A MOTHER’S DAY MEDITATION

James Ishmael Ford

11 May 2014

First Unitarian Church
Providence, Rhode Island

While preparing for this homily, for those of us not up on preacher lingo, a homily is a short sermon, I ran across a poem by Rhona McAdam, The Boston School of Cooking Cookbook. Here’s how it goes:

“This is my mother’s cookbook, its spine loose/with age, the fabric bare of colour at the seams/and weak, so it must be held tenderly, the way/my mother knows, easing into its pages/with her disobedient-knuckled hands.

“This book is my mother’s; she navigates/its mysteries with indifferent skill,/reads the runes of food-stains,/the faded trail of silverfish/who ate their random way over words;/she has the eye to decipher the tastes of another time, scrawled/in the margins, invoking the power/of other kitchens, the fit of old aprons,/the shape of a family/swallowed into other lives.

“This book’s pages, furred with use,/fade to brown. Its leaves have pressed/my mother’s memories in perfect squares, the things/she likes to come upon by chance:/household tips and obituaries, invitations/to weddings. My first poem is in there, and the card/someone made for mother’s day. Sentiment/among the weeds of recipes she clipped/in more ambitious days/that crowd, untasted, between the even rows/of meals we chewed our way through/but never knew the names of, all those years’/worth of peeled vegetables and trimmed meat,/a lifetime’s preparation vanished into our waiting mouths.”

This poem reminds me of the story we just told about the Creator and particularly that line, “Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery.” Certainly mother’s day is one of those complicated things, for most of us something deeply compelling and for more than a few of us something profoundly problematic. And, and. Riddle and mystery, nothing like Mother’s Day to open all that up, the whole of our hearts, broken and full.

Now this poem caught me in part because we have a book very much like Rhona’s in our house. It’s the other American classic, The Joy of Cooking. But, it is the same book in so many ways. Ours was my mother’s book, now it is mine. It reveals that astonishing similarity we all share as our human condition. Its tangible memories beat out that great rhythm of life and death in which we all move and breathe and have our being. I know that book. I know those meals, which have been prepared for me, and, which I’ve cooked. I know it deep and true and I know it filled with joy and sorrow.

This is my first opportunity to speak to you all since sending my letter out announcing that I will be retiring from parish ministry at the end of our next church year, that means the last regular church Sunday service in June, 2015. I’m grateful that I have this chance to speak and it is on a Sunday when we speak of our mothers and we honor our teachers and we even gave a salute to a cub scout who proudly asserted his Unitarian Universalist faith.

I find myself thinking of gratitude.

Gratitude.

Cathy and I agreed that Marcia Taylor’s lovely song “Because of You” would be the thread that we would follow through this service. “In this world, we come and go, touching lives in ways we never know; so here and now, I just want to say: you have made a difference in my life.” So rich an assertion, so layered. So true. Like those cookbooks. Like our lives, all children of mothers, some of us mothers, hopefully in some ways all of us mothers.

So here I find myself thinking of all who give themselves to the great project of care and attention that is our shared life here, from taking care of our growing children to engaging the call of a more just world, all those things great and small. Here I think of the mysterious mix given to us by the Creator, our common mother: smell, touch, taste, sight & hearing, as well as sadness, courage, loneliness, memory, and hope, and freedom and joy and choice and most of all, the wondrous thread that winds through it all, love.

And, here I think again, of that old cookbook. How can I not?

And of gratitude, I find myself thinking of gratitude.

Rhona McAdam sings how “This book’s pages, furred with use,/fade to brown. Its leaves have pressed/my mother’s memories in perfect squares, the things/she needs concealed from time,/things she likes to come upon by chance:/household tips and obituaries, invitations/to weddings. My first poem is in there, and the card/someone made for mother’s day. Sentiment/among the weeds of recipes she clipped/in more ambitious days/that crowd, untasted, between the even rows/of meals we chewed our way through/but never knew the names of, all those years’/worth of peeled vegetables and trimmed meat,/a lifetime’s preparation vanished/into our waiting mouths.”

And, recalled here today, by you and me.

We do it through our ordinary lives. All of us children of the great mother, all of us children of mothers, some of us mothers, and in some ways, all of us, mothers.

So connected.

So completely connected.

I’m so grateful.

Happy mother’s day!

Amen.