something holy in such a
realization, the merger of goddess, awareness and purpose.
I would be remiss, if on this day I failed to notice what is happening,
what we have done to our holy mother the earth. We've only just
begun to realize the damage to this planet caused by the BP drilling
disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The same dynamics are at play in
our relationship with this mother as with the others. We have failed,
as a human race, to honor this grandest mother of all. We have been
irresponsible in giving back to her as much as we have taken. When
might we be the mature and differentiated, the spiritually centered
children that she deserves? That she requires?
Mother's Day reminds us that we have been given this incredible
gift of life, and it reminds us that we are accountable for it.
Writer of The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote, "Knowledge of the
self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to
know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics,
its subtleties and its very atoms." Pearl S. Buck, author of
The Good Earth, goes on: "I love people. I love my family,
my children… but inside myself is a place where I live all
alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up."
In our second reading this morning, The Journey by Mary Oliver,
the poet asks us to own our lives and then to save them. There is
another poem by Mary Oliver, Mornings at Blackwater. I don't know
if she had Mother's Day in mind when she wrote it. I do as I read
it.
For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.
And it always assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.
What I want to say is
that the past is past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
Or the harbor of your longing,
And put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
Our mothers may have opened or closed doors to us in our lives.
As we step into our own light, though, the choices have become ours…
which doors we will go through… whether they have been opened
for us… or have been made more into barriers. Whatever has
come before, now the choice is ours.
On this Mother's Day, put your lips to the world and live your
life.
One of the hard things about growing up is accepting our parents
as more than just our parents. They are people. And when we can
accept that, somehow we open up the possibility to ourselves of
becoming our own best parents. It's not easy being mom.
Happy Mothers Day! May it be a day of appreciation and forgiveness,
a day of awareness, growth and ownership, a day of awe and gratitude
and service.
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