Soul Force

Care and Tenderness

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

May 8, 2011

Reading: Proclamation for Mother’s Day - Julia Ward Howe

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will 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, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the voice of a devastated 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 our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough 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 solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Sermon

Mothers’ Day! What a wonderful day to celebrate! We all love our mothers, after all, and all mothers are happy with their children, especially on Mothers’ Day. It should be very easy to preach about Mothers’ Day. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out. First of all, we aren’t all mothers, and some of us can’t be mothers. Men, for example. Some desperately want to be mothers and can’t, so words spoken in praise of the joys of motherhood are like arrows to their hearts. Others can’t imagine wanting to be mothers, and feel the day is a bit insulting. Others are ambivalent about their children, and idealizations of motherhood (and apple pie, by the way) seem saccharine and insincere. Not everyone is included in the honoring we do on Mothers’ Day.

On the other hand, while all of us may not be mothers, all of us do have mothers, right? And we all love our mothers dearly, every day of the year, but especially on Mothers’ Day, right? Well, not exactly. There’s ambiguity here, too. There are days when we don’t or didn’t love our mothers. Whether they are still alive or not, thinking about our mothers probably invokes in us a range of feelings from intense love and gratitude to a desire to be on our own, independent of her strictures and instructions. Perhaps because of the extraordinary dependence on our mothers that we recall from when we were infants, there is always some ambivalence in our feelings about our mothers, fondness mixed with the need to establish ourselves as independent of our mothers. Perhaps boys go through this more than girls – no boy wants to be teased as a “mama’s boy” – but girls, too, cringe when some admiring relative says, “Why, you’re just like your mother!”

Becoming a parent clarifies a good deal in our evaluations of our mothers (and of course our fathers as well). When we are the ones raising children, some of our mothers’ less desirable ways of disciplining and caring for us come to seem absolutely justified in light of what the task of raising children really turns out to be like. Children aren’t actually 100% pure angels; there’s generally a bit of the monster mixed in there somewhere as well.

Perhaps all of this ambiguity and ambivalence around mothering and being mothered helps in part to explain how Mothers’ Day ends up being so sentimentalized and commercialized. There are all sorts of pressures to buy something – anything! – to show your mother you love her. Mothers’ Day is the second-highest gift-giving day of the year. Ninety-eight percent of Americans participate in Mothers’ Day in some way or other. Long distance companies, Hallmark Cards, the Second Parish Art Show – all benefit from Mothers’ Day. If you listen to WBUR, you will have been assaulted by endless entreaties to send Winston Flowers to your mother (or whoever you honor on Mothers’ Day) and support the news. [Pause for brief commercial announcement: Not that I would wish in any way to discourage purchases from the Art Show at Second Parish. Bring your mother or buy something for her; get her something she’ll love and support Second Parish and local artists at the same time.] You can see how the temptation to commercialize Mothers’ Day can be a good thing all around!

For all the ambiguity and all the ambivalence we may feel about mothering and being mothered, we all recognize and cherish something of the essence of what mothering is about. For all the missteps and shortcomings that inevitably crop up in the real world where mothering happens, there is something awesome about bringing new life into the world, protecting, nurturing and preserving that new life, and caring for children until they can care for themselves. Mothering is a primal task of the human race, and greatly to be honored.

The women whose names are most closely associated with the establishment of Mothers’ Day – Ann Jarvis and her daughter Anna, and Julia Ward Howe – were concerned with the preservation of life as one of the functions of mothering. Mrs. Ann Marie Jarvis was the wife and daughter of Methodist ministers who was born in Appalachia. She lost four of her twelve children to childhood diseases, and this undoubtedly fueled her passion to help other mothers to raise their children in cleaner conditions safe from disease. Before the Civil War, she began to organize what she called Mothers’ Day Work Clubs in towns where she and her husband served Methodist congregations, getting mothers together to buy medicine, inspect milk bottles and food, and hire helpers to work in families where mothers were suffering from tuberculosis.[1] These Mothers’ Day Work Clubs were days for mothers to join together to promote what was of the greatest importance to them, the preservation of the lives and health of their children. By pooling their resources, mothers working in a club were able to extend their mothering beyond their own families and children to all of the children in a town and thereby take under their care the children of mothers who were ill and unable to care for their own children. Better health and sanitation for the town directly translated into better health for each child in the town.

Julia Ward Howe grew in more favorable circumstances; her father was a wealthy banker in New York City. Her parents were Episcopalian and strict Calvinists, and it was with great relief that she discovered our free faith. Later she wrote, “I studied my way out of all the mental agonies which Calvinism can engender and became a Unitarian.”[2] She was a published poet and a passionate abolitionist, and her initial response to the Civil War was one of joyful support of the Union cause. Her family visited Washington, D.C., in 1861 and went out to watch a Union army review which was suddenly dispersed when the troops were attacked by Confederates. The Howes and friends drove their carriage back to Washington among the troops and began singing patriotic songs, including “John Brown’s Body.” A friend suggested that Julia might write a better song to the tune, and that night in the hotel she came up with the outline of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and finished it the following day. The martial tone of this hymn can be a little unnerving if attended closely – it claims that God is on the side of the North and speaks of the grapes of wrath and God’s terrible swift sword. Lincoln in his second inaugural was a little more humble in acknowledging that both sides prayed to the same God and that at most one side could really have God on their side.

