When Your Heart Goes Walking

a sermon for Mother’s Day

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

5/12/02

 

Reading (Kate Moses, excerpt from “A Mother’s Body” from Mothers Who Think)

 

“We are at the ocean.  My daughter is playing, making a comfortable seat from a chunk of driftwood, running from the surf, crouching in the sand.

 

I’m watching her, holding her shoes, my back to the sun, when I notice she’s playing in my shadow.  My hair is blowing, my long shape darkening the colorful sand—and there she is, my little girl, inside me again.  ‘Celeste!’ I say, waving my arms.  ‘Look!  You’re in my shadow.’

 

She does look up, looks around, but she doesn’t understand or doesn’t see, or maybe she’s just so intent on the mossy stick in her hand that it doesn’t matter.  I follow her closer than I need to before I finally give up, keeping pace as she wanders, trying to get her attention, trying to get her to see my shadow and herself in it.

 

A few days later, I’ve moved her toy table into the kitchen while I make dinner.  She sits in a yellow chair with her watercolor set, some wide sheets of paper, and a cup of water.  Kiddie songs natter in the background.  She loves to paint—the muddy pools of color, the swampy paper bleeding pink and orange and blue.

 

When I turn back to her a little later, she is so still, her hand poised, holding a slim plastic brush over the spilled water cup, that I think maybe she’s fallen asleep.  But no—it’s her shadow she’s discovered, her fingers duplicated on her painting, moving as she moves.  She’s so focused I wouldn’t dare disturb her, and watch instead as she wags her thumb, tips the brush, moves her hand entirely away and back again.  She’s blocking the light, and letting it in.  Learning that her body is ripe with miracles.  Seeded with powers beyond her imagining.  I know my place.  I stand back, ready with another cup of water, out of her light.”

Sermon

I was in a K-Mart the first time I realized that Mother’s Day was more complex than greeting cards and flowers…that the day meant more than taking Mom out to dinner or offering a long-distance phone call salute.  I had been walking the main aisle of the store, glancing up and down in search of some generic purchase when I was halted by the greeting card section, an aisle featuring several signs with colorful, bold-faced type prodding consumers to do some consuming:  “Remember Mom!”  they hollered out.  “Don’t forget Mother’s Day!” they pleaded.  A typical display for the Hallmark holiday that Mother’s Day has become…no different than any Mother’s Day display of my past.  The problem was that I was different. My mother had died earlier that week and my whole world was in a state of flux.  In the midst of my mourning, these familiar Mother’s Day reminders were offering images to me that transcended cards and flowers.  “Remember Mom.”  I felt as though I had just received the secret handshake to a club for which I had no use just a few weeks earlier, a club of survivors—my membership sealed by my realization that Mother’s Day is not just a day to send flowers or to take Mom out to dinner.  It is a day to remember:  to remember what is but will not forever be; a day to remember what was but is now no more.  And maybe a day to remember what never was and may never be.

 

During my visit to K-Mart I had been unexpectedly inducted into a new way of viewing this holiday, this second Sunday of May—a day I had taken for granted ever since my first Sunday school produced construction-paper greeting card featuring glitter and dried macaroni.  Now I found myself more capable of discerning the variety of ways in which others might be viewing this annual marking post of time.

 

Mother’s Day is one of the more complex holidays we celebrate because at its core are issues intricately woven into the fabric of our lives.  It is a day to honor the woman without whom we would not be here, yes.  But for many it is also a day to be reminded of an unfulfilled desire to bear children of their own.  It is a day to be together with the woman who sacrificed much of herself in order to have and raise offspring, but it is also a day for many to be reminded of challenging relationships, unresolved conflict, and mothers who are no longer here to visit.  It is a day for mothers to be surrounded by their children’s affection, but for many it is a day to remember children whose lives ended too soon.

 

Mother’s Day is a time to recognize the paradox of our existence:  that as separate as we might view ourselves, we all are intimately connected to another; while at the same time, as connected as we sometimes are or want to be, we are forever separate.  We cannot escape this endless cycle of connection and disconnection, a pattern mirrored in the changing seasons, the tidal flow of the oceans and the repetitive exchange of day with night.  Each of us is a product of connection and each of us is headed for separation.  That is the rhythm of life: a continual process of holding on and letting go.

 

Extraordinary, isn’t it, this give and take that enables each of us to exist?  And yet, right there is another contradiction—how can something we all experience be extraordinary?  The satirical paper The Onion ran a headline a while back that read:  “Miracle of childbirth occurs today…for the 18 billionth time.”  Yes, this miracle produced each and every one of us, yet that doesn’t make it any less miraculous…any less wonderfully amazing, does it?  Extraordinary and mundane…at the same time.

 

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of child bearing is the surrender of the mother’s body to the life growing inside.  A walking incubator, each mother’s body is taken over for nine months or so by a force with an ever-developing mind of its own.  Sounds like the plot of a horror movie, doesn’t it?  And let us not forget the continued surrender required once the baby makes its grand entrance.

