Mother's Day 2013
By Charles Rush
May 12, 2013
Luke 2: 19
[ Audio
(mp3, 4.4Mb) ]
rlier this week I happened to see a post on Facebook by my daughter Lauren, mother of 4 under the age of 6. It was a picture of a worn out woman and the caption said, “I live in a mad house ruled by a tiny army that I made myself.” For the overwhelmed and underappreciated Mothers in our midst, I'm pretty sure the reason that we set aside a day to remind us to be grateful and to remind you of why you do what you do.
Some of our
grandchildren live two blocks from the church, so I stop on my way home.
Earlier this week the baby waked up from her nap. I went up to the nursery to
get her, walk in the room. She is like 1. I give her a big smile like this is
the best thing that has ever happened to me. She runs three circles around her
crib and dives head first under her blankie for me to pick her up. That child
cures whatever ails me.
Kids do love
their Moms with something deeper than mere emotion. I'm always startled at my
grandson Charlie. He is tough as nails and daring
beyond reason. But when he gets really hurt, there is only one woman that will
do in a real emergency – not Nana or Grammy, not Dad or Uncle Ian – only Mom
can calm him down. We want to say thanks for that, somehow, someway.
Parenting is profound for men and women, but it is
biochemical for Mothers… as every young boy finds out watching his girlfriend morph into
pregnancy and natal-Motherhood. I remember calling my son-in-law on the phone
asking him if he was ready for the baby to be born. There was a long silence on
the phone. He said “Yes… as soon as I finish applying the second coat of the 3rd
color on the nursery…” I took that as a big yes to the question, ‘is she
nesting?'
And every young father has one night, when one child is nursing, the other has a fever… Both of them are in bed with
Mom and you are out on the couch realizing that frankly, in the great pecking
order of stuff that really counts, your personal stock is tanking.
Mothers have this built-in biochemical connection that
changes them so much that most of the time even they are surprised at who they
have become. And that never really goes away exactly does it? I remember being
at an athletic event when a serious injury happened… the boys must have been
13-14. All of us Dads all jumped up and
started walking or jogging to the scene, especially the Doctors. Right through the middle of us- boom- one of
those prim and proper ladies, the mother of one of the boys. Heels went flying
off, beating a dead heat across that field like Superwoman. Us men were all
looking at each other like ‘Well, maybe we should pick up the pace a little here'.
Mothers just have that connection for better and worse.
And that biochemical connection also has spiritual
implications doesn't it? I love that line in the beginning of the gospels about
Mary. She has had her baby. The Angels come, the wise men come—all this
activity and bustle. The gospel says, “she pondered
all these things in her heart, wondering what they might mean.”
Jesus grows up, becomes wildly popular. He is arrested at the
height of his fame. Suddenly, everyone he knows deserts him. He dies alone and
who is the only person there at the end? His mother and a
couple of her friends. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Sounds
right.
And this is the piece that you probably won't find on any
Hallmark card today because it isn't superficial enough. But
the spiritual profundity of Motherhood lies somewhere in this matrix.
Michelangelo captured that image so well in the Pieta. Slide 1 It is permanently on display at St. Peter's Cathedral in
Rome in the first prayer alcove right as you enter the church on your right.
Michelangelo does a slight of hand. In the first place,
Mary's lap is the size of huge, but you don't really notice it because of the
flowing character of her skirts. In the second place, Mary is the same age as
Jesus. I think both are exactly right.
She has this huge lap to symbolize her expansive compassion.
She actually holds Jesus, curiously, in a way that she could hold her baby… in
a way that she could hold her husband… in a way that she could hold her grown
son. And isn't that the point? There is something expansively humane in her
compassion that is moving to behold, particularly so since Michelangelo was so
adept at transforming the stone into a life-like medium. At
the end of the day, isn't the profundity of her grief not because she is
holding the Son of God but because she is holding her own son? And isn't
there this deeper dimension that it is not that Jesus is special so much as all
children are special?
