Mother’s Day

Mother's Day is one of those deceptively complicated holidays. After all what could be simpler than honoring and celebrating mother love? A lot, as it turns out. Mother love is a fulcrum on which tilts the greater span of many forms and challenges and versions of human love and relationships. It is a mistake to think that love is ever just about the usual model we associate with mothers: giving, self-sacrifice, nurturing, sustaining, though love is partly about those qualities, and mother love is also partly about those qualities. But mothers are people with full interior lives and concerns and so have more to offer than just nurturing, and what they offer isn't always perceived as nurturing, even if it is intended as such. We have seen and heard in our readings and songs today some of love's other aspects - worry, fear, pride, rejection, hurt, hope, concern, adoration, rebellion, inspiration, frustration, mourning, rejoicing. And all of these feelings are felt by mothers and by the daughters and sons of mothers, generation after generation.

The physical cycles of a woman's life, which revolve around her capacity to bear children, not only reflect the larger cycles of life in nature, they also remind us of the emotional cycles in our lives with those we love, and of the merciful fact that life does move in cycles, instead of just a steady stream. Every year around mother's day, people speak to me about their complicated relationships with their mothers. Sometimes Mother's Day hits when we are on a high, feeling close and understood and precious with a mother. Sometimes Mother's Day rides an ebb tide, leaving an expanse of loneliness or misunderstanding or guilt spreading before us like a bleak beach.

But while we cannot always love those we love on our terms, and we cannot get them to live their lives on our terms, we can love them and we can let them live their lives. And remembering the model of the cycles in life and nature, we can hold onto the values which sustain us in our emotional lives with those we love, the necessary qualities of honesty and forgiveness, which cycle inevitably through us in our love and pain, our sharing and separation, our brokenness and wholeness.

A number of people requested for this service that I reread a poem I have read to you before. I wrote it to my mother on Mother's Day, May 8th, 1994.

Before I wrote that poem, and since, my mother and I have fought. We have ranted. Our voices have shaken with anger we have provoked in each other. And we have cried together. We have held each other when one was in pain. We have cracked each other up. We have tried to solve each other's problems. We have rejected each other's solutions. We have argued about food preparation and laughed at our dogs' shenanigans and shaken our heads at the craziness of our family and danced together at weddings.

Sometimes as your minister I preach from life experience, yours as well as mine. Sometimes I preach about things I've studied or learned. Sometimes I preach about beliefs I can't prove or logically justify. Somehow, Mother's Day is never a day that can be abstracted much from real life. But it's not only me who preaches the essential place of honesty and forgiveness in relationships with those we love. Forgiveness is a fundamental value in most religious and ethical systems. Jesus preached it. Twelve step programs center on it. Forgiveness, both mortal and divine, is the theme and point of Judaism's high holidays.

And honesty is one of the more recent developments, still rising in importance, in Western culture. Especially in America, people are beginning to perceive a value in being honest, in letting it all hang out. Our appearances are more honest, corsets and girdles are out, shoulder pads are vastly reduced, hair is less ornate and depends less on elaborate preparation. Our entertainment is more honest; sex, sexuality, insecurity, fantasy, failure, divorce, rape, loneliness, pms, death, the vagaries of the human soul are exposed and explored in what we watch and listen to as never before. I can remember when I was young, people never talked about health problems. If a woman got pregnant she disappeared until the problem was resolved one way or another. If someone had cancer, there was almost a stigma attached: people whispered the word to each other, and never discussed it openly. Now we talk about everything; at parties, in restaurants, on tv and radio. And while there can be vulgarity in that, which is a real issue, but not my topic today, there is also freedom and acknowledgement and a sense of strength that come from knowing we share many truths, both intimate and public, about our experiences of living.

And honesty and forgiveness are mutually dependent. Without honesty, forgiveness is a lie. And without forgiveness, honesty is impossible. Without either honesty or forgiveness, no true relationship can exist. And with honesty and forgiveness, everything is possible. Because honesty and forgiveness carry us through the cycles of loving and living.

Honesty is also what keeps us alive, keeps our lives dynamic and connected. It is when we lose our honest connection with those we love or ourselves or our lives, that we start to feel dead, hopeless, remote. Honesty keeps us intact, and in time with the flux of live, open to opportunities for transformation. Honesty is what makes our experiences of wholeness so profound and uplifting, when we are wholly honestly ourselves with ourselves and with those we love. And forgiveness is essential for those time of brokenness, when we need to forgive someone we care for, who therefore has the power to hurt us, even perhaps with their honesty. There can be no healing without forgiveness, forgiveness knits our emotional bones together, it allows us to accept transformation, and it strengthens us for the days to come when we will inevitably go bump against each other again.

Loving and living, honesty and forgiveness, brokenness and wholeness, we all know what these are, and we have each felt them in our lives. Mother's Day, whether we celebrate as mothers or children, is a good time to remember how closely tied to each other they are, as closely tied as we are to our mothers and children. We love each other. We disappoint each other. We sustain each other. We wound each other. We grow apart. We grow back together after a day or a month or a year or a decade. It is never too late for honesty. It is never too late for forgiveness. Such holy gifts have no season. And we all need to offer and receive them, knowing that they keep us truly alive, keep us healing, keep us living in love.

Forgiveness cannot be forced, it comes when its time is at hand. This is not a sermon urging forgiveness today for all offenses. Nor is it urging absolute honesty on all fronts immediately following coffee hour. Honesty and forgiveness are powerful, and like all powerful things they must be handled with integrity and care, timing and intentionality. But their very power is grounds for hope for us and those we love. With honesty and forgiveness, brokenness in life may always be healed by wholeness in love. Anything is possible for all of us, we who are sons and daughters, grandchildren, mothers and fathers, matriarchs and patriarchs and grandparents and great grandparents. Rejoice in love which sustains all and succors all and shares all and hopes all. Happy Mother's Day.