Sermon: Motherly Mentors

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Motherly Mentors

By Charles Rush

May 8, 2005

would like to wish all of you a happy Mother's Day, particularly those amongst us who are in that blessed phase of life where we have small children who have attempted to give you unreserved devotion on this day, usually with a great display of breakfast. It is very endearing. Our next door neighbors in graduate school were from England. One day the Mother in the family was ill with the flu, so her four year old daughter wanted to do something to cheer her up in the English way, so she made her tea on a tray and brought it to Mummy. Mum was a little surprised at this gift, so she said "Honey I didn't know you could make tea". Her daughter said, "I took the leaves and poured them through the strainer just like you Mummy but I couldn't find the strainer… so I used the fly swatter." There you go… Get your caffeine and your protein at the same time- insect legs floating around.

And I know that this is a complicated day for some of us, particularly we acknowledge those of you who have lost your Mother in the past year and are feeling a lot of things this day. May God's grace cover you.

Yet, I want to venture out and suggest the importance of finding and becoming Motherly mentors. I have yet to meet anyone that doesn't quietly crave authentic Mothering in some way or other. I remember being with Dave Bunting a few years ago at Sing Sing prison watching inmates graduate from a college program. Here we are inside a Medium/Maximum security prison, everyone there serving at least 10 years for violent crimes most of the time. After they received their diploma's, almost to a man, they got choked up and thanked their Mom's. It wouldn't surprise me at all that in most cases, Mom was the single person that stuck with them through their many years of incarceration.

There is something touching, humane and noble about that kind of nurturing love, wherever it is manifest. And as Bill Coffin once suggested, Oh, that it would spread to that Mother most in need of liberation, the woman in every man.

Several years ago I visited Mount Vesuvius in Southern Italy. Many of you have probably visited the city of Pompeii that was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted 2000 years ago and destroyed that Roman city. We were there to see another town, the port city of Herculaneum that had only recently been excavated.

After the volcano spread ash all over the town, the ash hardened into tartufum, which has solid tensil strength but you can also chip it away easily, which archeologists had done painstakingly. As a result, we have at Herculaneum a Roman city in something of a frozen snapshot in time. Bowls and spoons were left on tables, water buckets right where they were left.

Like any crisis, most of the people had fled but some did not. What the archeologists found were people that were waiting down on the wharf for the boats to take them away. When the volcano blew, a wave of Carbon monoxide poured down the hill and covered the town, asphyxiating those still there. So the archeologists did a novel thing, they poured plaster into the tartufum and they could literally make a cast of people as they were when they died on that terrible day. It is humane and holy to look at these casts which they have left right where they were. And there you see what you would expect to see, young and old, to be sure… And mother's who have wrapped their children under their cloak, hugging them in protection. It is very sad but also touching and tender to see. I remember thinking at the time that we can endure almost anything, even death, if we can hold on to our Mom's.

And that type of love is what Jesus encouraged us all to become. Just before the end of his life, he lamented himself, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I would have gathered you under my wings like a Hen gathers her chicks. Jesus wanted all of us to become sturdy spiritual people that could nurture others and ourselves be open to receiving the care and comfort that keeps us strong. There is that wonderful insight in I John that says, "Perfect love casteth out fear." We all need to be around that kind of love that drives back fear.

When I was thirteen my friends were all walking to school, the same way we walked to school every day. One of them was hit by a car, quite seriously. This was back in the early Paleolithic period, so when the group of four or five us arrived at school, the Principal called us into his office, got a change of clothes for the boys that needed it, and told us that he didn't want to alarm the students, so we were to go through the day and not talk about what we had seen, and to be strong. Back in the Paleolitic period, we did as we were told pretty much by the authorities.

Right near the end of school, an announcement came over the loud speaker that grimly told us that my friend had died. I had acute anxiety. The teacher was talking to the class. I quietly got up and walked out into the hall, found the nearest exit and ran all the way home, ran in the house, up the stairs, and pulled the covers over my head. I was afraid, a fear I didn't realize could be so powerful. My mother just came into my room and held me. There wasn't much to say. You know, there never is. But we need those sturdy wings, those compassionate arms. They help drive back the demons of fear, confusion, chaos.

We never stop needing to be Mothered in that way, perhaps more so when we no longer have our birth Mother's embrace. We all need Motherly Mentors. Where is it that you go when you need refuge from the emotional maelstrom that swirls around you? Who is it that keeps you sturdy when you no longer have the strength in yourself? Where is it that you feel safe?

Our Motherly Mentors do more than just make us feel safe. They also help us to discover who we actually are and what we are to be about in this life. They help us to claim our gifts and find our passion and work our way out of the knots that we have woven in the fabric of our lives.

