Sermon: The Mother God

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The Mother God

By Charles Rush

May 14, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 3.14Mb) ]

day we lift up our Mother's, remembering among other things, our primal need for mothering. I've been in touch with that this week, as our grand daughter has been with us, aged 3 months. She was napping with me, woke up squirming around happy as could be. At some point, I got my face right up next to hers and she studied it for a minute… and began a wailing cry of bloody murder for all the universe that meant… 'you are not my mother'. Such force and conviction. It is a visceral example of what Martin Heidegger used to call our 'existential angst', the anxiety we feel over the fleeting character of human existence and our tenuous dependence on forces in the world that we are not entirely sure are benevolent. That sense of existential angst, though primal, recurs in our lives in different guises.

I have dreams every once in a while, mid-life dreams, that are full of confusion and I awake, not quite sure if I am alive or dead, completely unsure for that few seconds of waking where I am exactly. Those moments are filled with what the playwright Samuel Beckett used to refer to as our sense of our own evanescence. It is remarkable how primordial that experience of dependence is throughout our life, I presume right through the moment of our death. At our deepest level, we need the reassurance of the mothering presence in a very fundamental way.

Perhaps you read the article in the Science section of the New York Times this week that reminded us that this comforting presence is not necessarily a given throughout the broad range of nature. They had many examples of Rabbit mothers birthing their children and abandoning them, various other species of animals exposing their infants recklessly to danger. So it is not the natural hormonal impulse that we lift up today, but rather the higher spiritual capacity of compassion and care that is profound in its more eloquent, mature expression. The bible tells us that God is like the Mother that looks over us when we are vulnerable, that lifts us up and completes us, so we can stand on our own.

I think of Gail Butler who had a characteristic way of communicating to her family through notes. She was an inveterate writer of little thoughts for her girls that they would find in their lunch bags, attached to their homework- little words of encouragement and confidence building, the thought for the day, the moral instruction. That was who she was.

When the girls were 12 and 14, Gail was diagnosed with lung cancer, despite not being a smoker. Her regimen of treatment was aggressive and it left her weak and bed ridden a fair amount of time. That year was just a difficult year all the way around. Her girls were in various phases of estrangement that usually mark early adolescence and they actually sarcastically derided her for not being able to do things for them like other mothers were doing. There were several times that Gail was livid with them after these encounters for their self-absorbsion and lack of compassion. They were the normal heated exchanges between adolescents and their parents, only she was in bed and rather confined that way periodically.

Tragically, her health made a sudden turn for the worse and in a matter of just a couple weeks in the spring, she went down hill and died, really in the middle of this miasma of difficulty and alienation. It was just a very sad time for the family and I presume that it was made worse for the girls because, in addition to the other range of complicated emotions that they were dealing with -- like abandonment, lack of courage, anxiety about the future -- I presume that they felt guilty. They just didn't really think their mother would die and they felt bad about how they left her. And it was not the type of thing that anyone in the family could really have addressed with them directly but it was palpable nevertheless.

But Gail didn't leave it at that. Probably as a way of coping with her worst fears directly, possibly as a kind of spiritual insurance policy, she left behind a folder full of notes for her sister. And her sister was a dutiful custodian of them and mailed them one at a time. There was a note for their birthday, a note for the prom, a note on what to think about when deciding on college, a note at graduation, a note for their wedding, a note for their first child. Throughout that difficult year, she was focused on giving the girls what they would need to become strong women. She must have had a sense of needing to complete that no matter what. And what was interesting and moving to see just how well she predicted what her girls would be like many years later and what they would need to hear. That kind of compassion that blesses from beyond the grave is not a natural hormonal by-product. That is an advanced, distilled spiritual essence of compassion and maturity that is worthy of being emulated. Indeed, when the bible speaks of feminine images of God, this is most consistently the type of image that they use. God is that power to bless us, to en-courage us, to build us up to stand on our own on this side of the grave and beyond.

Aren't we all in search of that from our Mother's or our Mother figures or our Mother God? Perhaps you read the popular novel "The Secret Life of Bees", the story of a young girl named Lily who grows up in rural South Carolina in the 50's. Her mother died in infancy and her father was one of those all too regular characters from that era that was emotionally distant and mute with feelings and no ability to give his own child a sense of her history. So one day Lily heads off as a teenager to find out about her mother, bearing only a photo of her mother as a young woman holding a jar of Black Madonna honey from Tiburon, South Carolina.

