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Rev. Dr. Leona Stucky-Abbott
February 22, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Infants begin to develop their brains in the context of a mothering matrix, which involves the important relationships of their early years. Internalized relational patterns gradually establish expectations and structures for how babies think. Their novice experiences also distort who mother is and why she exists. These distortions mirror the ways humans construct their relationships with the Divine.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
Black History Moment: Elandria Williams
This morning we are called into worship by taking a moment for Black History by lifting up Elandria Williams. According to the Country Queer podcast Elandria Williams identified as a Black, southern Appalachian, disabled, gender-queer, pansexual, Unitarian Universalist.
They was one of the co-founders of Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism or BLUU They were a leader co-founding many different organizations and movements all with the goal of liberation. Before their death in 2020, Elandria served as a UUA co-Moderator following the Hiring Controversy.
Elandria led a short but powerful life in which their heart, activism, and tireless commitment to ant-racism and anti-oppression has profoundly changed Unitanan Universalist for the better. Here is their poem:
WE ARE WORTHY
We are worthy
Not because of what we produce
But because of who we are
We are divine bodies of light and darkness
You are not worthy because of what you offer
not because of what is in your mind,
not for the support you give others.
not for what you give at all
We are worthy and are whole just because
In this great turning, in this great pandemic,
in this radical readjustment and alignment
We are not disposable, we are needed
we are the very people that have withstood everything that has been thrown at us as a people
and as Maya Angelou would say
Still I Rise
We arise from the pain
We rise from the grief
We arise from the limits people place on us and
the limits we place on ourselves
We rise to be the children and the ancestors
We rise to be our true selves
Our true selves in relationship to our families
and communities
Recognizing our liberating and whole selves
Honoring them and others as we strive for
abundant communities, abundant lives, abundant
relationships, and abundant
values and
cultural manifestations
We are worthiness personified
I, you, and we are worthy and deserve a life
where we are not always fighting for our existence
Imagine what we could create if we were not always in the struggle
Imagine what we could envision if we could just be let to just go there
So tired of always having to resist, to fight, demanding, pushing
To everyone that has the courage, the power, the
ability to co-create what we want and need
while rooting in what we can’t lose and who we are
You are the visionary
You are the hope
You are our ancestors’ dreams
No, you might not ever end up on some list somewhere
But you are on a list in someone’s heart and mind
And if it’s in how you move in the world so people can see by exampleYou are the embodiment of what we need
By Elandria Williams
Thanks to all that are the embodiment
The embodiment not of productivity but
the embodiment of radical love, care and sanctuary
It’s time
Embodiment time
Embodiment
Living ones values out loud
Let me everyday live my values out loud
Let us everyday live our values out loud
Embodying our values
Not the productivity quotient
Beyond productivity
Past productivity
True embodiment
Life
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
Psalms 139
O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou Knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; Thou discernest my thoughts from afar. Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit! Or whither shall I flee from thy presence! If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.
For it was you who formed my inward parts; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for l am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them – they are more than the sand. I awake in the end – I am still with you.
Sermon
UNVEILING THE MOTHER BEHIND GOD
Thank you for letting me share with you again. I really appreciate the privilege.
It may be difficult for some of you to hear about the mothering matrix. As a therapist, I know how tender the mix of pain and love can be with our very human mothers. And yet, the crucible of healing is often found where hurt and hope meet. So take a deep breath and protect yourself if you need.
Talking about mothering does not mean that fathering is less important or less difficult. Historically, fathers were often cast as the expendable ones, sent into danger and away from daily care, Human history, for all genders, holds both joy and suffering-and plenty of it.
Focus on healing – there is no shortage of mother love or loving mothers and we treasure mothering relationships. They often are our best and most meaningful connections, Profound wisdom lives inside those years of loving each other.
GIVING GOD RELATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS
It was probably the Greeks, three or four hundred years before Christ, who can be “blamed” for hooking us into gendered dualism. They wanted to rank characteristics. Somehow the meme got started, and our early Christian fathers picked it right up. We already had Christ as the head of the Church and man as the head of woman. They also dictated that because woman was weaker, she should obey. Likely the Church Fathers didn’t appreciate women’s ways of thinking, so rational vs. emotional got thrown in. Above and below, namer and named, creator and creation, and all the rest of the valued opposites came along.
The intent was to show that, just as Christ is of higher value than the Church, man was then of higher value than those who obey him. And thus gendered dualism became a meme with serious staying power. After 2000 years you can find it, in various forms, in the newly released Heritage document. Remember the people who wrote Project 2025? They produced a new document, Building a Stronger America, with a segment on family.
