When Your Heart Goes Walking
--a service for Mother’s Day Weekend--
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
Rev. Mark Stringer
May 12 and 13, 2007

 

“And it came to me, and I knew what I had to have before my soul would rest. I wanted to belong - to belong to my mother. And in return - I wanted my mother to belong to me.”—Gloria Vanderbilt

 

Reading 
From an essay by Kate Moses.

 

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.[1]

Sermon

I was in a K-Mart almost twenty years ago 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.  This display was typical for the season…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 world had been turned upside down.  In the midst of my sorrow, 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 thinking about 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 in the calendar 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. 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, 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.  Kind of 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.

 

It’s true, having a child can require some serious reconstruction to the lives we have built up as autonomous adults, and, sadly, our current culture does not offer many opportunities for prospective parents to truly grasp the reality of raising a child.  I remember commenting to Susan not long after our own daughter was born, “Why didn’t anyone tell us it would be like this?” 

 

Of course, people may have told us, but we just didn’t (or couldn’t) hear them.  But, then again, when I talk to couples expecting children for the first time, I don’t tell them all that is truly involved…maybe because I care about their mental health.  Or maybe because I have already blocked so much out.  Or maybe a little bit of both. 

 

I don’t want to overstate the challenges of parenting.  As Bruce Martin mentioned to me after one of the services in which this sermon was preached (paraphrasing), “Raising children made me more humane.”  I agree, Bruce.  I agree.

 

It’s been said that “being a mother (or a father, for that matter) is a lifelong lesson in embracing contradiction.”[2] This morning then, this Mother’s Day, I encourage us to consider this contradiction that underlies motherhood (and fatherhood), and in turn, which underlies us all…the contradiction embedded in the reality that a child is inextricably part of her parents, 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 moms and dads, 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 parents’ heart, then do not parents forever carry a piece of their child’s heart? 

 

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.  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.”[3]

 

Similar stories of separation occur throughout all the stages of life—the first date, graduation, leaving home, getting married, having children.  I appreciate the poignancy of 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.

 

But fathers, too, can be challenged by the separations inherent in life.  In this poem entitled “No Longer a Teenager” Gerald Locklin reflects on the changes in his relationship with his daughter:

my daughter, who turns twenty tomorrow,

has become truly independent.

she doesn’t need her father to help her

deal with the bureaucracies of schools,
hmo’s, insurance, the dmv.
she is quite capable of handling
landlords, bosses, and auto repair shops.
also boyfriends and roommates.
and her mother.

 

Frankly it’s been a big relief.
the teenage years were often stressful.
sometimes, though, i feel a little useless.

 

but when she drove down from northern California
to visit us for a couple of days,
she came through the door with the
biggest, warmest hug in the world for me.
and when we all went out for lunch,
she said, affecting a little girl’s voice,
“i’m going to sit next to my daddy,”
and she did, and slid over close to me
so I could put my arm around her shoulder
until the food arrived.

 

i’ve been keeping busy since she’s been gone,
mainly with my teaching and writing,
a little travel connected with both,
but i realized now how long it had been
since I had felt deep emotion.

 

when she left I said, simply,
“i love you,”
and she replied, quietly,
“i love you too.”
you know it isn’t always easy for
a twenty-year-old to say that,
it isn’t always easy for a father.

literature and opera are full of
characters who die for love:
i stay alive for her.[4]

 

While parents may be more familiar with the “heart goes walking” metaphor, than their children, in time, their offspring will eventually face life’s contradictions as well.  For while we are all consciously or unconsciously connected to our parents, the intensity of that connection demands separation…requires that we pull away from the source of our being.  But, 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.

  

Writer Philip Hallie poignantly shared his own recognition of the flow of existence in an essay entitled “An Apology to My Mother.”  I’ve read this piece before from the pulpit and it seems particularly appropriate today, as I am aware of how many in our community have recently said their final goodbyes to parents. No doubt about it, this congregation has had its share of heavy hearts this year…its share of hearts going walking, we might say. And, at the same time, we’ve had several births and pending pregnancies, too.  And the circle of life just keep on turning.

 

In the essay I will read, 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]

 

Even as we discover the ultimate separation of death, so too, may we rediscover the initial connection we may have spent a lifetime forgetting.  And for me, therein lies the importance of this holiday, this Mother’s Day (and the Father’s Day that will follow in June).  No matter how many difficult or beautiful memories these days conjure up for us, no matter how connected or disconnected we may feel to our mothers and fathers, these days can remind us that life is far more temporary than it may seem, and each of us, by nature of being human, will one day have to let go of those who gave us life...and we will each have to let go of those to whom we have given life.  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 courage and the joy of sharing our hearts, of surrendering to forces greater than our individual lives.  And when our hearts go walking, as they always have and always will, may we find the strength to enjoy the ride…and to delight in the patterns of the tracks left behind.

 

Closing Words (Mary Oliver)

To live in this world you must be able to do three things:

To love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;

And, when the time comes to let it go,

To let it go.