Sermon 5.8.16
The original origins of Mothers Day go back to a Unitarian feminist.
Before she became a pacifist, Julia Ward Howe wrote the famous Civil War song “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” as the war entered the first of what would be four winters.
In this song, Howe envisions the Union soldiers fighting a righteous war with God’s blessing: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; … He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; … Glory, glory, hallelujah!”
But having witnessed the devastation of the war, she experienced a change of heart and became an adamant pacifist.
Here is part of the text of her Mother’s Day Proclamation, written in 1870:
Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! 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 of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the 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 out dishonor, nor violence vindicate 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 council. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
— Julia Ward Howe
Three years later, Howe organized the first Mother’s Day Peace Festival, which was celebrated on June 2nd in eighteen cities throughout the country. But Howe’s effort to engage American mothers in pacifist advocacy largely failed. There was not even sufficient enthusiasm to mount a similar celebration the following year. As Howe would recall in her autobiography, “The ladies … were not much interested in my scheme of a world-wide protest of women against the cruelties of war.”
Our modern Mother’s Day is an unrelated celebration and established by Anna Jarvis years later, who would later lament the way the holiday became commercialized.
Howe’s feminist conviction was that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.
These days the critical observer might see in her words some dated thinking: for one, there is some heterosexist and essentialist language – assumptions typical to the time that all women marry husbands and have children.
But her deepest message still rings true: that women – and really all people – have a responsibility to shape their societies – in particular, that those who care for others, whether through mothering, or being a human being in this world – should not limit their care to the interpersonal but expand it to the social and political.
As the feminist refrain goes: the personal is political.
Mothers Day in our time is fairly commercialized, usually does not honor the diversity and complexity of mothering relationships, and is certainly not a political holiday the way Julia Ward Howe would have imagined it.
Lately Unitarian Universalists have been joining with the organization Strong Families to imagine a different Mother’s Day.
To reclaim the holiday, they call it Mama’s Day, and their mission is two-fold:
1) to highlight the contributions of a diversity of Mamas – mothers of all sexual orientations, races, incomes, immigration statuses, and more – and…
2) to work for recognition, rights and resources for Mamas and families.
One way they are furthering their first goal is by creating free, striking e-cards for Mothers Day that go beyond what you would normally find in the typical card section. To further their second goal, they fight for affordable childcare and afterschool programs, just immigration policies, marriage equality, rights for transgender people, and more.
Another current campaign is to raise awareness of the true costs of incarceration. They say 2 in 3 families have difficulty meeting basic needs as a result of their loved ones’ incarceration. 70% of these families are caring for children under 18. And in their surveys, the family member most often identified as primarily responsible for covering court-related fees and fines was “Mother.”
The circumstances they are working against can seem insurmountable, but the good news is they are working together and have many partners.
There are so many stories of mothers, of women, of people working for a world in which we take better care of the most vulnerable among us – children, animals, the Earth.
I think of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo.
During the “Dirty War” in Argentina, the military government abducted, tortured, and killed anyone they claimed were left-wing or political opponents of the regime. The abducted people became referred to as the “disappeared.” Some estimate the number at 11,000 people; others say 30,000. Many were youth. Within a terrorist state, those who spoke out risked their lives. Yet, a group of mothers began to meet each Thursday in the large Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. They walked in non-violent demonstrations demanding information about their children. Their numbers grew, and eventually they attracted international attention from human rights groups.
The government could no longer ignore the moral presence of mothers – and others – standing witness to the brutal acts of the regime… Mothers wearing white scarves to symbolize the white dove of peace.
With the return to civilian government in 1983, one group of Madres focused on working with the democratic government to help recover remains; another group continued to hold silent vigils until the laws of immunity for former military leaders were lifted.
The Abuelas (grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo still works to find the “stolen” babies whose mothers were killed. Their efforts have resulted in finding 114 grandchildren. Today the Madres de Plaza de Mayo association continues, as they struggle for human, political, and civil rights in Latin America and elsewhere.
One of the mothers, María del Rosario de Cerruti, reflected on her experience:
“One of the things that I simply will not do now is shut up. The women of my generation in Latin America have been taught that the man is always in charge and the woman is silent even in the face of injustice…Now I know that we have to speak out about the injustices publicly. If not, we are accomplices. I am going to denounce them publicly without fear. This is what I learned.”
I think, too, of the Compassion Collective – a movement started by authors Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), Cheryl Strayed (Wild), and others. They are reclaiming Mother’s Day to support refugee children and homeless youth. Their call to action reads:
“Mother’s Day IS about Love. But it’s not about commercial, comfortable love that snuggles up and stays home—it’s about love that throws open the door and marches out of our homes, beyond our fences and neighborhoods and into the hurting world to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, comfort the hurting, mother the motherless. Mother’s Day love is dangerous, revolutionary love that unites our one human family and reminds us that we belong to each other and that there is no such thing as other people’s children.”
Art by Amaryllis deJesus Moleski.
So, here it is folks:
we know, perhaps from our own experiences related to parenting or to being children,
that this world is a complex place, often filled with loss, injustice, indifference, and pain.
Hopefully we also know from our experience that this world is also a place of redemption, of hope, of the life-giving struggle for change.
Hopefully we know that out of hard, harrowing labor can come something as new and precious and hopeful as a child.
That even when that child is hurt or lost, they can be healed and found.
That even when that adult is isolated and hurting, they can find community.
IF you don’t yet know this deep in your bones, or, if like most of us, you need to be continually reminded, then keep coming back.
Keep coming back to places and communities like this –
where we practice holding the complex, messy stuff of life,
and we emerge rejuvenated for the journey of
truly loving this world.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon