Mother's Day

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© Davidson Loehr

9 May 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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READING: Mother’s Day Proclamation,

by Julia Ward Howe

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

PRAYER:

It is Mothers’ Day: Let us give thanks:

For mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them,

For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.

For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;

For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us,

And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.

It is Mothers’ Day. Let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in gratitude and prayer.

And let us remember in prayer those other names, which we now speak aloud or in the silence of our hearts.

Amen

SERMON: Mother’s Day 2004

Mother’s Day is an annual ritual when we expect images and words of peace, life, gentleness, and a well-deserved recognition for the many mothers of all kinds whose job, we say; it is to embody those things.

It’s worth wondering why we only give ourselves a couple days a year for these voices to be recognized, isn’t it? Christmas, Mother’s Day, Easter, and Valentine’s Day – there aren’t many days that we set aside to remind us of the gentler voices, the angels of our better nature.

It isn’t that Mothers’ Days are new inventions. In prehistory, the Greeks held festivals to honor Rhea, the mother of all the gods. And they honored Demeter, the earth mother. Egyptians made pictures and statues of their goddess Isis holding her god-son Horus, and those pictures became the models for nearly identical pictures and statues of Mary and Jesus, another mother of another god. In Hinduism too, there are similar appeals to great mother goddess figures. I found this short prayer to Mother Durga, a many-armed symbol of many-faceted powers:

May the All-Compassionate Mother

be a welcome guest in our hearts.

May she consent to carry us safely

across the ocean of life

to the shore of Liberation.

This could be a prayer to any of the great mothers, the mothers of gods and mothers of dreams, life and hope.

In Buddhism, the prayers are to Kwan Yin, the feminine counterpart of the Buddha. In Taoism, they are to Yin, the feminine principle associated with the moon, and with becomings, the vulnerable but necessary counterpart to the kind of male force represented by Yang.

So these voices arise from all times and places, and they say much the same things. They plead for life, love, peace, compassion, understanding, and comfort. They’re all variations on one voice coming up from the depths of the human soul, a voice that pleads for compassion to balance combativeness, love to balance lust, generosity to balance greed, the power to give life to balance the power to destroy life. All these are voices of mothers, of mothering, of mothers’ days, and they span all times and places, these voices.

But why are they so rare? Why do they speak out so seldom? Why do we have only a few days of the year when we’re supposed to trot these voices out and listen to sweet words of love and compassion?

They are like fragile little spring flowers, these voices, always having to break through the hard soil of harder attitudes – attitudes of greed, lust, power, destruction, war, imperialism, and domination. That hard soil seems to be the ground of history, the ground on which are built all our tragedies, on which we stage our battles, in which we dig our graveyards. That hard soil is made of the coarser and dirtier aspects of our human nature. To become fully human, to become whole or balanced, we have to educate these coarse voices, like we would educate a teen-aged boy who thought only in terms of joining gangs, fantasizing about violence, domination and war, a show you can watch kids playing in a thousand video games and half the top-selling movies.

We like to fool ourselves about this. We like to pretend that we are really just, honest and peace-loving, and seem to be more surprised when war breaks out than we are when peace breaks out, though peace doesn’t break out as often. It’s a kind of anesthetic that lets us make war, enslave third-world workers to make us cheap goods, and do all manner of unspeakable things.

I want to honor the spirit of Mother’s Day here by being blunt about the background noise, the hard soil, that motherly spirits always have to break through. I think we forget, at our peril, that the reason voices like those of Mother’s Day need special occasions is because those are not the voices that run our world or write our history.

The voices against arrogant violence don’t always come from women, but they do come from that feminine part of us, what Taoists call Yin. One of the most ancient and famous of these voices came from a man, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes. In 410 BC, he wrote his play “Lysistrata,” about a sex strike by the women, that is to continue until the men stop playing war. Yin has arisen to confront Yang here, to say you may not go destroy life then come to us to enjoy its sweet pleasures. If you would be served life at night, you must serve it in the daytime. That’s the spirit of Mother’s Day, in its ancient form. It is saying that the feminine force, the power of Yin, can be just as powerful as the testosterone-soaked power of Yang.

Buddhism has a wonderful story about the nature of true power. It is this same voice of Yin, this same feminine wisdom, attributed to the Buddha.

A powerful macho bandit comes up to inform the Buddha that he is a ferocious bandit, the mightiest in the world, and is going to kill the Buddha to demonstrate his great power. The Buddha says “Ah. Well, then surely you can first grant me two wishes.” The bandit says to get on with it. The Buddha points to a small sapling nearby and says, “cut off the smallest branch on that young tree.” The bandit laughs, waves his sword, it is done. “And what is your final wish?” The Buddha bends over, picks up the small branch and hands it to the bandit, then says, “Now put it back.” Legend says the bandit achieved enlightenment in that instant, as he finally understood the true meaning of power is to create life, not to destroy it.

