Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-6-13

It is sweet to look ahead to Mother’s Day by looking back, and thinking about, motherhood. Of all the artificial, consumerist-induced “holidays,” this might be the “holi-est,” because a Mother, as a subspecies of the human family – indeed all of animate creation – comes the closest we can imagine any of us being to divine.

I write, of course, as someone of the sub-sub species, a man who is merely a son. Without being a traitor to my sex, what I mean is that a recipient of a mother’s love, a product of a mother’s nurture, a blessing of a mother’s grace – for all the unspeakable joys represented in those conditions – can only accept on trust what it means to be a mother. To conceive, to bear, to deliver, to rear, to laugh, to cry, to hold, to love, and then to say good-bye to a child is something that neither father nor even son is capable of fully understanding.

I am not so starry-eyed to be saying that all mothers are angels. It is a statistical unlikelihood. Half the fairy tales we know would not have been spun without the Evil Stepmother. Nature allows for exceptions. But if all mothers are not angels, I think it is true – plausible under poetic license – that all angels are mothers. Marschall’s Law: A few mothers seem like angels because they are always harping about something; but most mothers are angelic because they display the saintly qualities God has imbued in the status of motherhood.

The modern world, including militant feminism (which, by its name, ought to believe the opposite of what it teaches), would have us believe that all humans are alike in every way, except for, um, internal plumbing. And the annoyances of life, like some of us have to shave our faces every day, and lift heavy objects in the yard on weekends; and some of us are cursed to become pregnant and bear all the things that society demands thereafter. I call that description of womanhood and of motherhood, faulty pronunciations of “special” and “blessed.”

I think it is significant that God’s chosen people, the Jews, trace lineage through mothers, not fathers. I think it is profound that the world accepts the wisdom of the statement, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” I think it is noteworthy that the viewpoints of mothers have sanction to transcend logic and mundane rules – in the manner of Ambrose Bierce’s description of “sweater” as “A garment worn by a child when its mother is chilly.”

My opinions were mightily formed as a child after dozens of times my mother took her handkerchief from her purse, and gently applied a little saliva to wipe my face after I played in the dirt, or before a Sunday School performance. (Those were days when women carried dainty handkerchiefs and, moreover, sprinkled them with perfume.) But I was naive. I was convinced for years that mothers emitted perfumed spit. Remarkable proof, it seemed to me, that moms were extra-special, endowed by their Creator with inalienable attributes.

Yet there were other, really remarkable and extra-special aspects to my mother (insert: “all our mothers”). When there was only a little extra food at mealtimes, I never, never saw my mother take a second helping for herself when others were even slightly hungry. When any of us kids disappointed her, which surely was not infrequent, time after time she forgave and even made the most ridiculous excuses for our actions – to others, while she no doubt cried herself to sleep in the way that mothers can fold things under their wings.

My mother chose instead to nurture, and explain, finding wisdom from who-knows-where, except the seeds that God plants. In her case, every question of mine that children have wondered through the ages, was answered in the context of God and the Bible. Even when her theology was improvisatory, her instinct was sure… and that taught me more than chapter-and-verse. She taught me hymns and Bible verse that she uttered even in her last days, when in a coma.

One final observation among these inadequate attempts to gild the lily that is Motherhood. Fathers tend to defend and instruct and, we hope, be role models: items on our job descriptions. But the unique relationship between a mother and her child is illustrated by the fact that a godly woman will make her requests known unto God; she will discuss her plans with her husband; but she shares her dreams with her child.

Usually mothers share those dreams privately, and casually. Her soul can be laid bare in the kitchen, while dinner is cooking. Imaginings can unfold while laundry is hung. A child’s bed, with Mom stroking her child’s hair, can become a confessional booth. Of such moments, biological imperatives all, trust is the fiber of the beautiful weaving of bonding, and of love.

What is shared by mothers in those unique moments matters little in relation to whether they bear fruit or are evanescent. They might be the stuff of foolish hopes, or even bitter disappointment. What matters is that mothers, in such settings, inhabit those extra-special attributes of motherhood. Sorry, guys: we have our special moments, but they are quite different.

We hear something like the flutter of angel wings, and it can remind us of saintly mothers. We can sense a whiff of something like perfumed spit – excuse me – and we are reminded of mothers’ everlasting acts of nurture. We shed a tear of remembrance for our mothers and realize that a magical alchemy joins that tear of joy with mom’s old tears of sorrow, and love, and supernatural compassion.

Mother’s Day. A holy day indeed, if we remember correctly.

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The great Iris Dement wrote a song about our theme today. She sings of her special relationship with her mother – dreams shared directly, values absorbed indirectly, but the weave that forms the fabric of life. The verses of the bridge, by the way, are comprised of 10 or 12 titles of old gospel songs.

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