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Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
May 10, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
The origin stories of Mother’s Day were a cry for peace and an attempt to acknowledge the work of nurturing that goes unrewarded in a patriarchal society. While the day has become about the physical act of bearing and/or rearing children, the origins speak to something more radical, the transforming power of nourishing and providing care. Rev. Carrie unpacks this holiday and any gifts it might have for us.
Welcome
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
OY VEH, MOTHER’S DAY
by Anne LamottThe illusion is that mothers are automatically more fulfilled and complete. But the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be many mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping or sullen children and husbands mothers into seats at restaurants.
I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or lost children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark. There is no refuge – not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums.
You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose.
Don’t get me wrong: There were a million times I could have literally died of love for my son, and I’ve felt stoned on his rich, desperate love for me. I felt it yesterday when I was in despair. But I bristle at the whispered lie that you can know this level of love and self-sacrifice only if you are a parent. What a crock!
But my main gripe about Mother’s Day is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them, including aunties and brothers; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, who unconsciously raised me to self-destruct; and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life.
The point is, have a beautiful, wonderful Mother’s Day if it is a holiday that brings you joy, but just be conscious that for many, many people, it isn’t. Proceed accordingly. Deal?
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Anthem
“Angry Anymore” (Ani DiFranco) – Bethany Ammon, voice; Brent Baldwin, guitar; Valeria Diaz, piano; The First UU Adult Vocal Ensemble
Growing up it was just me and my mom
Against the world
And all my sympathies were with her
When I was a little girl
But now I’ve seen both my parents
Play out the hands they were dealt
And as each year goes by
I know more about how my father must have feltI just want you to understand
That I know what all the fighting was for
And I just want you to understand
That I’m not angry anymore
I’m not angry anymoreShe taught me how to wage a cold war
With quiet charm
But I just want to walk
Through my life unarmed
To accept and just get by
Like my father learned to do
But without all the acceptance and getting by
That got my father throughNight falls like people into love
We generate our own light
To compensate
For the lack of light from above
Every time we fight
A cold wind blows our wayBut we learn like the trees
How to bend
How to sway and sayI, I think I understand
What all this fighting is for
And baby, I just want you to understand
That I’m not angry anymore
No, I’m not angry anymore
Reading
MOTHERS’ DAY PROCLAMATION
Julia Ward Howe, 1870Arise, then… women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! 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 vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and eamest day of council.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.
Centering
Music for Meditation: “Innsbruck ich muss dich lassen” (Heinrich Isaac,
arr. Baldwin) – The First UU Adult Vocal Ensemble
Sermon
THE EVERYDAY RADICALIZATION OF NURTURING
On Social media you will often see the question, what radicalized you? For me, that’s simple, it was having children… and Mr. Rodgers… of course.
I was radicalized by coming into contact with our systems and institutions in a new and enlightening…. if not rage inducing way.
Now I don’t think you have to be a mother or have children to know and understand these things, but I can only preach from my experience and for me this is how it worked.
I knew that birthing wasn’t as easy and natural as everyone made it to be, but I really got it when I found myself in a medical crisis.
I knew that teachers were given way too much responsibility but not the resources, recognition, or compensation they deserved but really really got it the day I went through a lockdown drill in an elementary school.
I intellectually understood that we had a child care crisis, but when I had to hustle to find care, that I could barely afford, just so I could keep working at a job that I trained so hard for… well I got it!
I knew that being a woman who had children was seen as a liability in the workforce but my co-worker really brought it home for me the day they shamed me in an end-of-day-last-minute meeting by saying “l forgot moms always have to leave early.” after I had just excused myself so I could make it to daycare in the next 10 minutes before it closed at 6:00.
And this is to say nothing of what I have learned because of the ten thousands of ways the State has inserted its narrow christian nationalist world view on my kids bodies and education.
Having my kids made me RADICAL!
After seeing all the harm, the inequity, the fear, and the pain….
I was radicalized.
Mothering can be radicalizing.
And I want you to hear me when I say mothering. Not mother but motheringÑ meaning to care for, nurture, to protection.
Not all mothers are mothering and not everyone that is mothering are mothers.
Mothering then is the deep care and commitment to nurturing, to nourishing life.
The work of mothering is radicalizing.
The first attempt at mother’s day in the US had that same radicalizing energy. Unitarian Julie Ward Howe who wrote both the Battle Hymn of the Republic and our reading was a mother to six children….and an abolitionist, a suffragist, and a peace and anti-war activist. In her piece we now call the Mother’s Day Proclamation she expressed her anger towards the “irrelevant agencies” that risk the life of children all over the world. She wanted to put an end to the carnage, she wanted to recognize the grief of all loss – regardless of nation – and she proposed that a group of women from all over the world come together and talk about how we could figure things out without having to send our children off to kill each other.
She lobbied to create a Mothers Day to be celebrated on June 2nd.
That went nowhere.
Then she suggested we celebrate it on July 4th, JULY 4th!
I don’t know about you but I just love that energy! I love a woman who when told no really just triples down!
She didn’t get that…..She died before Mother’s Day was a thing.
But Around the same time she was active in the late 19th century a young Anna Jarvis heard her mother, Ann Jarvis, end sunday school with an important prayer.
Now lets just stop for a moment. Ann is the mother and Anna is the daughter… its going to get confusing so lets buckle up…..