As the war went on, both Ann Marie Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe worked for the Sanitary Commission, an organization of volunteers set up to care for Northern soldiers who had been wounded and in particular to improve the appalling sanitary conditions in the camps and hospitals where the wounded were cared for, conditions which caused the death of far more wounded soldiers than necessary. For both of them, the preservation of the lives of young men, now grown into soldiers, represented a further extension of mothering, this time to the young men of whole armies.

After the war, both of these mothers faced broader issues of promoting peace. The section of Virginia in which Ann Marie Jarvis and her family lived had broken away from the rest of the state and been admitted to the Union during the war as West Virginia. The young soldiers returned to their Appalachian towns had served on opposite sides of that great armed struggle, and there was justifiable concern that lately-armed young men still bearing the grudges of a long and painful war might be less than the best of friends back in their home towns. Ann Marie Jarvis took the initiative to face the problem and organized Mother’s Friendship Day in her community to bring together soldiers who had fought on both sides, in part by engaging their mothers in the work of reconciliation. The day caught on for several years in that part of West Virginia and helped to lessen the tensions between those who had formerly been enemies. In this way she participated in a practice which has had application elsewhere, in which mothers on both sides of conflicts recognize the common humanity of their mothering and reach out to mothers on the other side to bring about reconciliation for themselves and their children. One of the most moving examples I have seen is described in a documentary about Israel and Palestine in which mothers – and fathers – who have lost children in that terrible conflict reach across that deep divide to make common cause with those on the other side to share their losses and to pledge themselves to ending the conflict which has given rise to so much death and sorrow.

Julia Ward Howe came out of the Civil War with a somewhat chastened view of the glories of warfare, and when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in Europe in 1870, she issued the Mothers’ Day proclamation we read earlier and organized mothers to work for peace. Here’s how her autobiography describes coming up with the idea:

I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?”[3]

Thus was the passion for mothering felt by both Julia Ward Howe and Ann Marie Jarvis internationalized to recognize that mothers of all countries have a stake in preventing the unnecessary death of children everywhere in war. Julia Ward Howe’s proclamation embodied both of their commitment to mothering all children, and to acting as mothers to preserve life wherever possible. For both of them, the ideal of Mothers’ Day was a day for mothers to unite, not a day about mothers.

Both of these initial celebrations of Mothers’ Day were soon forgotten. Then, in 1907, two years after the death of Ann Marie Jarvis, her daughter Anna M. Jarvis was invited to give some reminiscences of her mother at a memorial service in the church where her mother and father had served so faithfully. After that experience, she determined to extend the homage that was dedicated to her mother on that day to all mothers in a tribute to her mother’s dedication to the shared work of mothering as shown by her Mothers’ Day Work Camps and Mother’s Friendship Days. In 1908, the first modern Mothers’ Day was celebrated on the second Sunday in May in her church (now a national monument to Mothers’ Day) and the idea spread from there to other towns and states until it was declared a national holiday by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. His proclamation called for a day for Americans to show the flag in honor of those mothers who had lost sons in war. Mother’s Day 1914 was, of course, just before World War I broke out, a war of questionable purpose that led to the death of so many more sons. Unfortunately, the high purpose of the day was quickly subverted to commercial ends so offensive that Anna Jarvis strenuously opposed them. For example, she regarded Mothers’ Day cards as an unworthy shortcut for children who were too lazy to write a letter! She was sufficiently upset by this subversion of purpose that in 1923 she brought a lawsuit against the governor of New York to prevent a Mothers’ Day celebration and was arrested for civil disobedience trying to disrupt it after she lost her case.

Bringing forth new life is one of the greatest wonders and joys of our living. Mothers are worthy of honor for the many blessings they bring to us. Presents, cards and phone calls; flowers and gifts; breakfasts in bed and dinners are all wonderful ways of expressing these feelings, but they don’t quite plumb the depths of what mothering is about nor do they resolve some of the complexity of our feelings about mothering and being mothered. The depth of passion that Ann Marie Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe brought to the broader task of mothering helps us to focus on the essence of what this day can be about. Seeing Mothers’ Day in this light relieves some of the ambivalence around the day.

This is, of course, a day for honoring mothers and foremothers, and it is good that we do so. It is a day to pause a remember mothering and being mothered, for celebrating, for giving and accepting gifts and appreciation with grace and goodwill.

But there’s more. Mothering – caring tenderly for all those born of mothers – also broadens out beyond our immediate families to include our neighbors and their children, our towns and their children, all the children of our nation, and all the children of the world. In that light, mothering is by no means the exclusive possession of those who bear children, though they may have a special passion for such tenderness. In that light, being mothered grows beyond our particular families in ways that point us toward becoming better mothers, better parents, in our own lives, whether of our own direct descendents or of others born of mothers. In that light, mothering becomes something anyone can share in, women and men, childless and childbearing, young and old. In that light, mothering is another name for loving what is most dear to us and, by extension, loving our neighbors whether near or far.

Dona Nobis Pacem – bring us peace.

So may it be, and Amen.