“Mother May I?”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
May 11, 2008
OPENING READING:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
--ee cummings
READINGS ANCIENT AND MODERN:
Our ancient reading is from the Book of Genesis:
Now the serpent was craftier than any other wild animal that the Lord had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ “ But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened…
Our modern reading this morning is from, “The Power of Myth,” the interviews of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers:
The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn't something ruling over and above a fallen nature. There was something of this spirit in the medieval cult of the Virgin, out of which all the beautiful thirteenth-century French cathedrals arose. However, our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature.
SERMON:
Popular Columbian author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wrote in, Love in the Time of Cholera, “...human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” I was thinking that for Mother’s Day, something of a quilt sampler might provide a good format for the sermon. I feel that I have to begin, “Mother May I,” with a bit of a disclaimer and then we’ll add some additional sections that I’ll hope to piece together into something of a comforter. Maybe you’ll have some sections of your own that you’ll want to add.
So, if this message is to have any integrity at all, I have to come clean from the start with my first piece for the quilt. That is, I learned from a very early age that to ask, “Mother May I,” was the kiss of death for far too many good ideas. Asking permission was a surefire way to guarantee that I would not get to do what ever it was I was hoping I might. Very early on, I learned that forgiveness was way easier to come by than permission.
Always the pragmatist, I typically went with the odds for success. You have to remember that I was one of 10 children. From my mother’s perspective, “no,” was a far safer and more efficient mode of response. But if I’d already gone ahead and acted, if something had already been done – well, she didn’t need to imagine all the possible, horrible ramifications of what could happen if I had permission to do whatever it was. The outcomes were already evident afterwards and she only needed to observe what did happen. Often, whatever apprehensions she might have had – had she the opportunity to have said no before hand – wouldn’t even come into play.
But of course that didn’t always happen, and I did manage to get into a fair amount of trouble on a pretty regular basis. My experience I think was like Mark Twain’s who said, “My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.” In the story of Genesis, I have to imagine that God, having experienced significant trouble with Eve’s plucky spirit, was also secretly grateful for the turn of events that allowed for the evolution of a self-differentiated human story. How dull it would have been otherwise!
Moving to the next patch in the quilt, I recognize that we don’t all approach Mother’s Day with the same perception or appreciation of it. Some of us have or have had wonderful relationships with and memories of our mothers or of motherhood. But for some of us, motherhood is an accident, and not always a welcome one. For some, biological motherhood isn’t possible, and while it typically is not an issue for most adoptive parents, sometimes – especially around Mother’s Day – there are awkward little moments that creep into conversations. For some, our mothers weren’t really all that nice. For some of us, the loss of our mother continues to be a painful experience. And for some of us here, motherhood under the very best of circumstances is still something quite less than a bed of roses.
Whatever our experiences or memories might be, today is Mother’s Day. To provide some perspective on the day that I hope might be helpful to all of us, inclusive of our histories, I offer these thoughts by Rev. Jane Rzepka, the Unitarian Universalist minister of our virtual UU congregation, the Church of the Larger Fellowship. Jane wrote:
On Mother's Day, one expects to [hear] about the wonder and glory of motherhood. While I can tell you from personal experience that we mothers like to be appreciated, I can also tell you that a rosy and sentimental Mother's Day [message] always refers to mothers in some other family – the picture painted there is not me, not my mom, not my grandmothers.
In my family, mothers do not suffer any more than other mortals, nor are we particularly unsung. We complain when we trip over shoes on the living room floor, and we expect a little praise for carrying the daily Grand Accumulation at the bottom of the stairs up the aforementioned stairs.
We do not deserve or expect devotion from our children. We wanted to have children. It was our idea. If they come around from time to time when they are grown-ups, we are ever so glad. But if they live their lives as secure and independent souls, we value that.
Motherhood, in my family, is not always the most important job in the world. Some of us are actually good at it, some of us shuffle along and do our best, and a few are better off in other professions. We try to face that.
Mother's Day is no time to romanticize parenthood – parenting is a down-to-earth process if ever there was one. So this Mother's Day, let's humanize Mom. Thank her for doing what she could, given all the dirty socks, thank her for loving you as well as she was able in spite of your three years in junior high, and then, let her thank you for the privilege of being your mother. (Source: Published in Jane Ranney Rzepka's A Small Heaven: A Meditation Manual, Boston: Skinner House Books, 1989, p. 21.)
I add this next small piece, understanding that it might be a bit controversial and perhaps won’t provide an appreciated fit for everyone in the same way it does for me. I feel my own experiences in eight years as an at-home-parent give me some amount of insight and understanding of the experience of motherhood. Call this arrogance or misunderstanding if you want, but eight years in the front lines with three small children, day in and day out, can provide for quite an in-depth education on the subject.
