Mother's Day
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday May 11th, 2003
***
It may surprise you to hear this (it certainly surprised me when I realized it), but this is only the third time in my twenty-some year career as a minister that I have actually preached on Mother’s Day.
The first time was in 1981, when I was still a student minister at the First and Second Church in Boston, and my mother was out visiting from Seattle in advance of my graduation and ordination.
The second time was in 1985, during the first year of my first settled ministry in Midland, Texas.
And today is the third.
And interestingly enough, this 18 year hiatus corresponds almost exactly to the period of my marriage. Margie and I tied the knot on June 21st, 1985 (about six weeks after my LAST Mother’s Day sermon), and our divorce became final on April 15th, or just a few weeks ago.
I don’t know whether there is some sort of significance to this odd coincidence, but it’s not as if I don’t have anything meaningful to say on the subject of motherhood. It’s just that somehow this has always been an easy Sunday for me to take off. Mother’s Day is a perennially popular day for lay-led services: either children talking about their mothers, or mothers talking about themselves. And for some inexplicable reason, it is also a particularly easy Sunday to find a guest speaker.
For my own part, it’s always nice to have an excuse to take a Sunday off, to maybe spend a little more time on the weekend with one’s own family; and I tend to think of the second Sunday in May as a holiday more sentimental than substantive anyway: a day of cards and flowers and long distance phone calls, of breakfasts in bed and dinners out, and large boxes of chocolates which tend to be quickly devoured by one's own offspring. It's not a particularly profound or controversial occasion -- after all, everyone has a mother, and even those whose relationships with their mothers might be considered less than ideal would be considered exceptionally tactless to express those sentiments on this particular day.
Yet in the midst of this shamelessly commercial orgy of unconditional appreciation, there is always the danger that we may inadvertently trivialize the essential quality of the special relationship between a mother and her child by failing to appreciate motherhood for what it truly is, and the awesome responsibilities it carries with it. No two mothers are alike; my mother is different from your mothers, or even from the mother of my two brothers, although biologically she is the same woman.
And no individual mother is ever perfect or ideal. Indeed, it is the very diversity of mothers which make motherhood such a sacred and delightful institution, and thus worthy of a special day of appreciation. Motherhood is nature’s most fundamental relationship. It is the cornerstone of the family, which is in turn the basic building block of society. Your mother carries you inside her body; provides you with nourishment from that body; puts her own life at risk in order to bring your life into the world, and is always present at the moment of your birth. And when something goes wrong (as if often does), we instinctively understand and sympathize; nothing is more sad, or tragic.
We are all no doubt quite familiar with the image of "motherhood" that comprises 50% of the popular understanding of the so-called "traditional" nuclear family: the husband as breadwinner, the wife as homemaker; the father as provider, protector, and disciplinarian, the mother as nurturer, caregiver, and cookie baker. And I suspect that in a lot of churches this morning, the preacher is lamenting the “demise” (or even the "destruction") of this "traditional" family, and blaming its disappearance for all of America's social ills, perhaps even suggesting that all would be right with the world again if only women would remain in their proper sphere, concerning themselves solely with their children, their kitchens and, of course, their church activities.
Yet I think it's important to note that this "traditional" family is little more than a cultural stereotype; it has never been as common in the real world as it has been on TV, and it is growing less common all the time. So without in any way slighting this "traditional" view of motherhood, let’s not lose sight of the fact that there are many other styles of motherhood as well, and that these mothers too, deserve our appreciation and our respect.
There are now, for example, countless thousands of two-income households in America; so many that, in many ways, working mothers have become the cultural norm, despite the cultural stereotype. For some this is a matter of choice, reflecting the desire of many women to have a career of their own as well as marriage and family; while for others it is simply a matter of economic necessity. According to Newsweek magazine, in approximately 30% of these households the wife is actually the breadwinner, (or “alpha-earner,” as they are now being called), while their husbands may very well (again by choice or necessity) be filling the role of homemaker and primary child caregiver.