That is the message of all Mothers’ Days, too, in all times and places: that we need to remember that honorable power is the power to create life, not destroy it. The spirit of Mothers’ Day is always this spirit of Yin, of the mother goddess, the earth mother, the fierce determination of the gentle sex in Aristophanes’ play, the overwhelming power of the Buddha’s gentle wisdom, breaking through the hard soil of our everyday minds, the hard soil of human history and human nature.

In England, they don’t celebrate our American Mother’s Day, but instead have a Mothering Day, in March. On the surface, it looks like hearts and flowers. It’s a day when children come home and bring their mothers flowers. But its history is darker. It came from the 19th century, when the wealthy had bought and owned the government, had looted all they money they could get, and reduced the masses to starvation levels, much as we find in many countries around the world today. Girls often left home at age ten to go find full-time work to stay alive, far from home. Mothering Day was the day when they were allowed to return home to see their mothers. Beneath the surface of hearts and flowers was a story of broken hearts and uprooted flowers.

Our official Mother’s Day here began by President Wilson’s proclamation in 1914, as mostly a hearts-and-flowers thing – a day on which florists and restaurants make small fortunes, which is why they buy most of the advertising to remind you of Mothers’ Day – but the original Mothers’ Day wasn’t.

That was the one you’ve already experienced, in the reading, the Mothers’ Day Proclamation written by Julia Ward Howe around 1872. She was quite aware that hers was a voice fighting up through the hard soil of greed, destruction and war, a voice fighting up through the forces that define history to oppose them. I want to read you some of what Julia wrote about the origin of her Mothers’ Day Proclamation, from her memoirs, so you can understand the manger in which it was born, the hard soil through which she was trying to speak:

“I had felt a great opposition to Louis Napoleon from the period of the infamous act of treachery and violence which made him emperor.

“As I was revolving these matters in my mind, while the [Franco-Prussian] war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?” I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed.

“The little document which I drew up in the heat of my enthusiasms implored women, all the world over, to awake to the knowledge of the sacred right vested in them as mothers to protect the human life which costs them so many pangs. I did not doubt but that my appeal would find a ready response in the hearts of great numbers of women throughout the limits of civilization. I invited these imagined helpers to assist me in calling and holding a congress of women in London, and at once began a wide task of correspondence for the realization of this plan. My first act was to have my appeal translated into various languages, to wit: French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and to distribute copies of it as widely as possible. I devoted the next two years almost entirely to correspondence with leading women in various countries. I also had two important meetings in New York, at which the cause of peace and the ability of women to promote it were earnestly presented.” (Taken from online version of Julia Ward Howe’s memoirs.)

In the spring of the year 1872, Julia visited England, hoping by her personal presence to affect the holding of a Woman’s Peace Congress there. She noted, though, that as she put it, “The ladies who spoke in public in those days mostly confined their labors to the advocacy of woman suffrage, and were not much interested in my scheme of a world-wide protest of women against the cruelties of war.”

I don’t think the spirit of Mothers’ Day can have its true meaning or power without understanding the background against which it is taking place, the nature of the hard crust it’s always trying to break through, just as you can’t understand Yin without understanding Yang.

But we don’t want to acknowledge that. We don’t want to reveal our own dark sides, the untutored and murderous layer of our human nature. This week, for example, we’ve seen and heard testimony from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the vicious and vulgar abuses of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. That was the infamous prison that Saddam Hussein used for years as his center of torture and murder. That’s the prison we took over, closed and then re-opened. After these stories began to break, comedian Jon Stewart said it seemed that Abu Ghraib hadn’t actually been closed, it was just under new management.

You’ve seen or read about these vulgarities. A video showing American soldiers, including American women soldiers, laughing and giving thumbs-up signs as Iraqi prisoners are stripped naked and forced into humiliating positions. You’ve read about the U.S. soldiers riding a 70-year-old Iraqi woman on all fours, like a horse. These are despicable acts – and I expect that we or our soldiers will pay for them. Donald Rumsfeld, in what struck me as a disingenuous speech, characterized them as completely un-American.

But that’s not true. Unfortunately, they are completely American. The New York Times carried a short article yesterday claiming that “Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, routinely takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern.” (“Mistreatment of Prisoners is Called Routine in U.S.” by Fox Butterfield, New York Times, May 8, 2004)

“Some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court” – who sometimes attends this church, and is worth getting to know – “imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.”

Yesterday’s New York Times also pointed out “that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.”

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, was handpicked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild Iraq’s criminal justice system. These behaviors weren’t un-American. They were both disgustingly American and completely predictable.

The behavior we saw in videos was distinctly, characteristically, behavior Americans practice and permit in our own prison systems right here. It may be the lowest and most despicable level of our American behavior, but it was American behavior nonetheless.

And while this administration – just as the administrations before it – tries to claim that our methods of war are humane and noble, the high activities of peace- and justice-loving people, this is no less a lie than it was 13 years ago in the first Gulf War or 35 years ago in the Vietnam War.