So now we “know” who God is. He is the one on the esteemed side with Man, and Woman is on the demeaned side. It’s clear, right?
Today, a curve ball is headed right at the gendered dualism list.
Let’s ride that curve for a minute by asking where the Greeks found that idea – Where did people actually experience that dualism list in their daily lives? Did they? To really understand it, we need to become babies and experience life as it came to us from the time we were born.
D. W. Winnicott, a celebrated child psychiatrist and theorist, says that we first learned that reality could relate positively to human beings through feeding. As infants we felt hungry, and mother’s breast or a bottle came to us, helping us transform from a negative feeling state, hunger, to a positive one. Warm milk tasted good and sustained us. Of course, we did not have religious words like “transformation” but we gradually internalized a pattern of experience that became a hope and expectation: when we need something, with the right kind of seemingly magical help, we can get it. You know, the Rolling Stones –
“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you might find, you get what you need.”
That’s the spirit we learned from day one.
We cry or fuss, and sure enough, somebody picks us up, brings our cheeks to her lips, rocks us, hugs and holds us, bounces us on her knee, changes our diaper, sings to us, distracts our attention to some better focus – someone figures it out for us and we feel better. And somewhere along the way we begin to understand that this magical reality-shapeshifter person is big while we are little; she is strong while we are weak; she seems rational while we feel emotional; she has wondrous knowledge while we know almost nothing; she is creator and we are creation; she seems to be everywhere at once, like she has our whole world in her hands; and we feel best of all when we are one with her.
In other words, mothers, fathers, and the significant others who assist-the mothering matrix – is our first God. (sometimes also our last God.) But her relationship to us lays the foundation for the falsely gendered opposites that have meemed their way into our conception of who God is and who we are.
Dr. Ahna Maria Rizzuto, who wrote The Psychological Birth of the Living God, claims that by age two and a half, toddlers who live in a Christian culture, even if their parents are atheists, will have a basic internal sense of God. These toddlers think of God as the one who lives in that big house on the street corner. And they know their God-character is really special. Toddlers’ internal God image is typically made up of aspects of their internalized significant others – like mom and dad.
So now we, as young’uns have an internal magical God with whom we can relate, who has some special powers put at our disposal if He likes us. Pretty cool.
In our “Owning Your Religious Past” class a few weeks ago, I remembered an old image of myself, age four, standing in the dark stairwell at night. Before I climbed the stairs I started praying out loud. I wanted that monster in the closet at the top of the stairs to hear that I had God with me. If Mommy or Daddy were with me – little fear. But alone, I only had God, and though I was still afraid with my God at my side, that was much better than no protection. And guess what: my prayers were answered. That monster did not show his face as I ran past the closet and took a flying leap into the bed.
The human imagination of who God might be is deeply embedded in the functions of the mothering matrix. That’s not surprising because the mothering matrix is our first experience of relationship, and a highly dependent, hard-to-describe relationship.
Psalm 139 illustrates quite well how an infant might feel in relationship to mother, but Psalm 139 gives those traits to God. That dearly treasured psalm feels potent to the four-year-old inside us. Plus it has a theological message with wide appeal. First, God is personally involved in the in-utero creation and development of all human beings. Secondly, God loved us personally, before we knew how to love. Therefore every life is sacred. No matter what circumstance we are born into, according to this theology, we have a starting point with God’s love.
Psalm 139’s theology seems quite beautiful in several ways – but falls short in others.
WHERE MOTHER DISAPPEARS
Mommies are not acknowledged for what mommies do. Mommies know when we sit down or rise up. Mommies have magical eyes behind their heads. Before a word is on our tiny tongues, mommies know it. Their knowledge is too wonderful for us, so high that we cannot attain it. Wherever we might try to go, there is mother and therefore we are safe. For it was mothers who formed our inward parts and “knit” them together in their wombs. How weighty for us are mothers’ thoughts. How vast the sum of them.
The credit for this wonderful saving relationship goes straight to God and, via God, is mirrored back to humanity as manly traits. Mother is wiped out of the picture. Her treasured traits seem to belong not I to her but to a male God. Though we consciously know better, we have a tendency to remove her.
Intrapsychically, a similar experience deprives us of full awareness of how mother is there for us day in and day out. Her most intensive caregiving, in our first few years, happens before we have memories. It is surprisingly difficult for us to fill those unremembered years with appreciation. And almost no one publicizes the incredible work of those years.
