Sermon: 'Mothering Life'

A sermon by Andrew Pakula

The Newington Green and Islington Unitarians, London, UK

 

Reading 1

Mother's Day

(to my children)

By Daisy Zamora

 

I do not doubt you would have liked

one of those pretty mothers in the ads:

complete with adoring husband and happy children.

She's always smiling, and if she cries at all

it is absent of lights and camera,

makeup washed from her face.

 

But since you were born of my womb, I should tell you:

ever since I was small like you

I wanted to be myself -- and for a woman that's hard --

(even my Guardian Angel refused to watch over me

when she heard).

 

I cannot tell you that I know the road.

Often I lose my way

and my life has been a painful crossing

navigating reefs, in and out of storms,

refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens

who invite me into the past,

neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.

 

But I advance,

go forward holding to the hope

of some distant port

where you, my children -- I'm sure --

will pull in one day

after I've been lost at sea.

 

Reading 2:

Invisible Work

by Alison Luterman

 

I think all the time about invisible work.

About the young mother on Welfare

I interviewed years ago,

who said, "It's hard.

You bring him to the park,

run rings around yourself keeping him safe,

cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,

and there's no one

to say what a good job you're doing,

how you were patient and loving

for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."

And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself

because I am lonely,

when all the while,

as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried

by great winds across the sky,

thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,

the slow, unglamorous work of healing,

the way worms in the garden

tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe

and bees ransack this world into being,

while owls and poets stalk shadows,

our loneliest labors under the moon.

 

There are mothers

for everything, and the sea

is a mother too,

whispering and whispering to us

long after we have stopped listening.

I stopped and let myself lean

a moment, against the blue

shoulder of the air. The work

of my heart

is the work of the world's heart.

There is no other art.

Sermon

  One companion asked, "O Apostle of God! Who is the person worthiest of

  my consideration?" He replied, "Your mother." He asked again, "And

  second to my mother?" The Prophet said, "Your mother." The companion

  insisted, "And then?" The Messenger of God said, "After your mother, your

  father."

These words are taken from the Hadith – Islam’s record of the sayings and deeds of Muhammad. And Islam is certainly not the only tradition to hold mothers in such high esteem:

From Hinduisim’s Taittiriyaka Upanishad:

“Let your mother be to you like unto a god!”

And now let’s look at Mothering Sunday today… In all the cards, the poems – in just about everything that written for Mothering Sunday or Mother’s Day, you will find fulsome praise – an almost reverential depiction of mothers. Mothers, we are told, are angels, capable of miracles. Mothers are infinitely patient. Mothers are infinitely loving. Mothers are infinitely wise. They can ease pain and heal wounds. They toil and sacrifice without ever uttering a single word of complaint.

Not one? Really?

Being a mother is an undertaking that is both noble and impossibly difficult… It is an immense responsibility to bring a new life into the world and to shape that life. It is often thankless invisible work, as Alison Luterman describes, and so it is important that we find ways to thank the mothers among us – our own mothers, ourselves if we are mothers, and all the mothers whose efforts will determine the shape of the future generations and thus the fate of our world. Today – Mothering Sunday – brings us to such a time and I hope that each one of us will find a way to reach out to the mothers and stand-in mothers in our lives to show them how much they have meant to us. To give them just a small fraction of the thanks they deserve.

And yet, as much as we should honour mothers, I worry when we begin to create an ideal image that no human can live up to – an image that Daisy Zamora describes in our reading as “one of those pretty mothers in the ads, complete with adoring husband and happy children, …always smiling…”

Not a single one of us is perfect. As you think of your own mother, you will recognize the good that she has done for you (and perhaps still does). At the very least, she gave you your life – her own body providing you shelter and sustenance for some nine months – probably rather uncomfortable months for her. She may have given you much, much more. Perhaps she was there to comfort you, to encourage you, to teach you. Perhaps she filled you with the values that formed who you are today.

But she was not perfect. Like Daisy Zamora – like most of us – she may have often lost the way and found life to be a painful crossing with reefs, storms, and ghostly sirens to contend with. You will also recognize that there were ways in which she may have wounded you and left you with challenges and struggles.