 

Along these lines, I’ve heard comedienne Rita Rudner say that she and her husband were trying to decide whether to buy a dog or have a child—whether to ruin their carpets or their lives.

 

Perhaps what makes this joke funny is the strand of truth running through it.  Having a child can require some serious reconstruction to the lives we have built up as autonomous adults.  It is not uncommon to hear new parents describing the contradiction of needing control over their lives precisely at the time when they realize control is a myth.  Choosing to lose the control that may have taken more than thirty years to construct does not seem to be a decision to be made without some outside assistance.  Clearly, there must be another force working to open prospective parents up to the idea of having a child…the force of nature.

 

Unitarian-Universalist minister and psychotherapist Maren Tonder Hansen speaks of her desire to bear children arriving not as a simple choice, but as an abduction.  She writes:

 

“In my thirtieth year, completely out of the blue, my DNA bounded onto center stage, boisterously demanding, ‘Honey, let’s get pregnant!’  It was as if a separate creature who had long been slumbering suddenly awakened….My pitiful little ego scrambled to get on its feet, to claim that all was under control.  My ego said ridiculous things like, ‘Wow, I sure am obsessing about being pregnant,’ or ‘I really think I’d like to start a family now.’  As if ‘I’ were in charge.  The conscious part of my psyche had suddenly been relegated to a minor role in a major drama that ‘I’ was not authoring.  Unbeknownst to me, forces ancient and powerful lurched forward, grabbed me from behind, abducted me for their own purposes.  I was merely a vessel through which to accomplish their goal:  perpetuation of the human species.”[1]

 

Despite the recognition that the forces of nature play a pivotal role in determining who will conceive and when they will conceive, for many there does remain a choice of whether or not to follow through with the impulses as they are received, to intentionally sacrifice one’s individual ego to the altar of child-bearing, to present another offering to the flow of life that is our human world.  And sadly our current culture does not offer many opportunities for prospective parents to grasp the reality of raising a child.  In one corner sit the general media who are apt to treat the raising of the next generation as a “lifestyle issue”—like deciding to take a cruise, earn a degree, or buy a condo—and in the other corner sit the specialized, targeted media—contributors to magazines, web sites and parenting manuals—who remain committed to twisting child-rearing into “chirpy twelve step guides and ten-best lists,” as though the complicated mix of emotions and drama that truly encompass motherhood were too much for the general public to handle.[2]

 

It’s been said that “being a mother is a lifelong lesson in embracing contradiction.”[3]  This morning, this Mother’s Day, I encourage us to consider this contradiction that underlies motherhood, and in turn, which underlies us all…the contradiction embedded in the reality that a woman’s child is inextricably part of her, yet forever separate, forever apart.

 

I chose the title of this sermon after reading a quote attributed to Elizabeth Stone.  She wrote that having a child is “to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”  And because we have all had mothers, whether we have known them or not, this is an issue with which we all must grapple at some level or another.  For if a child carries a piece of her mother’s heart, then does not a mother forever carry a piece of her child’s heart?  Other questions arise as well:  How can we be together and separate at the same time?  What do we do in the face of this incredible contradiction of living?  And how may we find meaning when our hearts walk away?  These are questions we must answer for ourselves over the course of our lives, yet I believe the answers may rest in our ability to surrender to something greater than ourselves, to surrender to the flow of existence.

 

In the reading this morning, a mother chases her daughter down the beach, almost pleading for her to recognize the miracle of their connection, while the daughter can apparently only conceive of the miracle of herself.  Sound familiar?  The mother is left to stand by watching, waiting, and staying out of the light.  Nora Okja Keller shares another story of mother/daughter separation—the first day of kindergarten, and reaches a similar conclusion.  She writes:

 

“As we walked to her classroom, her small hand folded within mine, I was the one trying to find reasons for her not to go.

 

‘I’m nervous,’ I told her before we entered her classroom. 

 

She frowned, puzzled and said, ‘Why are you nervous?  You’re not the one going.’

 

When the bell rang, she cried a little.  She hugged me…[and] then with a little sniffle, she let go, releasing me.

 

From this point on, I knew, our separation would continue to grow over the years, as she experienced things in her life that I wouldn’t even know about.  Imagining her in the world without needing the protection of a mother’s body, I felt a small moment of panic, a sudden clutching cramp not unlike the pain experienced at her birth.

 

Each good-bye, each separation, reminds me of our vulnerability—hers and mine.  Because of our attachment, vital to life, I am afraid of death in a way that I never was before; I cannot bear to think of that ultimate separation.  Life suddenly seems so tenuous, so brief.

