In Jewish tradition, your mother determines whether you are Jewish…if your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish. The point: our mothers determine so much about ourselves, which is where William Ross Wallace got the idea for his famous poem, or at least the famous line from a relatively obscure poem from which I got my sermon title:
The Hand That Rocks The CradleIs The Hand That Rules The World
Blessings on the hand of women!
Angels guard its strength and grace,
In the palace, cottage, hovel,
Oh, no matter where the place;
Would that never storms assailed it,
Rainbows ever gently curled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Infancy’s the tender fountain,
Power may with beauty flow,
Mother’s first to guide the streamlets,
From them souls unresting grow–
Grow on for the good or evil,
Sunshine streamed or evil hurled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Woman, how divine your mission
Here upon our natal sod!
Keep, oh, keep the young heart open
Always to the breath of God!
All true trophies of the ages
Are from mother-love impearled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Blessings on the hand of women!
Fathers, sons, and daughters cry,
And the sacred song is mingled
With the worship in the sky–
Mingles where no tempest darkens,
Rainbows evermore are hurled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
~ William Ross Wallace
The role of women, including those who are mothers, has been evolving – changing – in recent decades.
The role of women in my own life has been very significant, of course. And today I want to name some names, starting with my own mother, Dorothy Laird.
My mother is first among the many – her influence was early, of course, and lasting, to be sure. I’ve said quite a bit about my mother over the years, including her imperfections, which made it easier for me to accept my own imperfections. The most important thing about my own mother – a mother whom I shared with eight others – was that she taught us all about that fuzzy thing we call ‘unconditional love.’ When I expressed some anxiety or nervousness about moving from Attleboro to Westport, 28 years ago, she asked me what that was about. I said that the Westport congregation has a reputation of being ‘hard on ministers.’ She said, simply, “Oh, Frankie, just be yourself and they will love you.” That statement summarizes her influence on me!
Then there’s the mother of my children, Anita Daniels, for whom I am eternally grateful; she was and is a wonderful mother. She has an intimate understanding of the value of unconditional love, and an intimate appreciation for another important thing that we call ‘forgiveness.’ No details, here. My gratitude for her influence on my life is deep.
Then there’s the mother of my grandchildren, my wonderful daughter, Susan Hildreth, who, I think and hope, has forgiven me for my imperfect parenting. She made me a grandfather and was intentional about the bonding with my grandchildren in those early, important, formative years. Her influence is ongoing, as I learn from her, more and more as the years go by.
There’s also the mother of my step-daughter, my wife, Lory Nurenberg, who made a step-father out of me, and helps me learn how to be a good step-father, which is easily as challenging as being a father and grandfather. She has been, and continues to be, my partner in the second half of life, and my teacher and mentor on a day-to-day basis.
There are others, especially my grade school teachers, each of whom has a significant influence on my early development. There was Mrs. Harrington, first grade teacher, who opened the window in our classroom one spring day, called me to the window, and told me to read out loud to a woman standing in the cemetery that was next to the school. When I was finished reading the page she assigned, she turned to the class, put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Now, class, that’s how you do it…that’s how you must project.’
Then there were the other grade-school teachers, in order of the grades in which I had them: Miss Nestor; Mrs. Kelley; Miss York and Miss Doneghey; Miss Sullivan and Miss Dillon.
Their hands didn’t rock the cradle, exactly, but I am forever grateful for what they gave, what they did for me.
I’m even grateful to Miss Doneghey, who I forgive – she was the meanest, cruelest teacher I ever had – one of the meanest people I’ve ever known. She gave me a back-handed gift (as well as a couple of back-handers, those slaps across the face for which she was known.) I didn’t know ‘what wars were going on, down there, where the spirit meets the bone.’ But having to deal with her helped me to develop a kind of ‘understanding’ or ‘acceptance’ that’s necessary in life, and sometimes necessary in my line of work.
Back to Mother’s Day: Early in my ministry I attended a clergy conference with Unitarian colleagues and the issue of choosing sermon topics came up – I appreciated hearing from senior colleagues in this regard; deciding on sermon topics has always been a challenge, and it ought to be…so it continues to be a challenge.
There was agreement among the colleagues that Easter sermons for Unitarian clergy were very touchy, since so many people in our pews have some unresolved issues around it, having been brought up in traditional Christian churches.
It’s another thing to celebrate Christmas. Let’s face it, Christmas is essentially secular, with Santa and gift giving and the tree and the carols, including Charles Dickens story about Scrooge, A Christmas Carol. Unitarians in America have had a very significant influence on the ways we celebrate Christmas.
Some colleagues talked about using a lectionary. A lectionary is a predetermined cycle of Scripture readings that are designed to take an individual or congregation through the majority of the Bible in a selected period of time, say two years. There are daily lectionaries as well as weekly lectionaries. The idea of it is unappealing to me.
Christmas and Easter aside, a consensus exists when it comes to the category of “The Most Touchy Sermon Topic and Best to be Avoided.” Hands down, the prize in that category goes to Mothers’ Day.
How can you go wrong talking about mothers? We all know the idiom ‘As American as Apple pie and Motherhood,’ even if nobody knows what is particularly American about either of them.
