“The Presence of a Protector, the Promise of Peace” Rev. Greg Ward and Moses Canales Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley May 8, 2016
BEGINNING THE JOURNEY <
Celebrations of mothers were historically held in spring, the season of fertility. In ancient Egypt, there were celebrations to honor Isis, the loving mother-goddess.
As the Roman Empire became Christian, the fourth Sunday of Lent continued to honor mothers by honoring the Virgin Mary, and the "mother church."
In the 1600s, England declared an official Mothering Day for the fourth Sunday of Lent encouraging families to gather. Since many working class families were employed as servants on separate estates, they were given a day off to visit their mothers.
When pilgrims came to America, they left behind all English and European holidays – including Mother’s Day.
It was reintroduced by Julia Ward Howe – author of the battle hymn of the republic – in 1870, after the Civil War – where mothers came together in protest of their sons killing other mothers' sons.
But it was Anna Jarvis who really created Mother’s Day. Her mother had held ‘Mother's Friendship Days’ to reunite families separated during the war. On May 10, three years after her mother died, she organized a day in her church in Grafton, West Virginia to reflect on mothers roles of life givers and peace makers. She wanted to heal the scars of the civil war. In one year, the celebration spread to nearly 45 states, Mexico and Canada. By 1914 Woodrow Wilson made the second Sunday of May ‘Mother's Day.’
Today, the holiday bears little resemblance to that original intent. Anna Jarvis herself was upset that it became more focused on sentimentality than unity and peace making. In the decades that followed, she spent the last of her own money lobbying to abolish mother’s day. She died in poverty without any children of her own.
Have we reduced and limited the idea of Mother’s Day – indeed mothers – from some greater intended purpose? That is the question we ask today.
Come, let us worship together.
READING <
I understood. I’m also not a mother. I remember once on Mother’s Day, a pastor in church asked all the mothers to stand. On my immediate right, my mother stood and on my immediate left, a dear friend stood. I, a woman in her late 30s, sat. I don’t know how others saw me, but I felt dehumanized, gutted as a woman. Real women stood. Empty shells sat. I do not normally feel this way. I do not like feeling this way. I want no woman in church to ever feel this way again.
I think being a mother is important and should be honored. But this is what I would like to hear in church:
- To those who gave birth this year to their first child—we celebrate with you - To those who lost a child this year – we mourn with you - To those who are in the trenches with little ones every day and wear the badge of food stains – we appreciate you - To those who experienced loss through miscarriage, failed adoptions, or running away—we mourn with you - To those who walk the hard path of infertility, fraught with pokes, prods, tears, and disappointment – we walk with you. Forgive us when we say foolish things. We don’t mean to make it harder than it already is. - To those who are pregnant with new life, both expected and surprising –we anticipate with you - To those who placed children up for adoption — we commend you for your selflessness and remember how you hold that child in your heart - To those who are single and long to be married and mothering your own children – we mourn that life has not turned out the way you longed for it to be - To those who are foster moms, mentor moms, and spiritual moms – we need you - To those who lost their mothers this year – we grieve with you - To those who experienced abuse at the hands of your own mother – we acknowledge your experience - To those who step-parent – we walk with you on these complex paths - To those who will have emptier nests in the upcoming year – we grieve and rejoice with you - To those who now find themselves being a mother to your own mother, we acknowledge how tender this transition can be. - And to those men who have become both mother and father to your children, we bless you. I’m not a mother. So you may think it unusual for me to speak about Mother’s Day; but maybe that’s why so many talk to me about mothering, I’ve got the parts, just not the goods. And know that although I’m a bit nervous to go to church on Mother’s Day, I will be there. But if I’m asked to stand, I might just walk out. And keep walking.
SERMON “The Presence of a Protector, the Promise of Peace” <
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Her truth is marching on.
I fell in love with this hymn the first time I heard it. The cadence made me want to stand up and march. The melody felt inspiring and bold. And the words – as you might have noticed – I could never remember or get right.
For reasons unknown at the time, I sang it with the pronouns, ‘She’ and ‘Her,’ instead of ‘He’ and ‘His.’ I was all too aware that our culture identified God as ‘He’. But, somehow this particular song was so stridently defiant and different – much like my Mom (who was the God of our house) – the change seemed appropriate.
A moment my mom was fond of reminding me of took place the first time she saw me marching around the house singing the song. She leaned in, curious. And then she asked me to sing it again. I did. She smiled. And suddenly I got the sense that something might be wrong. So, I asked her if I’d gotten it right. ‘Oh, yeah!’ She said, ‘you definitely got it right.’
That truth marching on was, at the time, beyond my understanding. It began as a hymn, before my time. It was written by a woman who was feisty, unconventional, strong of character, firm in her convictions and ready to do battle for her causes. Just like my mom. And like my mom, she was a Unitarian.
Singing about God as ‘She,’ wasn’t about making a statement. It wasn’t a conscious choice so much as intuition – a cultural Freudian slip. And when I look back and imagine what seed planted such intuition, I began to understand something important.