 

I drove to the school early and sat on a bench until the bell rang.  I worried that my daughter might have been as off-balance as I was that day, but she came out skipping.  When she jumped into my arms for a hug, her words tumbled over themselves in her excitement to tell me about the girls in her class, about a boy who had to have a time out, about the playdough they had mixed from scratch.  I pressed my face into the cradle of her neck, inhaling her sweaty-sweet scent not barely reminiscent of infancy, before she squirmed away.”[4]

 

Certainly we could find similar stories of separation occurring throughout all the stages of life—the first date, graduation, leaving home, getting married, having children.  I appreciate these stories because they really point up the tension between holding on and letting go that is always just below the surface of everything we do. And, because of their unique position in the center of the paradox, mothers have much to teach us.  As the sacred vessels through which human life emerges, mothers cannot help but view their children as extensions of themselves, thereby experiencing human interconnectedness on a most basic, intimate level.  Children, on the other hand, as new arrivals on the scene, cannot help but view their mothers, initially at least, as anything more than personal attendants to their nourishment, support, and protection.

 

In time, though, these children will eventually face life’s contradictions as well.  For while we are all consciously or unconsciously connected to our mothers, the intensity of that connection demands separation…requires that we pull away from the source of our being.  That, we have been told, is the way of the living.  And further down the road of our lives, if we are lucky, we may have the opportunity to come to terms with the connection we have left behind along the way.  For some this occurs as we pass the baton of life to our offspring, and for others it happens when we come to terms with the death of a parent.

 

It’s not surprising that birth and death are the avenues by which we are reminded of our connections, for they are the most obvious portals into the mysterious depths of our existence.  They are windows into the unknown and mirrors providing the reflections of ourselves we so often miss.

 

Writer Philip Hallie poignantly shares his own recognition of the flow of existence in an essay entitled “An Apology to My Mother.”  Written in the form of a letter dated May 20, 1989, Hallie reflects on his mother’s death which had occurred just nine days earlier.  He writes:

 

“Your death has done some strange things to your son.  And I feel what it has done more sharply now, here in Connecticut, than I felt it while I was burying you in Chicago.  One of the things it has done is to make it impossible for me to lie to you anymore.  Before May 11, I used to say to myself, ‘She is there, in Chicago.  She’ll never find out.’…No more.  I once thought that death is only parting, but it is more strange than that.  Now I feel that you were separate from me before you died.  While you were alive you were there, outside of me, there in Chicago, or there across the table stroking your right eyebrow and dreaming.  I could think my own thoughts, I could plan my own travels, and I could feel my own guilty disdain for your fears.

 

But now you are within me as you have never been before.  Now there is nothing you cannot find out about my thoughts.  Sometimes I am like an empty house that is full of your spirit, your fears, and your sense of humor….It was only your body we buried in that hole on that rainy day in May, your body, which was always separate from me, ever since you gave birth to me.  I feel your soul as I never felt it before you died.  Life parted us, not death.”[5]

 

Hallie offers another layer of complexity to the contradiction.  Even as we discover the ultimate separation of death, so too, may we rediscover the initial connection we may have spent a lifetime forgetting.  So as we gather this Mother’s Day, this day to honor those to whom we owe our lives, may we remember that behind every separation is a connection.  A connection to life, to love, and to the extraordinary flow of existence of which we are all a part.  And may we rejoice in the joy of sharing our hearts, of surrendering to forces greater than our individual lives.  And when our hearts go walking, may we find the strength to enjoy the ride…and to delight in the patterns of the tracks left behind.

 

Meditation (inspired by the writing of Rev. Barbara J. Pescan)

Creative Spirit, Spirit of Life,

Mother of us all.

We carry with us this morning

All the accumulated baggage of our lives

Connections almost forgotten

Separations too easily remembered

 

We gather amidst the complexity of this day,

A day of love and longing

Of remembering and returning,

To affirm the gift that we are alive

And that this gift was bestowed upon us

Through the life of one we call mother

A person with fears and dreams and challenges

A person with faults and failures and triumphs

A person who was once merely a child herself.

 

Let us now offer to the silence

One by one, aloud or silently

The names of our mothers

In appreciation

In acknowledgment of all we did

And did not receive

In forgiveness

 

In the silence

Rediscover the connection

Bind what has been separated

And if you wish, after a time,

Say the name of your mother

Or say the name of the one who mothered you.

 

(silence)

 

And now offer into the silence

The names of those who

You have mothered and nurtured,

Who you have cared for and encouraged.

Those you have launched into life and heard into speech

Say the names of your daughters and sons

Those who have walked with your heart

And those who have offered their hearts to you.

(silence)

We have offered these names

Of our mothers, and of those we have mothered.

We have offered

These pieces of our hearts

In recognition of the imperfections

That make us who we are

In acknowledgment of the forgiveness we all require

For who among us can be certain

Of the challenges others must face

The chasms others must cross

To simply live.

 

May we be gentle with ourselves.

May we be gentle with each other.

And may that be enough.

Amen.