Faith of Our Mothers

Rev. Millie Rochester

May 11, 2008

Mother's Day has been observed in one way or another as far back as the time of ancient Romans and Greeks, but a day of dining out, chocolate, and Hallmark cards was not even remotely envisioned.

In the 16th century, "Mothering Sunday" in the United Kingdom was a day when everyone was expected to revisit the church in which they were baptized. The step from honoring Mother Church to honoring mothers took about a hundred years in the UK. In this country, we associate Mother's Day with two women - Julia Ward Howe and Anna Jarvis - neither of whom was impelled by "Hallmark" sentiments - but both of whom speak to us.

Julia Ward and Samuel Gridley Howe were a power couple, though not by Samuel's choosing. He believed that women should not have a life outside the home; they should support their husbands and not speak publicly or be active themselves in the causes of the day. Yet, he was a radical Unitarian whose religious conviction valued the development of every individual, and he manifested his faith through working with the blind, the mentally ill, and those in prison. He had become Director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, by the time he and Julia married.

She had been born into a socially and religiously conservative family, but grew to be a Unitarian Christian, believing in a personal, loving God who cared about the affairs of humanity. Both of them opposed slavery, and they were encouraged by their minister. The Reverend Theodore Parker was known to keep a handgun on his desk in order to defend runaway slaves staying the night in his cellar, on their way to Canada and freedom.

Julia lived in isolation as a wife and mother. She had scant contact with the wider community of either Perkins Institute or Boston. But she was quick-witted, not suited to submission, and committed to the same causes as Samuel. She attended church, wrote poetry, studied philosophy, taught herself languages; and eventually her writing became published. Samuel recognized that Julia's social conscience moved her to act out her passion for justice, and he acquiesced as she became a public figure with a reputation of her own.

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (signed into law, incidentally, by the Unitarian president Millard Fillmore), obligated even the citizens of states that banned slavery to return fugitives to their owners in the South. Samuel and Julia were among the opponents of slavery who became even more radically abolitionist. Samuel Howe and Theodore Parker are thought to have been among the "Secret Six" - people who helped to fund John Brown's attempt to capture arms stored at Harper's Ferry for slaves in Virginia. But little is known about that group, even now.

When the Civil War broke out, Julia and Samuel worked together as volunteers on the U.S. Sanitary Commission, for conditions in prisoner of war and other army camps had been so atrocious that they caused more deaths than combat. As a result of their work, President Lincoln invited the Howes to Washington, in 1862; and upon visiting a Union Army camp in Virginia, they heard soldiers singing a popular song of the time - "John Brown's body lays a'mouldering in his grave."

The Reverend James Freeman Clarke, a social reformer and mutual friend of the Howes, Emerson, and Parker, urged Julia to replace "John Brown's Body" with words of her own. She wanted to emphasize the importance of anti-slavery in the war effort, so she did, and her poem was set to the same music as the well-known tune. We know the song as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It was first published in the Atlantic Monthly, in February 1862, earning the author five dollars.

Julia Howe was moved by the human and economic devastation of war. She worked with widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides. Now, as another loomed - the Franco-Prussian War - she knew better than to rely exclusively on the good will of men, so made a different sort of appeal. In 1870, she issued a Declaration calling for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. I can picture her standing on a Boston street corner, calling out:

Arise then...women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts!

Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:

"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,

our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,

for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country,

will be too tender of those of another country

to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

 

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with

our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."

Blood does not wipe our dishonor,

nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now

leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby

the great human family can live in peace...

each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God -

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask

that a general congress of women without limit of nationality,

may be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient and

the earliest period consistent with its objects,

to promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

the amicable settlement of international questions,

the great and general interests of peace.

For some years, Mother's Day for Peace was an annual event for women to come together across national lines, recognize what is held in common above that which divides, and commit to finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts.

Julia Ward Howe had long been an outspoken advocate for women's suffrage and equal rights. She had helped to found the New England Suffrage Association in 1868. She continued to speak publicly and work with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony for the cause. But neither her goal of a Mother's Day for Peace or women's suffrage succeeded in her lifetime. She died in 1910.

Miss Anna Jarvis is credited with founding Mother's Day in this country – the result of a resolution to pay tribute to her own mother, for whom she was named. Mrs. Anna Jarvis was in some ways the southern counterpart of Julia Ward Howe. Both were shaped by the devastation of the Civil War. A devoted mother, Mrs. Jarvis was moved to improve the health and sanitary conditions that contributed to the high mortality rate of children. And so she formed Mother's Day Work Clubs in local churches. During the Civil War, she urged members of the Clubs to nurse both Union and Confederate soldiers. After the war, she organized a Mother's Friendship Day to bring together former soldiers and neighbors of all political beliefs. It became an annual event to promote peace and friendship.

After her mother's death in 1905, the younger Anna became determined that she and, by extension all mothers, would be memorialized. She pursued an aggressive campaign to establish a National Mother's Day, beginning with a small tribute on the second anniversary of her mother's death. Supporters joined her in a letter-writing campaign; but the initial response was chilly. What made the difference was the support of John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia merchant and philanthropist. Anna's goal was realized relatively rapidly.