I grew up in the 60s. A time when everywhere you looked there was a questioning norms… a stretching of assumptions and boundaries… casting off the yoke of authority. Civil Rights raised the questions of oppression and liberation. And it wasn’t long before these ideas of challenging norms became issues for ecologists, the poor and working class, the LGBT community… And, of course, women.
It was a time when environmentalism became a religion. As did the labor movement and social activism. As did the sexual revolution and the drug culture. And as each of these new philosophies emerged, not only did the world begin to change, but so did the image of God projected large by these various cultures. Almost overnight, we were exploring liberation theology, environmental theology, process theology and, of course, feminist theology.
All these rapidly expanding understandings had a profound impact on all religions. And still do. But for Unitarian Universlism in particular, feminist theology hit home. Within a few years of the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s, a commission was appointed to create a new hymnal that used ‘inclusive language’ playing with the pronouns – and the image – of God. Applications to our seminaries poured in from women who wanted to become UU ministers and we went from 10% female clergy in the 1960s to over 50% in the 90s. And the curriculum, ‘Cakes for the Queen of Heaven’ swept through our seminaries and congregations recalling into awareness long forgotten understandings of matriarchal communities and feminine aspects of the divine that appeared in a variety of cultures throughout human history.
Today, our culture is still stretching to imagine the kind of God liberated enough to rise above the constraints of gender. Some have noticed over the two years I’ve been here that I often freely exchange the pronouns for God, sometimes referring to ‘Her,’ sometimes to ‘Him.’ I do this not to intentionally confuse you (... well, okay… I admit I really do want to intentionally confuse you). But I also do so because I think it’s valuable to try and break us out of rigid conventions that have imposed unnecessary and unhelpful assumptions and restrictions on our understanding.
There is a new conversation about God emerging today and it integrates liberation theology, process theology, feminist theology and Jungian psychology. It imagines God as being a balance of two powerful archetypal manifestations – the divine masculine and the divine feminine.
The divine masculine is the side of God we are most familiar with. It has been the dominant framework employed over the last several thousand years. It presents God as ‘He’. As dominant, in control, transcendent and outwardly focused. It is a God determined to go forth and convert the world to righteousness. The call of this God is to seek peace through differentiation and dominion.
The divine feminine, on the other hand, is inwardly focused. It is receptive. Intuitive. Integrating. It draws in, embraces, envelopes, germinates, reconfigures and eventually re-births new ideas and new understandings. Rather than ‘divide and conquer’ as its focus, it integrates and transforms. It favors inclusion and collaboration rather than divine proclamation.
A political model based on the divine masculine would be more like a kingdom on a mountaintop with an army. The divine feminine would be more like a commune in a lush valley with a soup kitchen. It’s not that one is inherently better than the other. Both have their place. Both are essential to establish balance. But the masculine side of God without the feminine will raise its people to be contentious, competitive and war-like. The feminine side of God without the masculine will produce people who ignore the need for boundaries and become indiscriminately inclusive.
And it is essential to realize that these two sides have nothing to do with gender. Women are learning how to embody the divine masculine in the same way that men need to understand and integrate the divine feminine. The purpose of which is not just about God being in good relationship with ‘Her’ children. It’s about us learning to be in good relationship with ours.
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My mother was a front-line feminist. She learned to parent while in line for bra-burning and assertiveness training classes. She considered herself to be casualty of patriarchy when so many of her interests and passions were disallowed – considered improper or unlady-like. She saw her generation breaking free from the Victorian gender norms that had been carried forth and planted in America by the Puritans. She felt it essential to learn more masculine tendencies as she became ‘liberated’ into the world of single parent forced her to be – both – the breadwinner for her family AND the nurturer of her children’s souls.
My mom had three children. And though outnumbered at home, she recognized home was only one of the battles in the larger war she fought. Everyday there was more to do than time to do it and so she learned to bark out commands. She could be judgmental and sometimes domineering. Some of the mantras she repeated until they stuck in my head:
“If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” “You sit still!” “If it had teeth it would bite you.” “If I have to tell you one more time…” “Keep your hands to yourself” “Don’t ask me about fair! The only ‘fair’ I know is in Kansas.” “I swear to God, I’ll turn this car around right now!” “Don’t spill.” “I’ll be there in a minute.” “I told you not to spill” “You just hold it, Mister!” “Well? Don’t just sit there with your teeth in your mouth! Do something!” “If everyone was jumping off a cliff…”
To the ears of a little boy, these messages were confusing. I grew up watching June Cleaver on TV. And Aunt Bea of Mayberry. And Mrs. Mitchell from Dennis the Menace. I was fed images of mothers who made coco with marshmallows and cut off the crust on your sandwiches. So, every mother’s day, I struggled to celebrate the Gloria Steinem mother life had given me with the Mrs. Cunningham version (from Happy Days) I thought the rest of the world had.
For the longest time, I thought it was me. That I was so unmanageably unruly that my mother needed to be extra controlling to keep me line. It didn’t occur to me that, being a single mother meant my mom had to weave together all the many divided roles in a two parent household into one person. And that sometimes learning a new role is hard.