She is the same age as Jesus and I think that is right as
well… When Mothers lose a child, no matter what the actual age that they are
when that child dies, isn't there this dimension to that loss that harkens back
to when they were young Mothers cradling their babies? Mothers cannot help but
touch their children (young or grown) and hold them in this way? It is such an
awful thing to contemplate for all of us, the death of children, but the pathos
is so great because the spiritual and physical connection is so profound and
grounding between Mother and child. We all have this identification. There is
something about it that gets right to the heart of the human condition. It so
mirrors God's love for us, we hope we can participate in it too.
Anne Lamott, the writer, goes to a
funky church in San Francisco. I heard her recently on NPR[i]
explaining how she got to see God's maternal love miraculously displayed right
in her own congregation in the 80's.
“One
of our newer members is a guy named Kenny who is dying of AIDS, disintegrating
before our very eyes. He started coming about a year ago. Shortly after he
started coming to the church his partner died of the disease. A few weeks after
he died, he announced that right then and there, in the hole in his heart that
Brandon left, Jesus had slid in and that he had been there ever since. This man
has a totally lopsided face, ravaged, emaciated. And when he smiles, he is
radiant. He looks like God's crazy nephew Phil. He said that he would gladly pay whatever price to have what he has now:
which is Jesus and us.
“There is a woman in the choir whose name is Renola, a beautiful
black woman who is smart and jovial and sweet and as devout as can be who has
also been a little stand offish towards Kenny if you ask me. She has always
looked at him with confusion if she looks at him at all, in his goofy, ravaged
joy. Or she looks at him sideways. She was raised by Baptists in the Midwest
who must have taught her that his way of life was an abomination. Maybe it was
hard for her to break through this. Maybe on the most visceral level, she was afraid of catching the
disease. I'm not sure, but anyway, Kenny has come to church almost every week
for the past year and has won everyone over. He missed a couple of Sundays a
while ago because he was too weak to come, and then a month ago he came back
weighing almost no pounds. His face seemed even more lopsided as if he had had
a stroke.
“During the prayers of the people, he talked joyously of his
life and his decline, about how safe and happy he feels these days. So on this
one particular Sunday, the first hymn, the morning hymn, we sang ‘Jacob's
Ladder', which goes ‘every rung goes higher, higher'… Kenny couldn't stand but
he sang away sitting down, with the hymnal in his lap.
“And then when it came time for the second hymn, the
fellowship hymn, we sang ‘His Eye is on the Sparrow'. I notice that Ken still
couldn't stand up to sing. The pianist was playing and the whole congregation
was standing, and only Ken remained seated, holding the hymnal in his lap. And Renola watched him skeptically for a moment and then her
heart began to melt and her face became contorted just like his. And she went
to his side and bent down to lift him up. She lifted up this white rag doll,
this scarecrow. She held him next to her, and he was draped over and against
her like a child, and they sang and it pierced me.
“I can't imagine anything else but music that could have
brought about this alchemy. How is it that you have a chord here and another
chord there and then suddenly your heart breaks open.
I don't know the answer. Maybe it is that music is about as physical as it
gets, your central rhythm is your heart beat, your central sound the breath. We
are walking temples of noise and when you the human heart to this mix is allows us to meet on a bridge we couldn't get to any other
way…
“Ken was trying to sing but then he began to cry. Tears were
pouring down their faces, their noses were running like rivers, but as she held
him up, she suddenly lay her black, weeping face against his feverish white
face, put hers right up against his and let all those spooky fluids mingle with
hers.
“He looked like a child in her arms who was singing because
tiny children just sing all the time, because they haven't made all the
separations between speech and music. So he sang and she held him up and she
sang and he held her up. I don't know whether what I witnessed was a genuine
miracle but for a moment I realized that we are all cousins on a flight
together towards our home. We are funky, quirky and just plain odd. And it is
enough of a miracle for me to rest in that.”
May
God's maternal love course through you. And may you
live to become a miracle of radiant love. And
may your life be enough of a miracle that you can rest in that. Amen.