But regardless of the details of the arrangement, the demands of motherhood within the context of a two-worker family are quite different from those of the stereotypical "traditional" family. Sociologists are fond of drawing comparisons between single- and dual-income households: on the one hand, two paychecks often result in a higher standard of living than might be available with a single breadwinner, which can certainly be an advantage when it comes to raising children; yet, on the other, the fact that both parents may be working outside the home often means that children spend less time with their biological parents, and more by themselves or in so-called custodial care.
And these are just the facts of life. So the fact that some still persist in attaching moral judgments to these alternatives is, to my mind, an unfortunate one; we are not faced with a "right" and a "wrong" way to parent children, but rather choices between different options, any of which carry their own rewards and limitations. No particular option should be preferred or exalted; but each needs to be understood and appreciated for what it is. A mother is still a mother, whether she works outside the home, or devotes her energies to working within it.
Of course, there’s at least one other possibility we haven’t spoken much about. Mothers in single parent households typically confront all of the challenges faced by the working mothers in a two-income family, while enjoying few of the benefits in return. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that, Newsweek magazine notwithstanding, women still tend to earn less than their male counterparts for similar work, and few single parents are truly free to put in the long hours away from home that are often required in order to reach the highest levels of professional success in our highly competitive business economy.
People become single parents for a variety of reasons -- death, divorce, unplanned pregnancy -- yet all too often the so-called “traditional family values” crowd approaches the issue of single parenthood, not with an attitude of compassion and concern, but rather with labels of condemnation and moral stigma. They blame single mothers and other working women for the "problem" of latchkey children, rather than recognizing that single parents have unique needs, and that these mothers must often become the most capable and creative parents of all, simply in order to make ends meet. Single moms deserve a special order of appreciation, as well as a greater commitment from society to do far more than we do to assist them in this difficult task of raising children alone.
This past week, while the President was off the coast of California playing “Top Gun” and living out the unfulfilled fantasies of his misspent youth in the Texas Air National Guard, his wife Laura was out west near Tuba City, Arizona, reading aloud to Navajo and Hopi Indian children and visiting the family of Private First Class Lori Piestewa, a divorced 23-year-old mother of two who was Killed-in-Action in Iraq when her unit, the 507th Maintenance company, was ambushed on March 23rd after making a wrong turn in the desert.
Piestewa was one of three women soldiers who were part of that ill-fated convoy; the others, of course, were her roommate, 19-year-old Jessica Lynch (who was dramatically rescued from her hospital bed by US Army “Special Ops” commandos ten days later), and 30-year-old Shoshana Johnson, another single mom wounded and captured by Iraqi soldiers, and later released and rescued as the Iraqi regime collapsed.
Piestewa, Lynch and Johnson have all been lauded as American “heroes,” but they have also become something of a cause célèbre for cultural conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, who asked in a recent editorial commentary “Does the Military Have the Nerve to Celebrate Mother’s Day?” “What is the matter with the men of this country -- our political and military leaders,” Schlafly asked, “that they acquiesce in the policy of sending mothers of infants out to fight Saddam Hussein? Are they the kind of man who, on hearing a noise at 2 a.m., would send his wife or daughter downstairs to confront an intruder?”
Schlafly describes these three women soldiers as “the victims of trickle-down feminism,” and suggests that “the politicians have brought this embarrassment on our nation because they allowed themselves to be henpecked by militant feminists. The whole idea of men sending women, including mothers, out to fight the enemy is contrary to our belief in the importance of the family and motherhood and, furthermore, no one respects a man who would let a woman do his fighting for him.”
Well, I’m not generally one to agree with Phyllis Schlafly, but she does have a point. The problem is that she’s only telling half the story. Schlafly points out that “Jessica Lynch didn’t volunteer for combat...she wanted to be a kindergarten teacher and joined the Army because jobs were scarce in West Virginia.” But she doesn’t ask WHY jobs were scarce in West Virginia, or why young men and women from all over the country, and particularly men and women of color, often enlist in the military because they feel it is the only way that they can gain access to the kind of health insurance, childcare, job training and other educational benefits, for both themselves and their children, that the citizens of most First World countries take for granted.
