So, I'm starting to write my sermon about mother's day and Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. And as I was doing some research about the origins of mother's day it came to me that mother's day is all about guilt. I mean, it's not supposed to be, but that really is how it started, with a daughter feeling guilty about not doing enough for her mother, blah blah blah, so she started a letter-writing campaign to make mother's day an official holiday.
It seems to me that there were some major issues there. I mentioned that it was mother's day to a friend of mine and his response was the usual, "crap, now I have to add 'go buy a card' to my list of stuff to do." I'm sure his mom will really appreciate it...
What I'm working on with my sermon is maybe this is how we are with God. We get all bent out of shape about what we need to DO for God that we forget that we can just BE in God. Remain in God's love, so to speak, as part of the vine.
I won't get into this in my sermon, but I have a secret to tell you...I have a placenta in my freezer. It's from my son's birth, and it was smuggled out of the hospital by some rule-breaking nurses and my grossed-out husband. We're going to plant it under my dogwood tree, eventually, and it was very important for me to have it this time as I never even saw my daughter's because of her surgical birth and how it was done. It's proof to me that I was connected...that my son is mine and always will be...as much as his little bellybutton says.
And while he was growing from the placenta, he didn't have to "try." He didn't have to do anything to grow, he just had to remain connected, so to speak. Wow, now I almost wish I could talk about placentas in my sermon but it would freak them out way more than I usually do.
I'll work it in somehow, the connection between moms and kiddos, God and us. It's not one to force, and it's not something that buying a card once a year is going to make stronger or not. It simply is. And there we remain, in the love of God, as we've started praying with M, "mother of us all."
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Chickpastor, wife, and attached mama to two.
3 comments:
LOVE it! I would join your Lutheran Church if I were close. Then I would be sad when you left in July. If I could find a pastor like you then I wouldn't be hanging at the UCC church in town....and maybe my second born would be baptized already.
(oh and don't visit my blog here...I don't use it anymore since i find blogger super hard to use and live journal mucho easier).
chickpastor, it's so sad when guilt drives us. For many years, a woman who grew up at Small Church would send over a beautiful flower arrangement each Easter, in memory of her mother. Last year, through a series of errors, their names were not listed in the bulletin insert. She did not attend the service, but as usual showed up after to get the flowers and a bulletin, the "proof" of her good works. When she saw the names were not listed, she went absolutely ballistic. This year she did not bring the flowers. Later someone told me that she had notoriously bad relationship with her mother. A very sad story all the way around. Who needed the proof?
Julia Ward Howe asked for the original Mothers' Day. Actually, she asked for a Mothers' Peace Observance Day. And here's what the first woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters wrote:
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will 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, the 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 a 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 our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate 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 earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
So, darlin', it's not about the guilt. Or it's not about the commercial kind of guilt, anyway.
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