I asked Lee Hilton to read that piece this morning because it speaks to the quiet routine way that mentoring actually gets done most of the time. It is not loud or spectacular. There is something about the way that we share our lives through chores and other traditions, especially the way that we tweak these traditions here and there, like teaching our sons to be more than capable in the kitchen and the laundry room, teaching our daughters how to work a fly rod and read the seasons so they know which flies to tie, that are more interesting and creative still.

It is here that we make a connection and keep it during the days of distance and independence that are built into our societal adolescent development. However tenuous that relationship might seem at points, however little impact it appears that you are actually having, it is important. Through all of these traditions and mores, we are creating a space of safety and support, and sometimes that will actually bloom into a time of exploration on the part of our youngsters and a teaching moment will suddenly arise and disappear just as fast as it came. That is the way it is, but you know how important it is.

And here, despite the cliché, it really does take a village to raise a child. We have to share the process of helping then next generation find out who they are meant to become and what they are to be about. Julie was telling me of a neighbor of hers in a different era, a woman that kept an open door, and always had something to eat and drink. She had a gift, and it is a gift, to create a sanctuary for High School kids. They would just drop over and talk about what was going on in their lives, a place where they felt a freedom to do some self-exploration. Not many of us can actually do that but how important it is.

And when she died, one of wonderful testaments to her quality of life, was just how many young people from the neighborhood made up the rolls of those who came to pay tribute to her life. We are all called to this, male and female, and it becomes more important as we get older. We all have this role to play in our extended families, in our Churches, in our neighborhoods. Who is it that you are helping to discover their gifts? What is your role nurturing the next generation? In all likelihood, you could stand to spend some time in prayer about this, that God would show you who and how you could nurture and bloom the next generation in this immediate phase of your life. That role is constantly evolving.

Erik Eriksson was one of the very few psychoanalysts to show how this capacity actually gives us the fullest expression of our emotional and spiritual selves in the last phase of our lives. It grows in us the older we get and becomes the central developmental challenge. He called it generativity, the capacity to develop the important values and directions that we have invested ourselves in through the next generation. It is investing our lives in ways that will out live us. When you actually live for things that have intrinsic, life-giving value, soul-developing power- and you are privileged to see those blossom and flourish after you… When you see people of substance and projects of worth, there is a fulfillment of a quality that allows us to say with Simeon in the Bible, "My eyes have beheld a wonder… now I may depart in peace." Our life reaches a fulfillment, a conclusion. It doesn't simply quit. Spiritually speaking, that is where we want to head. We all need to become Motherly Mentors and develop the rising generation in different ways.

And we need to do it with moral character. We need to be people of serious moral substance, as well as people of joy, celebration, passion. I was reminded of this reading about the woman that actually first proposed a day to honor Mother's. She did it to promote peace, that Mother's might never have to have their sons die in useless military campaigns.

The woman was Julia Ward Howe. You probably know her name vaguely. She wrote the lyrics for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". [Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord/ He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword/ His truth is marching on.] She was an abolitionist in the 19th century and that poem, first published in the Atlantic Monthly became the unofficial hymn of the Union army in the Civil War.

But the scope and depth of the aftermath of that war, turned her focus again to the horrors of war itself. Particularly, it was the Franco-Prussian war just a few years after the end of the Civil War, in 1870-1871 that gave rise to a new German military caste and political order that I am sure appeared to be the wave of the future at the time, not only of Europe but affecting even the United States as well.

Julia Ward Howe was a suffragist in the 19th century. She had watched men with exclusive control of the political process. She had watched as war was increasingly used to settle conflicts and like so many of the women suffragists of the day, she had a simple plea that there simply must be a better way and that the contribution of women could only elevate the mode of conflict resolution between the nations.

So she called for a Mother's Day of Peace, for women to come together and unite their voices in moral protest against the over use of violence. And this was her original declaration.

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! 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 towards those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devasted 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 indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow 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 then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace,

And each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

– Julia Ward Howe, 1870
Ref: various (via Google)

Those words are spoken with an authority that only people who have lived through the horrors of war and experienced the very unromantic reality of its aftermath can speak. The point is not to quibble with one line or another, but to note the overall moral courage and fortitude that the original leader had before the Floral industry and the Greeting card business dumbed it down and fluffed out the holiday until it had no moral fiber in it.

We need Motherly Mentors with moral backbone, Motherly Mentors who are confident about what they bring to the table that is missing if they are not present. No, the Motherly Mentors list that carries the subtitle "Courageous Moral Force" is not yet fully subscribed…

So Happy Mother's Day to all of you Motherly Mentors. Yours is a high and holy calling, from changing diapers, to hugging your Godson at his graduation, to walking in a March on Washington. We need your wings of refuge, support, and compassion. And may God grant you a vision of what you should be about in this next chapter of your life and who else you can include in your influence. May God grant you joy and spiritual gravitas at the same time. For better and worse, nobody else is going to do this, nobody else can do this, but you. Amen.