Feminism didn’t force Lori and Jessica and Shoshanna to join the Army, it only made it possible for them, and approximately 210,000 women a lot like them, to have an opportunity to create a better future for their families than would have been possible if they had been restricted, like their mothers, to cleaning houses, or waiting tables, or performing some other sort of tedious, menial, physical labor: long hours, low pay, no benefits, and little chance of advancement beyond their “place” in a trickle-down economy dominated by white, male breadwinners and their stay-at-home wives.
OK, I guess you’re starting to see why my wife never used to let me preach on Mother’s Day.
As those of you who read Larry’s letter in the Inky last week already know, Mother’s Day was originally conceived by Julia Ward Howe as a “Mother’s Day for Peace.” Because Howe knew that, despite patriotic appeals to Mom and Apple Pie, there is something fundamentally antithetical between motherhood and militarism. It is always SOME mother’s son (or daughter) who is killed “in action;” warfare generates, above all else, not glorious heroes, but rather widows and orphans, whose lives and futures are often forgotten or ignored once the flag-waving has subsided. We’re doing better now than we have in the past. But we could still do a lot better than we do, and not just for the families of soldiers, but for all the mothers and their children who inhabit this great nation.
The poet William Ross Wallace once noted that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world." And when I look back at my own childhood, I recognize the truth of this statement. The things I appreciate most about my mother are not the things she did for me, but the things she made me do for myself: things like cleaning my own room, fixing my own lunch, writing my own papers, doing my own laundry, even folding my own clothes and rolling my socks into little balls so that I would not have to search desperately for two that matched when the hour was late and I was in danger of missing my bus.
The children we raise today are the parents of tomorrow; it is an awesome responsibility, but also one of life's greatest joys. So if you would truly honor your mother today, go ahead and send those flowers and make that phone call.
But also take a moment to contemplate this most intimate and mystical of human relationships, and then go out and do something special that would make your mother proud.
For the kind of person you chose to become is the highest compliment you can pay your parents, on this day, and every other day of the year as well.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday May 11th, 2003
***
It may surprise you to hear this (it certainly surprised me when I realized it), but this is only the third time in my twenty-some year career as a minister that I have actually preached on Mother’s Day.
The first time was in 1981, when I was still a student minister at the First and Second Church in Boston, and my mother was out visiting from Seattle in advance of my graduation and ordination.
The second time was in 1985, during the first year of my first settled ministry in Midland, Texas.
And today is the third.
And interestingly enough, this 18 year hiatus corresponds almost exactly to the period of my marriage. Margie and I tied the knot on June 21st, 1985 (about six weeks after my LAST Mother’s Day sermon), and our divorce became final on April 15th, or just a few weeks ago.
I don’t know whether there is some sort of significance to this odd coincidence, but it’s not as if I don’t have anything meaningful to say on the subject of motherhood. It’s just that somehow this has always been an easy Sunday for me to take off. Mother’s Day is a perennially popular day for lay-led services: either children talking about their mothers, or mothers talking about themselves. And for some inexplicable reason, it is also a particularly easy Sunday to find a guest speaker.
For my own part, it’s always nice to have an excuse to take a Sunday off, to maybe spend a little more time on the weekend with one’s own family; and I tend to think of the second Sunday in May as a holiday more sentimental than substantive anyway: a day of cards and flowers and long distance phone calls, of breakfasts in bed and dinners out, and large boxes of chocolates which tend to be quickly devoured by one's own offspring. It's not a particularly profound or controversial occasion -- after all, everyone has a mother, and even those whose relationships with their mothers might be considered less than ideal would be considered exceptionally tactless to express those sentiments on this particular day.
Yet in the midst of this shamelessly commercial orgy of unconditional appreciation, there is always the danger that we may inadvertently trivialize the essential quality of the special relationship between a mother and her child by failing to appreciate motherhood for what it truly is, and the awesome responsibilities it carries with it. No two mothers are alike; my mother is different from your mothers, or even from the mother of my two brothers, although biologically she is the same woman.
