A sermon by Rebekah Ingram,
Ministerial Intern
It’s an old story: the story of our birth. Life brought forth from a big bang. Present day humans evolving from early hominids. God forms man out of dust and then breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. Poet Vassar Miller describes Eve as “nimbly […] bouncing out of / Adam’s side till as night came everything / and everybody, growing tired sat / down in one soft descended Hallelujah.” There is J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of how, “the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.”
The way we came into being is the oldest story in the world: it is universal, evolving, mysterious, and it is individually and culturally miraculous. We were all born somewhere, by someone just like everyone else in the world, and yet the story of each of our births is so very different, so very unique to us, and our small little place in creation’s history. As a child, I loved hearing my parents recount the story of my birth: how my mother made it to the hospital just in time, avoiding a roadside birth by mere minutes.
The story of our arrival bears witness to something miraculous and ordinary of which we have no memory. We can’t remember it, yet it happened. Similar to how we might examine a recently found baby picture of ourselves, we are curious about our beginnings, particularly all those things that happen before our memory takes root. That’s you in the photograph. That’s you entering the world. We were there, yet we can’t remember it. We have no recollection of what it was like to emerge into the world, to take that first gasp, to have our umbilical cord cut, to exercise our vocal cords for the very first time – to name just a few of the many, many births that fill our lives.
To those who have labored or even considered laboring through the delivery and/or the raising up of a child: I don’t even know what to say…thank you…I’m sorry….perhaps an AMEN or a “soft descended Hallelujah” would be best.
In preparing for this Mother’s Day service, I discovered a poem by Alicia Ostriker titled Happy Birthday. I’ve read it many times this week. Here is an excerpt:
Happy Birthday, a gray day like the first one –
You were so brave to enter our world
With its dirty rain, its look of a sepia photograph.
I call you at college, early and drowsy.
I hear you describe the party last night,
How you danced, how dancing is one of the things
You love in your life, like thinking hard. You are
All right, then, and on the telephone
Hearing the high snare drum of your voice
I can feel you about to be born…
What should I do, you wonder, after I graduate?
I imagine you curled under your quilt…
Dear salt flesh,
I am ready if you are, I am afraid if you are.
On your mark, get set,
We give birth to each other. Welcome. Welcome.
What I find so artful and truth-telling about the poem is how intertwined and independent the mother and child are. At the other ends of the telephone, you can sense the distance between them: how the child’s love of dancing and thinking hard are somewhat foreign to the mother, how the mother calls early in the morning, probably well aware of the fact that she will be waking her child from one of those heavy morning slumbers unique to the undergraduate. She calls to wish her child happy birthday, to hear that her child is OK. She calls early in the morning because there is no more tiptoeing to her child’s bedroom to see the child home safe and sound asleep. I imagine a mother who has waited as long as she can to pick up the phone…
And then we hear the child ponder his or her next move, totally focused on the birthdays to come, not the birthdays that have been: What should I do after I graduate? Somehow in that one moment of contemplating the future, the distance between mother and child vanishes. The mother can feel her child about to be born. The body never forgets certain things. And so the poem dances between the “dear salt flesh” that is mother, that is child, that is you and me. The dear salt flesh that is birth, the dear salt flesh that is every day.
Mother’s Day is sort of a celebration of birth, but I don’t think we can entirely conflate birthdays with Mother’s Day. Hallmark, for different reasons, would probably back me up on that. Mother’s Day is a celebration and it is a day of remembrance for those who have been with us when we arrive and when we don’t arrive. The mothers who welcome us home again and again, mothers who release us into the world, but who hold us at a necessary, sometimes painful distance that is so, so difficult to negotiate. Am I overbearing and over-involved? Or am I giving my child too much freedom, not enough guidance? Can a parent and child ever agree on what that appropriate distance from one another is? It seems like one always wants the complete opposite of what the other wants. And just when you think parent and child are coming to a place of agreement and alignment, something sets this approaching harmony off- key and you end on opposite sides of the fence again. It’s a complex dance of holding, guiding, and releasing. It’s an old story about the human condition: a parent tends a child, doing the best she can with whatever she has, which is never enough, but always just enough.
I wonder if the most fundamental social and psychological human need is to be held and told that everything will be OK. Everything is going to be OK. I have absolutely nothing aside from personal experience (and my favorite novel!) upon which to build this argument. I don’t know if any of you are like me, but sometimes you need to hear that everything will be OK. And you need to hear it from someone else because telling oneself that everything will be OK just doesn’t have the same effect. I’ve been known to instruct my friends and family: “Tell me everything is going to be OK.”