She wends her way to this tiny rural crossroads, finds the honey still for sale at the general store in Tiburon and they tell her where to find the place the place that makes the honey which turns out to be a group of African-American sisters. And these sisters, along with many of their friends and neighbors are all devoted to the adoration of a Black Madonna. This Madonna was the mast head from a slave ship that capsized off the shore of South Carolina and mysteriously made its way to shore and was found by the slave women who escaped and made it to shore. They all took it to be a divine sign. And this is how the matriarch explained it.

"Everyone knew the mother of Jesus was named Mary, and that she'd seen suffering of every kind. That she was strong and constant and had a mother's heart. And here she was, sent to them on the same waters that had brought them here in chains. It seemed to them she knew everything they suffered…[i] The people called her Our Lady of Chains. They called her that not because she wore chains… They called her Our Lady of Chains because she broke them."[ii]

And through the rest of the story, young Lily finds the fuller story of her mother and ends up with a warm empathy for what her life was like. In the process she ends up with a blessing of sorts from her mother just knowing what she went through and what became of her. And she gets quite a lot of motherly love and guidance from the sisters that introduce her to the Black Madonna and the secret life of bees.

It is important dimension of the Divine Spirit that has so obviously been present with our popular piety from the beginning of Christianity, despite the overlay of patriarchal structure that the institution gave the Church with the exclusivity of Men in the priesthood. Ordinary people have always needed that divine feminine because it expresses one of our primal spiritual longing to be taken care of in a world of loneliness where we are not quite sure of how we belong or what our place really is.

We've always had this piety in and through the devotion to the Madonna, the feminine side of God. A broad brushed history of this imagery and the different forms of piety that it engenders is interesting in it's own right but I only have time to look at a couple things this morning. (Slide 1)

The vast majority of the images that come to us through the first several centuries are represented through icons, the two dimensional paintings on wood that symbolically reflect the divine presence and were placed in homes, on hearths, where accidents happened, really anywhere that the Divine Spirit was thought to be needed. In these, the overwhelming majority depict Mary as the Mother of God, quite formal, (Slide 2) holding an infant who is usually already adored with an aura or halo that indicates that he was special and different from the time of toddler status on. It was a spirituality that lifted up the uniqueness of Jesus, even as it adored the special place of Mary, as in "Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus." (Slide 3) The invocation is incantational and is illustrative of the piety of the early medieval era that looked principally to religion for supernatural power to cover the many maladies that we were unable to understand, interpret or control- from the weather, to plagues, to famines, to the irregularities of pregnancy. (Slide 4)

Then you see another phase developing in the high middle ages, from the 11th to the 13th century, where Jesus and Mary are both depicted as the co-regents of heaven. Interestingly here, they are really equals in an ontological sense, both of them finding their place in the great pantheon of beings on the other side that act as portals for our prayers, some directed through Jesus, others directed through Mary, depending on content. (Slide 5)

Remembering that the vast majority of these were painted by men in monasteries, one is tempted to speculate that they represent the needs that celibate men have for nurture and a feminine touch, such that Mary was increasingly elevated to the point that she became not only figuratively but almost literally, the feminine dimension of the divine.

But what has interested me the most as I have seen thousands of pictures of the Madonna with Child in museums and cathedrals across Europe are the depictions that come out of the early Renaissance, when humanism was in full bloom.

I would point you towards two quite famous artists, one of them with a quite famous sculpture, the other with a painting that you probably have never seen. This first image was done by Leonardo Da Vinci and it is entitled Madonna with Child and Spindle. (Slide 6) I saw it first as an exhibition of one painting in a small town of Arrezzo in Tuscany.

I find it moving for the warm and humane dimension in which Mary and Jesus are both depicted. In contrast to so many of the traditional images of Mary and Jesus in which Jesus is depicted as already having a martyr sense of his destiny and Mary somewhat forlorn about the inevitable fate of her only child, this picture has them playing together the way that ordinary young women enjoy their children.