In the space of just two years, forty-three states, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico observed Mother's Day. People wore carnations - Mrs. Anna Jarvis' favorite flower - in tribute to their mothers. By 1912, Mother's Day was celebrated in almost every state of the U.S. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson officially proclaimed Mother's Day the second Sunday of May. But Anna Jarvis never intended the day to become a commercial spectacle, and she expressed disappointment, feeling that it had, even in her life time.

As a mother myself, I'm not comfortable with recognition based solely on having given birth. Circumstances mean far less than actions. We all have nurtured others, and have been nurtured. We'd all like be more than a superficial "Hallmark Moment," no matter how real the sentiments. I would rather think of Mother's Day as an embodiment of our living tradition, so I want to unpack it in that light.

We refer often to our seven principles (they're written on the back of your order of service, if you want a reminder); but usually we talk only indirectly about the six sources from which we draw our faith. "Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love" is the second of the Sources.

Two aspects of this phrase particularly strike me:

First, the language does not refer us to words and deeds of "Unitarian Universalist women and men," rather to those of "prophetic women and men." What an interesting choice. The word "prophet," to me, conjures up visions of a hero - maybe a hero of ancient times. Webster's Dictionary lists four definitions of prophet:

1. a person who speaks for God or a god, or as though under divine guidance;

2. a religious teacher or leader regarded as, or claiming to be, divinely inspired;

3. a spokesman for some cause, group, movement, etc.

4. a person who predicts future events in any way.

Now, we don't claim to speak for any god, or to be under divine guidance, or even to be divinely inspired - though I do wonder about that, now and then - and predicting the future is a little tricky. "A spokesperson for some cause or group or movement" seems relatively benign, though, a familiar role. Julia Ward Howe was obviously a spokesperson, for the Sanitary Commission, women's suffrage, and peacemaking. Mrs. Anna Jarvis, at the same point in our national history, became a spokesperson for right relationship, even among former enemies, and her daughter was an ardent spokesperson in advocating a National Mother's Day. All of them fervently believed in the implications for justice their causes represented. So they can be linked with the second source from which our tradition is drawn, even though they did not share the Unitarian Universalist faith.

The other feature of this Source that especially strikes me is the word "evil." Despite familiar depictions of an "evil empire" and "the axis of evil," it's not a word that roles off the tip of the tongue for most of us. Justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love are words we can live with and live for, even live toward; but the concept of evil is more difficult for many Unitarian Universalists to contemplate. We'd rather approach the issue indirectly, as the underlying conditions that feed the need for justice-seeking.

The Reverend Edward Frost, now emeritus minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, Georgia, addresses our difficulty with a doctrine of evil, with this true story from the mid-twentieth century:

Neville Chamberlain, Britain's Prime Minister as the nightmare of World War Two began to form, came from a long line of British Unitarians. He inhabited an age bristling with pride in all things human. Nature was going to be controlled by human engineers, including human nature. Reason, once laid out richly and beautifully in the presence of our enemies, would bring even the most brutish to the table, finding their place, minding their manners. Chamberlain went to Germany and sat down with the devil. "Look here old man," he said, and proceeded to sweet reason with Adolph Hitler. Then back he went to England and announced to cheering crowds that he had achieved an agreement with Hitler that guaranteed "Peace in our time."

The Holocaust is probably the most frequently cited example of acts of evil. Now, we cite others, too - Pol Pot in Cambodia, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, tribal warfare in Rwanda...I've talked before about this country's history of sins against Native Peoples and African Americans, and there are countless others. These are issues of terrible importance, but of course equally important is how we respond to them.

James Poling, Professor of Pastoral Theology and Counseling, Colgate Rochester Divinity School, says evil is abuse of power that destroys bodies and spirits, produced by personal actions and intentions which are denied and disassociated by individuals. I would add the implied absence of assuming responsibility to that disassociation.

Our task is to act, to resist the impulse to indulge in what the Reverend John Buehrens calls "sophisticated resignation," in response to injustice. The words of a song written by Amy Carol Webb call to me: "God has no hands, no hands but ours."

Our simple criterion is to ask of our action, "Is it life-affirming or life-denying?" When we think about words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love," that's what I think we mean.

Our usual impulse is to relate heroic acts to well-known icons of history; but progress is measured by links in a long chain, links we each can personify. I lift up the struggle for women's suffrage as a vivid example. My colleague the Reverend Chris Bell drew my attention to Carrie Chapman Cat, a second-generation feminist, who described the seventy-two year struggle for women's suffrage in terms that offer a certain perspective.

She said that during that time, activists conducted fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; four hundred eighty campaigns to get state legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; forty-seven state campaigns to get state constitutional conventions to write in women's suffrage; two hundred seventy-seven campaigns to get state party conventions to include women's suffrage in their planks; thirty campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt women's suffrage; and nineteen campaigns over nineteen successive congresses. Millions of dollars were raised, hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, and hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could. The young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began, and the old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended.

This is a good day to remember that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, known and unknown. I am reminded of a man who famously nurtured millions of children and their parents. A few years ago, Fred Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On this Mother's Day, I invite you to do what he advised then: "Take ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who have cared about you and wanted the best for you in life. Ten seconds. I'll watch the time."

The people we remember who influenced us may have known it at the time, they may not have. Just so, we may be in someone else's thoughts right now. May we ever be mindful of our prophetic power, for one another and for the world to come. Blessed be, and amen.