Remember that all over the television stations before we invaded Iraq – in a spectacle I hope none of us would have been willing to believe if we had not seen and heard it – our President, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State actually referred to the invasion and slaughter of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens under the proud title of “Shock and Awe.” No blood, no bodies blown apart, no crippled, orphaned children, just something really exciting and fun.

It wasn’t wholesale murder during the invasion of a country whose oil and strategic position we had lusted after for fifteen years. No, it was something exciting, like special effects from an Arnold Schwarzenneger film: Shock and Awe. You could try to imagine how whoever thought up that line might describe the vicious and vulgar tortures of Iraqi prisoners. But we don’t have to imagine it. You could have tuned into Rush Limbaugh this week, to hear him laugh it off as being just like fraternity hazing, and an understandable way for soldiers to let off steam. Is this the most we have come to expect of Americans? No higher values that that? This is part of the background against which today’s Mothers’ Day takes place. Those are the violent voices we need to counter; that is the hard soil through which messages of truth and responsibility must strain to break through.

We need to claim the power to describe events more truthfully, in order to retain our own integrity and sense of sanity. These were vicious, vulgar, disgusting actions. But they were not un-American. Nor were they subhuman. Humans are the only species that do things like this to one another. They were part of human nature: the vulgar, untutored, unevolved part of human nature.

The great tragedy of humanity is that the violent and vulgar behaviors write human history, while the truly noble and life-giving voices are relegated to occasional shouts from the back of the room, and sparse annual holidays.

And yet life is bursting up all around us. We are surrounded, embraced, cradled in the great power of life. Even here. This week, working on this sermon, I’ve been thinking of some of these things, and have felt positively engulfed by life.

Our last year’s intern, Cathy Harrington, is preaching her final Candidating sermon this morning up in Ludington, Michigan. I read her draft of it Friday; it’s a Mother’s Day sermon drawing a lot on her own experience as a single mother who raised three kids and sent them all through college. I served that church seven years ago as a half-time interim. And the other church I served at that time, also as a half-time interim, called their new minister last week. Her contract begins August 1st, though she won’t be doing full-time ministry until November 1st, because she is expecting her first baby in August, and will begin her ministry on paid maternity leave.

Hannah Wells, this year’s intern, is looking forward to marriage and to having children, and sometimes talks about it in our weekly private meetings. She’s bursting to burst forth. Vicki Rao, next year’s intern, will arrive here with her husband and their six-year-old son.

And Betty Skwarek, our Director of Religious Education, told me that last Sunday here in this church we had 39 kids in the pre-kindergarten classes. Thirty-nine kids age 4 and 5! You don’t think life is bursting up all around us? God, it’s everywhere! And it’s wonderful! That’s why the voices of Mothers’ Day and the spirit of Mothers’ Day is such an important spirit to honor, not only today but every day. These are the voices of life and love and compassion and nurture, without which we cease to exist as healthy, mature people.

There’s another problem with hearing these voices so seldom, and that is that we can under-rate them. It’s easy to value the voices of war, greed, piracy, or imperialism more because they get more headlines and write the scripts for more movies. And then we neglect or undervalue all the life-giving and life-serving voices that are our own lifeblood. We undervalue motherhood and parenting. Over 60% of women with children are also working outside the home. And when they come home to their “second shift,” they are doing an average of about two hours per day more work at home than their partners.

We hear these things, and it’s easy to get angry in all directions. The husbands feel they are overworked, and they are. The wives feel they are overworked, and they are. The kids, when polled, say the one thing they would most like to have, is more time with their parents. So then the parents feel guilty for being gone so much, in order to earn enough money to support their family in a good way. It’s like a trap with no exit, and I suspect all of us have felt some of these feelings.

Well, it would be so easy to let this become completely dark, especially if we reflect on the rest of the changes in our society that are likely to happen during President Bush’s almost-certain second term. We can’t fix history today. We can’t change the hard soil, or the fact that gentle voices of life, love and compassion must always struggle to fight their way through it. The forces that write history will continue to be the forces of Yang, not Yin, because Yang owns the guns and the politicians and makes the laws.

But we can try to give a little recognition to the voices of Yin, those who are doing their best to serve life, add love, and bring compassion to the world. And the good news is that this includes most of us.

It is Mothers’ Day. Let us give thanks for all the many kinds of mothers there are among us. Let us give thanks for that spirit of mothers and mothering, that spirit which knows that real power is the power to give life, not the power to destroy or demean it. Let us give thanks that these gentle voices of the angels of our better nature do speak up at least on these few days of the year we have allowed them, for when we listen to them, they have the power of making us all better people, partners, parents and citizens, making us all more whole and more holy, a credit to ourselves, our species, and to life itself.

Let us be raised to those higher aspirations today, and show it in higher behavior. And let us remember that what we are capable of some times we can also rise to most of the time, if only we will. It is Mothers’ Day, a day which holds sacred the tender mercies within all of our hearts. Let us give thanks.