A MOTHERING SPIRIT
A Mothers’ Day Meditation
James Ishmael Ford
8 May 2016
Pacific Unitarian Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, California
Today, let’s consider mothers. We have many mothers among us. And, of course, we all, every blessed one of us have a mother. So, let’s talk mothers.
And, let’s not pretend otherwise. Mother’s Day is a complicated thing. I don’t think its possible for any of us to have unmixed feelings about mothers in general, and our own mothers in particular. Even the happiest and healthiest of mother child relationships are marked by wounds, sometimes profound. And then there are those mothers who were seriously abusive, or absent, or, who knows? All are present as we say the word mother. And it doesn’t end there. Possibly, probably, among us there are those who wish they could be mothers, but for various reasons could not be. So, Mothers’ Day can be a hard day.
And. And, and there’s something else woven into that word “mother,” a primary thread that if we follow it leads us to some sense of hope for humanity and for the world. There is something buried just beneath the sappy sentiments and flowers and printed greeting cards. Something authentic. There are those traits we associate with mothers and mothering, a mothering spirit, if you will, that speaks of every good thing there is about being human.
This spirit might come with the flesh, in our blood, our genetic connections. And it might come in any number of other ways, as well. I’ve seen how exactly who it is that brings that mothering spirit into our lives can be a complete mystery. But, if we attend, we will see it. It is there. It is here. We can’t live without it. And, of course, this mothering spirit that we see is always the ideal and the actual, like a box and its lid. We have to take both the broken and the whole together.
Today we’re each of us invited to reflect on that, all of it, ideal and actual. Now, for me, I have three women in my life who fit the “mother” category, each of whom brought the mothering spirit to my formation as a human being. And today I find memories of them floating up from my heart into my mind, and a need to let them loose through my tongue. I’d like to share them as examples of different ways they showed me things, mostly good, although not all it.
Now, the dominant figures within the family throughout my growing up were my father and my mother’s mother. My father was handsome, smart and deeply troubled. James was an alcoholic and a schemer always looking for the main chance, and always bungling it. When I think of him today, mostly I think of someone like George Clooney’s Ulysses Everett McGill in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.
It was my grandmother who was our family anchor and spiritual center. Boline was a prayer warrior, who I admit in my well-polished memory, is Jane Darwell’s Ma Joad in the Grapes of Wrath. When her husband abandoned her with two small daughters, she did what had to be done. In her case the girls went into an orphanage as she paid the costs working as a live-in maid. It was hard and sometimes demeaning work. A family story that has traveled down and lodged in my heart was of her humiliation once when being accused of stealing food. My sense is she may well have needed it, I can only think thankfully not for her daughters, but, also, her fierce dignity that probably would have led her to starve before stealing to feed herself, and my absolute certainty of the falseness of that accusation. Today, I carry that wound as if it were my own physical memory.
But, there were two more mothers, mothering spirits. My biological mother and my auntie. My mother, Barbara, if I’m going to continue to use film analogies is probably a lot like Oliva de Havilland’s Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, without, need I add, any of the social advantages. In our family drama, she was the victim. She had a hand in it, but ultimately she was buffeted by circumstances beyond her control, she nearly always was acted upon, rather than the actor. Here, I find some of the less healthy parts of the real in mothering for my life. But, also, her never wavering love if also often ineffective for my brother and myself was palpable, and important in several ways.
And then there’s auntie. Julia was the younger daughter. She never left home; she lived with her parents, then her sister, and then, with Jan and me. Reaching for a film image, none of those stereotypical maiden aunts work. The problem is we can’t capture auntie through the world of action; it’s the world of dreams that fits her. So, for me, I guess she will eternally be Mary Martin’s Peter Pan, mischievous and eternally pre-pubescent. As a kid she was the source for comic books and trips to museums and long walks to find strange things. My brother and I never really thought of her as a real adult, more a co-conspirator and sometimes instigator in our kid lives. For me today, I’d say she was my junior mom. Another angle on the mothering spirit.
And, helping me along as I reflect on mothers and that idea of a mothering spirit, I would have two lives with these women, or, at least my mom and junior mom. One of them as a child, and the other as an adult. Some twenty-five years ago I accepted the call to my first ministry in the suburbs of Milwaukee. My grandmother had died a couple of years earlier. Watching my mother’s and aunt’s financial circumstances turn dire, Jan and I decided we had to move them in with us. They brought their limited social security income and a small, rapidly dwindling savings account, which turned out to be just enough to give us the down payment on our first home. We all pooled our income as a single-family unit. And it worked. We had our rough moments, but it worked.
The four of us lived together until 1997 when following a recurrence of breast cancer my mother died. That last week I was out of town at a conference. But before it was over Jan called and said that I needed to get home, and quickly. I booked a flight that day and returned. When I got to the house and walked into her bedroom where she now slept and lived in a recliner chair, she took my hand and said, “I waited for you.” She died later that day.
Then it was three of us. Auntie was with Jan and me for twenty-three years. She died a year and a month ago in the midst of the run up to our retiring and getting ready to return to California. For her, it, too, was a recurrence of breast cancer. As I’ve already said auntie’s life was lived mostly within her imagination, helped along the way by Romance novels of a supernatural sort. She liked nice dragons and good vampires. We never drove by a bookstore she didn’t want to stop at, to rummage through it to find old friends and new. While she never got to occupy the bedroom meant for her in our condo in Long Beach, we still refer to it as “auntie’s room.”
I think of these three women who occupied mothering places in my life. Not the only ones. Obviously. And not all women. But, the principal ones, the ones with ties of blood as well as of spirit, the ones who imprinted for me what a mother might be, and how, if I were lucky, and paid attention, and stepped away from the constraints of stereotype and myths and realities of gender difference, could find within myself.
And that’s an important point, I think of this mothering spirit we hold up at the heart of Mothers’ Day, the real deal, the sense of nurture and care and willingness to stick with no matter what, and even as it doesn’t always happen, it doesn’t have to happen with a biological mother. Just as with the archetypes associated with the variation on the theme we can call a “Fathering spirit.” Those, we’ll reserve for another reflection. Today is, after all, Mothers’ Day.
That said, this thing we call the Mothering spirit. I can manifest an important aspect of it. And, so can you. Whoever you may be. Mother. Father. Daughter. Son. Friend. Neighbor. Teacher. This list is as long and as deep as our human hearts. We all can manifest this spirit. And, and this is important: I feel we should. I believe we’re called by it, into it. That’s part of the miracle of it.
In fact, what I believe we’re celebrating here is the most important part of what it means to be human, the ways we care for one another, the time, and energy, and most of all, love that we extend. That love which is more than any doctrine is ultimately the love we call Mother’s Love, the love that nurtures, the love that sustains.
Sometimes, we just call it love.
It lives at the heart of our being human. The comfort of the helpless. The strength behind all strength.
That certainly is something worth recalling on a special day. The ideal and the actual. All of it. To remember. To witness. And, maybe to resolve in our hearts, to share.
Don’t you think?
So, happy Mothers’ Day. All of it.
So be it. Blessed be. And, amen.
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