Anna is a little girl in sunday school where her mom, Ann is the teacher. One day Ann wraps up up class with this prayer.
“I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mothers day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life,”….. “She is entitled to it.”
Ann Jarvis, felt deeply moved by her experiences of mothering in a way that connected her to others. The loss of her children to childhood disease inspired her to work to reduce infant mortality to prevent others from losing their children.
After the civil war she saw the deep suffering of those who had lost children in battle and found ways for mothers to come together and grieve.
She was a woman that allowed the everyday experience of mothering to motivate her to action on behalf of others.
But – because none of us are one dimensional – I like to imagine that when Ann said that prayer she was just very tired and feeling very much under appreciated. Maybe she was saying these words not to G-d but somebody in that room.
And sure enough when her daughter Anna was older she lobbied for Mother’s day to be a holiday. And eventually President Woodrow Wilson made it one.
….and it’s been a monetary feast for candy, card, and flower companies ever since.
Anna Jarvis HATED that. She hated what it became and lost all her money and really, in some ways, her life by working to try to stop what it had become. Trying to stop the commercialization of what she saw as something much more meaningful. I think she wanted people to understand how much her mother did for the world that went completely unappreciated.
Mother’s day was supposed to be something different than it is now.
But the sentiment of those original efforts are still needed.
We still live in a world where people’s children are being sent away to other lands to kill other people’s children. Where childbirth is still dangerous, especially if you are black birthing person.
Children are being imprisoned in detention centers here. Killed in genocides across the sea.
Children are still the most oppressed class.
And it is mostly women are still expected to stand between the world and them with no assistance from the powers that be.
We still live in a world where women are held to impossibly high standards, mother or not, with their work deeply undervalued and unappreciated.
Patriarchy says that nurturing is specifically related to women and we know that under patriarchy anything related to women isn’t valued….
or at least isn’t valued outside of the narrow context that it will allow.
Like telling women that to be a mother is the highest call, that it is “Their biological destiny” ….has there ever been a more stomach churning phrase.
Pushing motherhood on women and then but then leaving them without any support or protection.
Even if women don’t have kids they are often cast in the nurturing role. Often encouraged to take jobs that are seen as more nurturing or to become the unofficial “mothers” of the office, making sure the food is ordered and the cake makes it in.
So women, mothers or not, are caught in an endless loop of being the nurturers without any support or acknowledgement.
Often feeling the pressure to perform those roles even when they don’t want to.
Thank goodness we are living in a time when so many have been able to extract themselves from this. Where modern medicine has allowed us some bodily autonomy.
But the pressure still exists and patriarchy still insists that women fulfill this role in society.
But in order for that pressure to work, they have to reinforce gender essentialism – the belief that there are only two genders and that each gender has inherent traits and never the two shall meet.
And maybe that would be okay, if that’s how people worked but in order to make it work they police gender in a million different ways. Its policed in society, through religions, and policies.
You don’t have to police things that come naturally.
Even outside the vastness of the gender spectrum we all know cis people who defy all gender norms.
Most of us, probably defy most of them.
But the pressure persists because the role nurturers play is vital to our society. It is necessary to keep people, plants, and animals alive and healthy. Nurturing is how life thrives.
But patriarchy – a system that requires domination – of people, of animals, of plants….of the earth – can only tolerate it to an extent. Can only tolerate it at the rate in which it benefits the systems… but not a inch more.
Patriarchy requires children to be born and nurtured but, just as Julie Ward Howe wrote, when it needs them, requires an unlearning of that nurturing in order to…harm and exploit others, to harm and exploit the earth …
to do the work of domination.
– Just so we are clear, patriarchy is about men being inherently better than everyone else but it harms men just as it harms everyone and everything else.
We need nurturing. We all need nurturing. And everyone, regardless of gender, may be nurturers.
Nurturers of children, relationships, communities, plants, animals. A million different things that require someone tending to and caring for in order to thrive.
So what would our world look like if we allowed this.
If we rejected gender essentialism
If we stopped putting pressure on people to perform certain roles
Stopped policing people existing
What If all nurturers, regardless of gender, were given the acknowledgement for the work they do to care for life so that it might thrive.
What if they were given the support and the respect they deserved?
Wouldn’t the world be a much better place if caring for children, the elderly. and all life was seen as the most valued thing?
– I don’t think we would have the caregiver burnout crisis that we have If we valued nurturing, if we valued the act of mothering. We could acknowledge that the work of nurturing is also the work of opening our hearts.
That it helps us to understand our place in the interdependent web of all existence and connect us to others with empathy.
What if nurturing was acknowledged to be the radicalizing and transforming act, that it is.
Mother’s day exists as it does only because patriarchy requires nurturing from women but only in the way that it benefits the systems.
Patriarchy would rather give a small token of acknowledgement than actually provide the support, systems, and value that we are entitled to.
Mother’s day exists that way it does to flatten the call of Julie Ward Howe and Ann Jarvis so that it could pacify and commodify, all while maintaining the status quo.
Maybe we should turn that on its head. Maybe we should take this opportunity to demand better.
Demand acknowledgment of the beautiful and often heartbreaking work of loving this world, children, creatures, and the planet.
And then man we here allow ourselves to be transformed by the radical everyday acts of nurturing, caring for, and loving one another.
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 you feel nourished as you leave this place
May you feel held
May you feel loved
May the warmth of all that is created here carry you throughout the week.
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