Mother's Day Column '16

Mother’s Day poses some challenges in the church service. Some folks expect that the entire service should be designated for mothers. For some of us, this undercuts the focus of the worship service: God. Some on the religious left use the occasion to speak about maternal imagery for God as In Is. 66. Some of us are sensitive about emphasizing the role of mothers for those who have lost children to death or who have not delivered children into the world.I usually try to write a prayer poem and distribute it. Perhaps one of our earliest intimations of the divine is seeing the face of the mother when we are infants. After all, “the love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge).

I had a church member who left the congregation due to a Mother’s Day prayer. His parents had  sent him to an orphanage, and he could not find the capacity for forgiveness. I have heard a number of people dislike the day, as their own mothers were not adequate to the task of being a parent, as their mental illness left them ill-equipped to try to raise a child. A few men have told me that they dislike m the holiday as they feel that their marital life deteriorated after bringing children into the world.A number of people avoided church that day as it reminded them of the passing of their own mother or grandmother.

Family relations forge the crucible of our lives. It’s been said that we carry around 25,000 hours of family tapes in our memories. I think that the soundtrack of the memory is often of a mother’s admonition and advice. Take a moment and I bet you can hear her voice. When we become parents we have a choice:what to continue form our family pattern, or what to alter a bit, or what to bury, not to see the light of day again.My mother was always either vaguely or openly disappointed with her Mother’s Day present. She poured her life, even her identity, into raising children. No present could ever hope to touch such a complete offering of self. So, she also felt unrecognized and underappreciated. Sometimes, a card would hit her well, especially ones that spoke of all of the variety of work and roles a mother shouldered.

Even if mothers are critical, we usually have the sense that they think the world of us. So, our sense of self-worth emerges from the cocoon of regard that they create. “A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.” (Honore de Balzac)

No one is fully prepared to be a parent. Since mothers are often the emotional center of households, the pressure on them is enormous. In a recent study, around ⅔ of new mothers are miserable as they face the astounding amount of demands a child places upon them.I’ve said before that  being a parent is like living in a time tunnel. Simultaneously, we see a grown child and an infant blur together in memory. Mothers may have good boundaries, but they find it difficult to say t no to children, even as adults. So mothers continue to be on call for their chidlren as grandmothers, babysitting, doing errands, handing out cash grants.At some level this constant attention emerges from a fear of failure, of a looming sense of guilt or shame for not having the capacity or skills to be perfect, an unattainable goal for anyone.

May God bless mothers fully this and every day. May they allow themselves to celebrate and to be celebrated this Mother’s day.