“Everything will be OK, Rebekah.”
“Thank you. That’s just what I needed to hear.”
I know that no one can make me such a promise. But why is it so nourishing to hear? It’s as if a weight has been lifted from me when someone else tells me that everything will be just fine. It’s as if they are saying, “Here, I’ll carry this for you for a little while. You need a break.” Our bodies never forget certain things – most of all the maternal touch and sound of someone who cares, someone who wants us to feel safe because they can remember feeling unsafe.
My favorite book describes a wonderful scene between best friends. The book is A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. In it, John Wheelwright has just been drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. His best friend, Owen Meany, devises a plan that will prevent John from being sent overseas. In one fairly drastic and ironically maternal gesture, Owen Meany literally cuts off John’s right index finger with a saw. The text goes like this:
The lenses of the safety goggles were very clean; Owen’s eyes were very clear.
‘I LOVE YOU,’ Owen tells John. ‘NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN
TO YOU – TRUST ME, Owen says.
Owen makes a promise that everything will be ok; that nothing bad is going to happen. Again, it’s a promise that ultimately no one can make. But it’s a promise we all need to hear sometimes. And it’s a promise we need to remember to say from time to time. We give birth to one another throughout our lives in words and actions. Whether we’ve born children or not, we are needed; we have maternal chords deep down inside of us no matter our gender that need to be sounded. From withstanding the pangs of birth to sawing off a best friend’s finger so his life may begin anew, we give birth to one another.
When I think about Mother’s Day, the first thoughts that enter my mind are of mothers: what they give and how they endure, particularly how they endure the middle school and high school years of their children’s lives. I’m sure most of us can remember being a pre-teen, awaiting the impending “coming of age” foreshadowed by older friends, older siblings, middle school English curriculums, Science and Health curriculums, and even Coming of Age programs offered at churches like this one. I remember it being explained to me that adolescence would be a time of many physical changes first and foremost. And accompanying those physically changes would be a deeper awareness of myself and of others…particularly my own parents. I knew that as a result of adolescence, I would see my parents differently. I had no idea what would be different. So I waited to come of age. It seems like one day the tables turn and for whatever reason, you catch a glimpse of your parents before your arrival, and you realize that they too were children. You realize that you are a chapter in their lives albeit a fairly substantial chapter. But there is more to their lives than just you. And there is more to your life than just you. When we come of age, the story of our birth widens. For as we are born, so are our mothers. “We give birth to one another. Welcome. Welcome.”
All of the mothering influences that have played significant (but perhaps not constant) roles in our lives enter our thoughts on Mother’s Day if we bid them welcome. Our definition of “mother” continues to evolve and augment as we move from childhood to adulthood, our circle ever widening. It may now include other family members, friends, ministers, teachers, colleagues, neighbors, entire communities such as this one, and even physical places: childhood hiding places, towns, vacation spots, cities, and countries that have all nurtured us in one maternal way or another.
A poem by Seamus Heaney is titled Antaeus after one of Gaia’s sons (Gaia is the Greek goddess of the Earth). Antaeus is a giant wrestler who challenges Hercules to a match. However, Antaeus cannot be defeated as long as he remains in contact with the Earth, a maternal source we often overlook:
When I lie on the ground
I rise flushed as a rose in the morning.
In fights I arrange a fall on the ring
To rub myself with sand
That is operative
As an elixir. I cannot be weaned
Off the earth’s long contour, her river-veins.
Down here in my cave
Girdered with root and rock
I am cradled in the dark that wombed me
[…].
We are cradled and wombed by the Earth, by the mother’s that delivered us, raised us up, the mother’s to whom we gave birth. Let us honor this day all those maternal sources within and without that know how to hold someone close and say (in one way or another): Everything will be OK.
Rev. Katie Lee Crane writes:
Let us honor them all on this day. Women who conceived. Women who bore.
Women who reared. Women who lost. Women who let go. Women who made
different choices. And people of any gender who mother.
To this caring community that knows how to hold one another:
Thank you, Amen, Hallelujah.
Works Cited
Crane, Katie Lee. “May means Mother’s day.” March 5, 2007.
(12 May 2007).
Heaney, Seamus. Antaeus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Irving, John. A Prayer for Owen Meany. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
Miller, Vassar. Morning Person. Good Poems. Selected & Intro. by Garrison Keillor.
New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Ostriker, Alicia. “Happy Birthday.” Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s
Spirituality. Ed. Marilyn Sewell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Tolkien J.R.R. The Silmarillon. Ed. by Christopher Tolkien. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1997, 1999.