If you are a mother, I hope you will keep in mind all the good you have done for your own children. But, no-doubt, you will also remember the times when you did not measure up to the ideal of “mother.” You may carry guilt for the times when you failed and for the struggles of your own children. You are not alone. In fact, there has been a series of recent books exploring the feelings of “bad motherhood.” And if you need something right away, you can go to a web site called “Bad Mothers Anonymous” – a place for mothers to share their feelings about the many times they failed to live up to that ideal of motherhood that is so glowingly portrayed on greeting cards.

Yes, the unrealistic glorified image of mother can be unhelpful. Children of actual real flesh and blood human mothers are left wondering who this glorious person called “mother” is and how it was they were stuck with someone who fell so far short of that ideal. For mothers, comparison with the ideal image brings feelings of inadequacy and guilt that they already feel, just for being imperfectly human.

And yet the ideal mother image is a persistent one and that probably has something to tell us.

Throughout the history of religion, it seems that there has been an ongoing tension between the masculine, warrior, protector father images and the feminine nurturing, generative and creative images. When male-centred monotheism arrived a few thousand years ago, much of the feminine in religion began to be portrayed as primitive. As much as possible, it was erased. The word Pagan became a derogatory term for the non-religious or non-Christian – an unfair and incorrect way to think about a way of being religious that was more in tune with the earth and her seasons and all life.

But each time the feminine was pushed away and subdued, it would reemerge somewhere else. The worship of Mary, Jesus’s mother is one example. The feminine images in Judaism of Wisdom and the Shekinah are others.

Just this week this tension between masculine and feminine notions of the divine popped up in the news yet again as the Pope cracked down on feminist interpretations of the Catholic liturgy. In recent years, some Catholics have increasingly adopted the use of gender-neutral terms such as "Creator", "Redeemer" and "Sanctifier." Now, orders the Pope, anyone baptised in ceremonies employing such language terms will have to be re-baptised using the traditional formulation: "Father, Son and Holy Ghost."

I will avoid for now the question of just why it is that a male-dominated religious hierarchy might want to keep entirely masculine language for God. It is just too easy a target!

More interesting to me is the irrepressible appeal of the image of the feminine in religion. Tied to the female role in creating life, the feminine has long been seen as the nurturing, caring, creative force in life. The oldest known story of creation – the Enuma Elish, written in the 12th century BCE years ago begins this way: "When above the heavens had not been formed, when the earth below had no name, Tiamat brought forth them both. Tiamat, Mother of the gods, Creator of all."

It is thought by many scholars that long before the advent of a patriarchal male-centred religiousness, most of the world’s peoples worshipped feminine deities and recognised the feminine as the origin of all things.

As in most things, the extremes of feminine and masculine, Goddess and God are easy to describe and to fight over, but balance – that messy ever-changing place of ambiguity in the middle – is where we need to be. This notion is so beautifully portrayed in the Taoist imagery of Yin and Yang – the balanced forces of light and dark, masculine and feminine, hot and cold… We need a balance to live meaningful, harmonious lives.

Today, it seems that our society has veered toward what might be described – perhaps unfairly – as the masculine way of being. The stereotypical male way of interacting with the earth is the way of exploitation and subjugation. As a society, we take more and more from the earth with little regard for sustainability. We seem to lack a deeper connection with the life around us.

What if instead of this detached approach to life, we acted with a profound felt sense of connection to things? The warriors in our story earlier had all the skills they needed to face the problem of the abducted baby. They worked at it – sought to find a way to defeat the problem. But in the end, it just wasn’t their baby! What would it be like if we approached life with the attachment, connection, and dedication of the maternal ideal? It is perhaps a subtle shift in thinking. How would we behave differently if we saw ourselves connected to all things.

The Buddha taught exactly this. In his words:

Even as a mother protects with her life

Her child, her only child,

So with a boundless heart

Should one cherish all living beings:

Radiating kindness over the entire world

Spreading upwards to the skies,

And downwards to the depths;

What would it be like indeed to unleash our buried maternal energy as individuals? As a congregation? As a society? How differently might we act toward other people? How differently might we behave when making decisions about the use the world’s limited resources? How much more willing might we be to give, knowing the strength of the connection that binds us to one another as a mother to her child?

So may it be with you.

© 2007 Islington and Newington Green Unitarians For comments or enquiries