If you heap too much praise mothers, and if you’re too uncritical, you open yourself to criticism from those who had difficult mothers. Like Mrs. Doneghey, some mothers are mean, cruel and abusive.
Those who had such mothers don’t want to be reminded about those difficulties – they don’t want you to assume that all is well in the mommy department of their childhood. I get it. (And I’ve ‘gotten it,’ in the sense of complaints about what someone called my sugary-sweet sermon about my mother and grandmother.)
Early in my ministry I was called to the home of a long-time-but-absent member of the congregation who had died. I had never met her, but I arrived at the house to plan a memorial service. I sat in the dimly-lit living room, waiting for the two sons and a daughter to join me – they were in the 50’s.
They arrived – I sat with my notebook, and after what was an uncomfortably long silence the oldest of her sons spoke. I’ll never forget his first words: “Well, Reverend, I expect you’re waiting for us to say something good about our mother. There’s nothing to say. She was a son-of-a-bitch!”
Okay. So let’s plan an appropriate service.
The service consisted mostly of music and a couple of traditional Bible readings. I remember it well. It was on a Friday evening. I welcomed people, did the readings and at one point I said, “Mary was not an easy person to live with.”
“Amen!” A loud voice boomed from the middle of the sanctuary. It turns out it was the deceased’s brother who came up to me following the service and shook my hand – actually nearly shook my arm off.
“Thank you,” he said, and added, “To tell you the truth Reverend I was afraid you would be slinging the bull…I drove all the way from Florida, and you made it worthwhile, just by telling the truth.”
Then there’s the other side of that coin – to suggest that all mothers are fallible, imperfect, doesn’t seem appropriate either. “We really don’t need to hear about that, do we? Especially on Mother’s Day!”
The acceptance of your own imperfection is liberating.
The acceptance of your mother’s imperfection is liberating.
Liberation – that highly sought after internal sense of freedom which we loosely call ‘peace of mind.’ It’s a goal we share.
You don’t have to grovel. You don’t have to make a confession of sin. You do have to accept the cards you are dealt and play them to the best of your ability; and avoid making the same mistakes over and over.
At any rate, Mother’s Day is the most challenging sermon of them all, and not just for Unitarians!
In addition to the reality of our imperfections, there’s the somewhat uncomfortable response from those who have never been mothers, some of their own choice, for various reasons, and some never became mothers by virtue of a biological inability to bear children.
The Biblical term was ‘barren woman.’ The implication was that God was punishing her, including the punishment heaped on the third and fourth generation for ‘the sins of the fathers.’
We who fill the pulpit on Mother’s Day have to be sure to include those women who never became mothers, and those who aren’t necessarily thrilled about becoming mothers, including those who feel too inadequate to the task. It is, after all, the most demanding role of all.
Some parents are relieved to learn that a certain sense of inadequacy or imperfection is universal. Most criticism about parents is self-inflicted.
Mother’s Day sermons tend to extol the virtues of motherhood with great exaggeration.
We have to validate the nurturing of women who adopt children, often providing exceptional care and nurturing.
We also have to make sure we don’t leave out single moms…and we have to make sure we include the two-mom families.
On the surface it may seem like a nice, safe topic – a nice safe day…Mother’s Day. One of my colleagues (Steve Edington) called it ‘a veritable mine-field.’ He said, ‘the best way to avoid such a no-win situation is to not put yourself into one in the first place, so clearly the path of least resistance is to skip the Mother’s Day sermon altogether.’
Having said all that, having acknowledged the risks, we want to sing the praises of mothers and motherhood. “In a house which becomes a home, one hands down and another takes up the heritage of mind and heart, laughter and tears, musings and deeds.” Antoine de St.-Exupery
All of which leads me to a story about a woman who was a Sunday school teacher in my former church, in Attleboro, MA.
I learned about her shortly after I arrived at that church in 1972 to begin my first senior ministry.
There was a Sunday school class of first-grade girls that started meeting in 1895, and five of those who started meeting as first graders were still alive – three of them still active members of the church, Murray Universalist Church.
They called their teacher Mother Lamb, and they stayed together as a Sunday school class with Mother Lamb (Elizabeth Lamb) for fifty years – from 1895 to 1945.
Since three of them were still active members of the congregation, I was able to ask them about their experience, both in terms of their religious education and more especially about their experience with Mother Lamb.
Each of the three said essentially the same thing: “Well, in those early years Mother Lamb always had a lesson, and when it was done she would put it aside and say, ‘Now girls, we have some very important things to talk about; you are going to see the day when woman in our country will be able to vote,’ and things like that.”
With great enthusiasm they told me how they marched together for women’s suffrage, and women’s rights in general.
They told me how the local YMCA/YWCA actually decided to bar Universalists from membership, until two or three wealthy industrialists who happened to be members of that congregation said they would not contribute to the Y and they quickly reversed their decision – these women were way ahead of their time!
In 1920, when these women were about thirty years old, they celebrated the passage of the 19th amendment, which declares: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
They told me how they showed up together at the polling place, with Mother Lamb, and cast their first ballots.
We’ll close with e e cummings:
if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses
my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)
standing near my
(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see
nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my
(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
& the whole garden will bow)