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Writer Ann Lamott describes the complex, confusing and impossible set of instructions that’s never actually included when signing up to be a mother. She writes,
“When a mother first gives birth, her baby will often be very quiet and sort of spaced out, like a little Hindu lama from Mars. And you will think that you got a good one. You didn't. The batteries just haven't arrived. They're all the same: on a good day, any baby can make Ted Cruz look like the Dalai Lama. But on a bad day, they will cry and kvetch like they’ve never heard of climate change. And it won’t be a moving, tender "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" kind of thing. It's this hysterical, self- obsessed Bill O’Reilly on bad acid kind of thing”
“The good news is that you fall hopelessly in love with them in a way that reduces you to something from the Care Bears. The bad news is that you now have so much to lose that you'll want to sit on the porch outside the house in a rocking chair, with a gun laid across your lap, like Granny Clampett.”
Or, as Erma Bombeck describes, ‘deciding to have children is deciding that your heart will forever walk around outside your body.’ Which means that you are constantly extending your domain of interest to include the far edge of your child’s wandering attention. So mothers are often found prowling around the perimeter of their children’s footsteps, casting a wary eye and sizing up anyone remotely in the vicinity.
My mother learned how to stand guard. How to be a fierce lioness protecting her cubs. At some level, she knew it cost her the chance to be tender. And it cost us some experience feeling adored. But there was no question in my mind that we had a protector whenever we found ourselves in the heat of battle. Nor did we fail to realize that if we stepped out of line, we would soon find ourselves square in the path of the army of the Lord.
Yes, my mother had to learn how to integrate more of the divine masculine typical of male patterned territorial behavior. And, yes, she was undertaking what many women are being asked to do to restore balance to a world divided by gender norms. And, yes, it is hard for our children to make sense of that against the backdrop of Victorian gender roles.
But it’s equally if not more true that men need to integrate more of the divine feminine in what they contribute to our culture or the violence which has become so dominant in our species will lead to our ultimate destruction.
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Julia Ward Howe followed her husband Samuel Greeley Howe onto the battlefields of the Civil War as he helped to create the Sanitation Commission. What she saw broke her heart. A mother forced to watch brothers fighting. Boys who came home a mess. Or didn’t come home at all. In the midst of war, she called for mothers to lobby for a day where the mothering instinct might be instilled in all God’s children – regardless of gender.
Are there not a few similarities between mothering children and walking a battlefield? Every childhood is a mixture of terror, triumph and tears. There are episodes of plans backfiring, dreams having to be carried off on a stretcher, trying to figure out who is on your side and who isn’t, feeling like you’re under fire and feeling all too often like you’ve run out of ammo. Being a mother often means being a combination medic and field marshal, commandant and confidante. Someone who is willing to go into war to attend to the fallen. Find help. Bring supplies. The presence of a protector. The promise of peace.
Anna Jarvis knew that. She lobbied to commemorate mothers for the peace mothers could bring to the world. And she succeeded. But, in later years, she became increasingly concerned over the commercialization of Mother's Day. "I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit," she said. She abhorred the selling of flowers, and called greeting cards "a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write." Nevertheless, the day she helped create become one of the most profitable for greeting card companies and florists. “What will you do,” she asked, “to route charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations?" In the end, Anna Jarvis went bankrupt in her campaign to bring Mother’s Day back to its original intent. She lived the last years of her life in nursing home without a penny to her name. It is interesting to note, after bankruptcy, all her bills were paid, unbeknownst to her – by the Florist's Exchange.
It is an ironic, funny and wayward world we live in. Restoring balance and providing for the domestic tranquility is a maternal instinct. Seeking that balance, my mother had to learn how to integrate the divine masculine into her approach. And she insisted that I figure out how to integrate more of the divine feminine into mine. For she knew that I – nor the world – would survive without doing so.
She was right. And ‘Her’ truth is – still – marching on.
To the Glory, Glory Hallelujah of Life.
GOING DEEPER SLIDE 1 Personal steps toward cultivating the divine feminine: 1. Practice creation 2. Engage with other creators (especially creative women) 3. Explore sensuality (‘sensation’ / ‘in-sight’ of your 5 senses) 4. Reflect on ‘mothering’ (giving birth, nurturing, care and feeding, protecting, etc.) 5. Become aware of biases regarding womanhood from family of origin 6. Become aware of biases regarding womanhood from your culture 7. Cultivate intuition. 8. Observe your emotions. 9. Cultivate radical acceptance, love, valuing, and invitation to integrate 10. Accept and embrace your own body SLIDE 2 Steps UUCB could cultivate the divine feminine 1. Reimagine authority – away from ‘mine’ or ‘yours’ to ‘ours’ 2. Share resources (information, support, vision) 3. Integrate differentiated groups (silos) in collaborative ways 4. Explore how to matter to neighbors without the goal of making them ‘UU’ 5. Explore how ‘shared’ power increases power