It is set in soft shades of blue that subconsciously radiate a serenity like unto the Mediterranean sea, particularly as the blue fades into the Tuscan mountains in the distance. Mary is a teenager and only a teenager. She has no supernatural prescience into her child's destiny, only the ordinary pose of a mother letting her child play with hands ready to catch him should he wiggle dangerously.

And Jesus is just a child and only a child, blissfully unaware in the way that children are. It is true that he holds in his hand a cross, reminding the viewers of his fate, but as the child looks at the cross, he does not recognize or understand the symbolism. No, and this is what I love about this painting, it is as subtle and transcendent as real life. The child is actually playing with a spindle used for wrapping yarn, one of the most common tools of every household in 15th century Italy. He is twirling it playfully, unaware of the symbolism, unaware of his destiny. Leonardo let the God man just be a boy and in its own way, in a warmly humane way, the spiritual pathos of the moment is not diminished but enhanced. Because in the end, is it really the supernatural foreknowledge that is the indicator of the Divine presence or the empathy of the heart that endures tragedy and sadness in the name of love itself? I think the humanists like Leonardo made a big step forward in changing the frequency by which we look for the divine in our world. It is not the extraordinary, not the epiphanic, it is actually right here all around us, the ordinary love and loss that we share day in and day out that is really the substance of spirituality.

Finally, I would share with you one of the most well known sculptures in the world, Michelangelo's Pietá. (Slide 7) I first saw it in kindergarten when it came to New York for the World's Fair and I have had a chance to see it at St. Peter's several times since. On our last trip, I discovered something you should all try when you get the chance.

I made my children get up at the crack of dawn, kicking and screaming, and we were the very first people into St. Peter's at 7:30 or so. At that hour, the only people in the Church are those attending the morning masses in the alcoves. It is quiet, reverent, at last a church where you can pray.

And this statute is beautiful to behold in its own right. But it was designed for prayer and meditation. It is worth the effort to be able to kneel for a few minutes of silence and no one flashing a camera.

What interests me about the piece is the way Mary and Jesus are depicted. Leave aside the technical skill with which Jesus appears so life like in stone, here he is as a young man, just recently dead before rigor mortis sets in. Michelangelo makes quite a break from the traditional piety, still depicted in Mel Gibson's 'The Passion', a depiction that emphasizes a wounded Jesus bloodied beyond all recognition. It is as though the gruesome quality of the suffering of Jesus is what makes his death so spiritually inspiring. Here, none of that is present. He is simply a young man, tragically cut down in the prime of life, still full of vigor and sinew. It is not endurance or the torture that makes this moment sacred, it is the pathos of death itself, the simple humane break between mother and son.

Michelangelo does a slight of hand for us to make this point. Mary and Jesus are the same age. They are both twenty. In that moment, when she holds her dead son, it is as though she is again cradling her infant. We have caught her in that moment before her full grief has set in, in that first moment of leaden shock when a Mother's heart is too heavy for tears.

And her lap is actually huge. Again, we are presented an optical illusion for Mary's lap is actually larger than a man's. But in this case it is, symbolically speaking. Mary's lap is as large as God's holding us in death, holding us through whatever tragedy we have to endure, like our mother when we were young or our Grandmother. I remember being young and running to find my Grandmother, jumping up, wrapping myself in her skirts and lap for protection from bad guys that were chasing us. Some of them were real fears, others imagined, but what a great refuge. All of us could stay there for an extended while.

And in the end, what is it that makes Mary divine, a miraculous conception of a supernatural being? Or, is it the transcendent capacity for compassionate love whose embrace will not let go, even in death? Perhaps, Michelangelo was suggesting, that this is all we really need -- the eternality of compassionate motherly love -- where time stops still so to speak -- that doesn't explain tragedy, doesn't have an answer for all the mysteries, but holds on to us in the midst of it. Maybe that is the whole point of our spiritual lives after all.

So go from this place and do not despair about the sentimentality of the commercial aspect of this day, nor the imperfect expressions of thanks from your children and your spouse, and do not despair if you have no birth children or birth Mother that you can celebrate with. Remember the eternality of compassionate, comforting love that we get from all our mother figures and that we mother in each other on our best days. Stay with that for you, too, quite in spite of yourself, can manifest the transcendent presence of our Mother God. Amen.

[i] Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees (New York: Penguin, 2002) p. 109

[ii] p. 110.