Motherhood is a role shared by a wide variety of players. I suspect my own male-influenced perspectives on it were no more masculine or feminine in character than those of mothers I knew who were of the more traditional female gender. I suspect that my perspectives fall well within a spectrum of both masculine and feminine viewpoints brought to the role by women who are mothers.
I include this piece, not because I think it provides me with the authority to speak on behalf of mothers, but because it gives me empathy for those parents, more usually female, who do or who have struggled hourly, daily and weekly for years to provide their children with what they need in order to be warm, dry, fed and nurtured so that their children could grow up safely and be prepared to engage with life in a meaningful way. I add this piece to the quilt, because I think that Hallmark and other cultural influences cause too many people to feel that their experience of motherhood is outside the acceptable norms, either in the mother the person is or in the one they have. There are many mothers, men not withstanding, nor gay, lesbian and transgendered parents withstanding, nor adoptive mothers and many others withstanding, who may not fit the stereotype but have every right to celebrate their motherhood today! By the way, about that initial experience of motherhood, like most men I have to admit, it is quite beyond my capacity to imagine.
For the next section of our quilt, I go back to our earlier readings to pick up a couple of pieces. There are many creation myths that attempt to convey a way of imagining and understanding the birth of humanity. Like it or not, in our culture the predominant myth is the story of the Garden of Eden. Sure, there are many fundamentalists who believe this story literally. I’m afraid though, that they miss the point. And even if they do miss it, even if the story implies not literal but more figurative and deeper meanings, like all myths, metaphors and symbols, the story has some very real limitations.
It’s important to remember that this particular creation myth evolved in a patriarchal culture that was surrounded by Mother-Goddess religions. It’s not accidental that God is a “he” in the story. And it’s not accidental that this father-god creates man from the earth, creates woman from man, and then establishes man as his dominant surrogate over all the other realms, except of course for the heavens.
The point, or a least one of the points missed in all of this is that we are not made of this patriarchal god; we are made by it. Still, even in the Genesis story, we are made of the earth. In a very real sense – it/she is our mother. We are comprised of her and life is passed on to us through her. Nature is not a damning force; far from being corrupt, it is the redeeming and creative force. It is or is closely related to the Spirit of Life. Nature is the conduit through which life is bestowed; it is the context in which life is experienced; the rhythm in which it occurs; the arms in which it is held… we are held.
There are times when our Mother Earth is harsh, for sure. For what mother is that not true? Sometimes that’s easily justified, as when the child is abusive and the mother must help the child restore balance and integrity in its relationships with other children or with the mother. Other times it may seem as though the mother is abusive, as when cyclones kill hundreds of thousands of children and destroy millions of lives. Still, she is the source of our being. It’s not only incumbent on the mother to forgive the child, but just as much for the child to forgive the mother.
The next piece is related to a couple of earlier ones. Quilts often have repetitive patterns in order to provide an evident and satisfying overarching theme. This piece brings together the request for permission – Mother May I – in relation to our Mother Earth. The point of this one is, like with my own mother, it really is best not to ask for permission. Nature it is what it is. In all her beauty and splendor, her cycles and balance, in her rhythms of birth and death, creativity and reclamation, our Mother-Goddess has put it all out there for us. She has set it out for us to graze upon and to flourish. For us to ask for special permission, to bend the laws of nature, to go outside of what has been so graciously provided to us is, well, that’s rather arrogant and destructive too.
Our duty in honoring Mother Earth is to take what we have been given and to make the most of it for ourselves and for others. Our task is to redeem what we have been given through what we give back in return. If we are going to mature into self-differentiated human beings in a story – a common human story – of sustainability, our mission must be to return with great interest the investment that has been placed in us by this original mother.
Finally, it’s time to add our boarder piece, one that might help to hold the others within more of a unified theme. Mother’s Day is a great opportunity to be grateful to the one person who brought us into life, or in many cases the one who held us in life once we were here. It’s a great opportunity to do that, if we’ve had or have a pleasing relationship with our mother, or if our spiritual maturity has allowed us to forgive her for her shortcomings, or some kind of combination of those two.
But even if that’s not the case, what a wonderful opportunity – here in the midst of the beautifully budding spring time – to honor mothers, to honor the qualities of creativity and nurturing in all those who mother. And to honor them, not just for themselves but for the participating surrogates they have been for the grandest goddess of them all – the Earth Mother. The greatest value of Mother’s Day is, or could be that it allows us to connect with our deeper religious selves – not to that which encourages us to dominate or destroy one another and the planet, but to connect to that which is in us that is creative, that gives birth, that nourishes life – our lives, each other’s and that of the planet.
To some very significant extent, we become our own parent with whatever knowledge or lack of knowledge we may have. Nature, the Spirit of Life, is not a source that we need to seek permission from. It has already said, yes, to our being here; it has already allowed us to be.
“...human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
May our being here then, give honor and add to the beauty of the tapestry that has spawned us.
I wish us all a very happy and meaningful Mother’s Day.
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