"Mother's Day" by Rev. Thomas Schade

[Memos from Rev. Barbara Merritt and Rev. Tom Schade]

M I N I S T E R ‘ S   M E M O

“Mother’s Day”

The first time I ever acted as a minister on Mother’s Day was to tell a
story in a children’ chapel service. As soon as I said that I had a story
about mothers, a little girl started crying and sobbed uncontrollably in the
lap of her Sunday School teacher throughout the story. As you can imagine, I
was a bit taken aback by this. After all, who wants to knowingly make other
people’s children weep? I was so troubled and so concerned that complaints
were going lodged against me with the management, that I went to the Senior
Minister of the church and confessed the whole event.

That wise minister told me that it was common knowledge in the profession
that whatever you said on Mother’s Day, someone in the congregation would be
crying. “Get used to it.”

Maria Rizzuto, in a brilliant book “The Birth of the Living God” explains
our first understanding of God arises in some relationship with our
understanding of our parents. For some of us, our first understanding of God
is that God is like our parents, or a super version of our parents. God is
thought of as unlike our parents, perhaps nicer, or more loving, or more
just. For some, God might even be thought of as the only force capable of
rescuing the child from the parents. One can imagine all the variations
possible. This insight puts the observation made by C.S. Lewis that no child
was ever surprised when they were told about God into context. Of course,
children would instinctively get the idea of God, because they relate the
God-idea to their experience of having parents.

If Rizzuto is right, then one of the first things that we have to do as we
grow in faith is to disentangle our understanding of God (and even the God
one might not believe in) from our experience with our parents.

If that is true, and I think it so, Mother’s Day is one of the most
religious days of the year. People are working with the raw materials of the
human experience on that day:
* None of us chose to be alive. We just woke up and here we were.
* Each of us started our life completely dependent on someone else, usually
our mothers, to whom we literally owe our lives.
* The people we depended on were inconsistent, unreliable and failed
miserably at meeting 100% of our needs and desires at all times. Eventually,
we had to stand on our own two feet.
* Our relationship with these primary people in our lives continues to be a
constant push and pull of love, anger, resentment, dependency, support,
encouragement and independence.

When I look through a rack of Mother’s Day cards, or read poems about
Mothers, it is remarkable how many religious themes emerge. It is said that
all religious feeling starts from feelings of gratitude for life itself and
for the incomprehensible chain of improbabilities that have resulted in a
single human life. You can start that chain of improbabilities where ever
you want – that the distance between the Earth and Sun is just right for
human life, or that human life apparently depends on honeybees – but one of
the last links in that chain is that a particular woman generated your flesh
out of her own, carried you and delivered you, all while trying to have a
life of her own.

It may be that your experience with your mother and your life make
responding with gratitude and awe seem foolish. On the other hand, it may
seem that you have been blessed with gifts so wonderful that they can never
be repaid and which you did not deserve. Life can be so good that it makes a
person feel guilty and ashamed. When I read the most sentimental and sweet,
Mother’s Day Cards about perfect and saintly mothers, I sometimes wonder,
“Just how guilty about growing up do you have to feel to write this stuff?”

Gratitude is hard. It’s hard because sometimes, it seems like the gifts we
have received are shabby and inappropriate. Sometimes it hard because it
doesn’t seem like we have deserved any gift at all. But discovering that
which you are truly grateful for, unreservedly and whole-heartedly, is one
of most important spiritual tasks. And no day it better for working on that
task than Mother’s Day.







P. S. It is not too late to make a better plan for Mother’s Day. And guys,
just because the mother of your children is not your mother is no excuse.


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