Perhaps because we don’t consciously remember those years, we don’t have a strong sense of mother being there for us. Our faith pictures of Deity fail to mirror back the reality of her existence and her deeds. She is disempowered by our God images, and – until the feminist movement in the 1970s – also disempowered in our wider world images. When images of women became more ubiquitous, the dissing of Mother began to shift. These tendencies to discredit mother’s work and blame mother for not being there still hold tremendous power in our unconscious minds, even when corrected in our conscious knowing.
With this faith traditions, believers and even nonbelievers have a difficult time finding clarity. What is real or not real in our beliefs about Mother and God? For a number of years, now, that question divides us. If God is the one who creates new life and “knits” together our pieces in mother’s womb, why should mother have any say about it? Her body is God’s tool.
On the other hand, those who comprehend what a woman goes through – when her body and chemistry and psyche make massive changes to create and nurture united cells into human form, and to birth a baby that is huge compared to what her body can reasonably deliver, and then to take on the challenge of caring for and loving, with a mother’s love, which usually involves significant sacrifice all through the growing years from infant into adulthood, and to love this new creation for the rest of her whole life – anyone who understands and lets go of the confusion about who does the creation work, a woman or God, would surely support a woman’s right to choose everything about her circumstances, including when she will nurture and birth a child.
GOD, MOTHER, AND FINAL HOPES
Another place where God and Mother twist into confusing roles is where the faithful count on God to do what mother has done for us in our infancy. We hope against hope that God will have the magical power that once, likely long ago, belonged to mother. On our deathbed, we want God’s mothering – Good enough mothering – that when, like an infant, we must again experience the primary dependence of helplessness-unto-death, we will be saved by a Mothering God who will create us anew, provide for our needs in an alternate home, mirror an identity to us, and love us enough to make life good.
That is who we want: a God who is a good-enough mother, but with supernatural powers that a mother could not have. What we want, and what we get? Who knows?
Our mothers were destined to become human beings in our eyes. Likely not all at once, but her ignorance, her willfulness against ours, her missteps, her exhaustion, her meanness, selfishness, inabilities, laziness, busyness – these were all heavy blasts against our illusion of her greatness as a need-satisfying person.
Gradually, we had to accept that she was just a human with as many imperfections as any other human, and maybe more, because historically she had to make herself real and powerful when much of her world was against her. No one would covet that role. All of her failures registered profoundly with us because she was our savior, the one who got us through, somehow.
Many times it wasn’t pretty. Many times she didn’t have a clue how to be helpful – or she didn’t care. All of that hurts because we weren’t big enough to know what to do. When we got into jams that she couldn’t transform, it really hurt. Much of the time, we experienced our troubles as her failure. Our pain is disproportionately experienced in relation to mother. Often as Mother’s fault.
GRADUATE STORY
I’ll give you a quick illustration and then close. We’re almost done.
In 1988 several friends and I were graduating with our doctoral degrees. Standing in line on this glorious day, waiting to process in, John (not his real name) said he “could just feel his mother sitting out there in the crowd, bearing with pride. She’s soaking up all the credit for everything I did to achieve this degree.” He said.
Marilyn said, “My mother isn’t even here. As is typical for us, there’s always something more important in her life than celebrating me. She is now on a cruise to Europe with her friend. She tried to excuse it, saying the tickets were a much better price for these particular dates.”
And I added that my mom died many years ago. “I’m feeling a kind of emptiness.” I said. “If my mom were here, I’d feel twice as good about graduating. I can’t get the feeling she is sharing this with me. It all seems pretty empty.”
I don’t know. With doctoral graduates like that – what’s a mother to do?
I’m not dismissing our issues with our very human mothers. I know all too well the kind of hurt we carry in relation to them, and when we experience too much injury with our mothers, we are truly broken. And the other way around – when we feel too much injury with our children, we are broken. It takes a long time to heal, and we often need a helpful process for that to happen. These are tender concerns, often impacting our theologies.
Profound love and delight shared with mothers.
CLOSING: FREUDIAN SIPS
Usually we start with show and tell at the beginning, but I’m ending with it. My son gave me this coffee cup a number of years ago. We laughed together because, somehow, who knows how, it was so real for both of us. The front of the cup has a picture of Freud saying, “When you say one thing, but mean your mother.” On the back of the cup it says, “Freudian Sips.”
Needless to say, it’s my favorite coffee cup.
The last thought I’m offering, may be a few Freudian slips combined: Likely our historical Judeo-Christian God – or most any God – wouldn’t mean much without Mother, way out ahead, paving the way for Him.
And the people said, Amen.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
May we expand the generational love we bring to one another and to our world.
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