And no individual mother is ever perfect or ideal. Indeed, it is the very diversity of mothers which make motherhood such a sacred and delightful institution, and thus worthy of a special day of appreciation. Motherhood is nature’s most fundamental relationship. It is the cornerstone of the family, which is in turn the basic building block of society. Your mother carries you inside her body; provides you with nourishment from that body; puts her own life at risk in order to bring your life into the world, and is always present at the moment of your birth. And when something goes wrong (as if often does), we instinctively understand and sympathize; nothing is more sad, or tragic.
We are all no doubt quite familiar with the image of "motherhood" that comprises 50% of the popular understanding of the so-called "traditional" nuclear family: the husband as breadwinner, the wife as homemaker; the father as provider, protector, and disciplinarian, the mother as nurturer, caregiver, and cookie baker. And I suspect that in a lot of churches this morning, the preacher is lamenting the “demise” (or even the "destruction") of this "traditional" family, and blaming its disappearance for all of America's social ills, perhaps even suggesting that all would be right with the world again if only women would remain in their proper sphere, concerning themselves solely with their children, their kitchens and, of course, their church activities.
Yet I think it's important to note that this "traditional" family is little more than a cultural stereotype; it has never been as common in the real world as it has been on TV, and it is growing less common all the time. So without in any way slighting this "traditional" view of motherhood, let’s not lose sight of the fact that there are many other styles of motherhood as well, and that these mothers too, deserve our appreciation and our respect.
There are now, for example, countless thousands of two-income households in America; so many that, in many ways, working mothers have become the cultural norm, despite the cultural stereotype. For some this is a matter of choice, reflecting the desire of many women to have a career of their own as well as marriage and family; while for others it is simply a matter of economic necessity. According to Newsweek magazine, in approximately 30% of these households the wife is actually the breadwinner, (or “alpha-earner,” as they are now being called), while their husbands may very well (again by choice or necessity) be filling the role of homemaker and primary child caregiver.
But regardless of the details of the arrangement, the demands of motherhood within the context of a two-worker family are quite different from those of the stereotypical "traditional" family. Sociologists are fond of drawing comparisons between single- and dual-income households: on the one hand, two paychecks often result in a higher standard of living than might be available with a single breadwinner, which can certainly be an advantage when it comes to raising children; yet, on the other, the fact that both parents may be working outside the home often means that children spend less time with their biological parents, and more by themselves or in so-called custodial care.
And these are just the facts of life. So the fact that some still persist in attaching moral judgments to these alternatives is, to my mind, an unfortunate one; we are not faced with a "right" and a "wrong" way to parent children, but rather choices between different options, any of which carry their own rewards and limitations. No particular option should be preferred or exalted; but each needs to be understood and appreciated for what it is. A mother is still a mother, whether she works outside the home, or devotes her energies to working within it.
Of course, there’s at least one other possibility we haven’t spoken much about. Mothers in single parent households typically confront all of the challenges faced by the working mothers in a two-income family, while enjoying few of the benefits in return. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that, Newsweek magazine notwithstanding, women still tend to earn less than their male counterparts for similar work, and few single parents are truly free to put in the long hours away from home that are often required in order to reach the highest levels of professional success in our highly competitive business economy.
People become single parents for a variety of reasons -- death, divorce, unplanned pregnancy -- yet all too often the so-called “traditional family values” crowd approaches the issue of single parenthood, not with an attitude of compassion and concern, but rather with labels of condemnation and moral stigma. They blame single mothers and other working women for the "problem" of latchkey children, rather than recognizing that single parents have unique needs, and that these mothers must often become the most capable and creative parents of all, simply in order to make ends meet. Single moms deserve a special order of appreciation, as well as a greater commitment from society to do far more than we do to assist them in this difficult task of raising children alone.
This past week, while the President was off the coast of California playing “Top Gun” and living out the unfulfilled fantasies of his misspent youth in the Texas Air National Guard, his wife Laura was out west near Tuba City, Arizona, reading aloud to Navajo and Hopi Indian children and visiting the family of Private First Class Lori Piestewa, a divorced 23-year-old mother of two who was Killed-in-Action in Iraq when her unit, the 507th Maintenance company, was ambushed on March 23rd after making a wrong turn in the desert.
Piestewa was one of three women soldiers who were part of that ill-fated convoy; the others, of course, were her roommate, 19-year-old Jessica Lynch (who was dramatically rescued from her hospital bed by US Army “Special Ops” commandos ten days later), and 30-year-old Shoshana Johnson, another single mom wounded and captured by Iraqi soldiers, and later released and rescued as the Iraqi regime collapsed.
Piestewa, Lynch and Johnson have all been lauded as American “heroes,” but they have also become something of a cause célèbre for cultural conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, who asked in a recent editorial commentary “Does the Military Have the Nerve to Celebrate Mother’s Day?” “What is the matter with the men of this country -- our political and military leaders,” Schlafly asked, “that they acquiesce in the policy of sending mothers of infants out to fight Saddam Hussein? Are they the kind of man who, on hearing a noise at 2 a.m., would send his wife or daughter downstairs to confront an intruder?”
Schlafly describes these three women soldiers as “the victims of trickle-down feminism,” and suggests that “the politicians have brought this embarrassment on our nation because they allowed themselves to be henpecked by militant feminists. The whole idea of men sending women, including mothers, out to fight the enemy is contrary to our belief in the importance of the family and motherhood and, furthermore, no one respects a man who would let a woman do his fighting for him.”
Well, I’m not generally one to agree with Phyllis Schlafly, but she does have a point. The problem is that she’s only telling half the story. Schlafly points out that “Jessica Lynch didn’t volunteer for combat...she wanted to be a kindergarten teacher and joined the Army because jobs were scarce in West Virginia.” But she doesn’t ask WHY jobs were scarce in West Virginia, or why young men and women from all over the country, and particularly men and women of color, often enlist in the military because they feel it is the only way that they can gain access to the kind of health insurance, childcare, job training and other educational benefits, for both themselves and their children, that the citizens of most First World countries take for granted.
Feminism didn’t force Lori and Jessica and Shoshanna to join the Army, it only made it possible for them, and approximately 210,000 women a lot like them, to have an opportunity to create a better future for their families than would have been possible if they had been restricted, like their mothers, to cleaning houses, or waiting tables, or performing some other sort of tedious, menial, physical labor: long hours, low pay, no benefits, and little chance of advancement beyond their “place” in a trickle-down economy dominated by white, male breadwinners and their stay-at-home wives.
OK, I guess you’re starting to see why my wife never used to let me preach on Mother’s Day.
As those of you who read Larry’s letter in the Inky last week already know, Mother’s Day was originally conceived by Julia Ward Howe as a “Mother’s Day for Peace.” Because Howe knew that, despite patriotic appeals to Mom and Apple Pie, there is something fundamentally antithetical between motherhood and militarism. It is always SOME mother’s son (or daughter) who is killed “in action;” warfare generates, above all else, not glorious heroes, but rather widows and orphans, whose lives and futures are often forgotten or ignored once the flag-waving has subsided. We’re doing better now than we have in the past. But we could still do a lot better than we do, and not just for the families of soldiers, but for all the mothers and their children who inhabit this great nation.
The poet William Ross Wallace once noted that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world." And when I look back at my own childhood, I recognize the truth of this statement. The things I appreciate most about my mother are not the things she did for me, but the things she made me do for myself: things like cleaning my own room, fixing my own lunch, writing my own papers, doing my own laundry, even folding my own clothes and rolling my socks into little balls so that I would not have to search desperately for two that matched when the hour was late and I was in danger of missing my bus.
The children we raise today are the parents of tomorrow; it is an awesome responsibility, but also one of life's greatest joys. So if you would truly honor your mother today, go ahead and send those flowers and make that phone call.
But also take a moment to contemplate this most intimate and mystical of human relationships, and then go out and do something special that would make your mother proud.
For the kind of person you chose to become is the highest compliment you can pay your parents, on this day, and every other day of the year as well.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 6:22 PM
