by Sarah Oelberg, minister emerita, Nora Church Unitarian Universalist, Hanska, Minnesota
Some years ago the small town in Minnesota where I lived had a town-wide garage sale. One place had a stack of those Ideals magazines. I bought a few for sermon fodder. I sat down to look through them, knowing Mother’s Day was coming up, and it didn’t take me long to realize why they are called Ideals. None of the mothers they were describing were like any mothers I had known.
It soon became obvious that “ideal” mothers stay home. They grow beautiful flowers and vegetables in their gardens, arrange the former in lovely bouquets and can the latter; bake pies and bread and cookies and other scrumptious goodies which are always warm and waiting when their children come home from school; keep a house so clean one could eat off the floor, if ever one should want to; sing songs and read stories and say prayers all the time; and sew and crochet marvelous creations which are always just the perfect thing! These paragons of virtue never seem to sleep, are always loving, understanding, available and sweet-smelling, and obviously second only to God. In fact, it is remarkable how many times the words God and mother appear together, as though they were one and the same, or at least inseparably linked. Yuck.
Now, I know that some of you are, or have, mothers who manage to come pretty close to that ideal. I have been in some of your immaculately clean houses and smelled the wonderful smells and eaten the fabulous foods you produce, and seen the lovely handwork you made, and you are wonderful mothers. Maybe my problem is that I am slightly envious. Thinking of four generations of mothers in my family, there weren’t any even remotely like the mothers in Ideals magazine. And yet, I think we were all good mothers, in our own ways.
My grandmother was a fine lady. She had a degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, was one of the leading socialites of her community, and busied herself with all kinds of philanthropic causes. She did make fancy lace, which she put on all her dresses, and she embroidered everything in sight, but I am quite sure she never did any of the rest of that “mother” stuff. My three main memories are of her using her lace hanky to swipe lightly at the furniture just before the maid came, peeking into the pots in the kitchen to see what the cook had prepared and to poke at the contents with the point of a paring knife, and sitting at her grand piano playing wonderful music. She was always off to some club meeting or tea party, and her children don’t remember her having any influence on their lives. Raising the children was left to the nurse and my grandfather, who was quite a different sort.
My mother got a degree in geology—not very useful during the Depression—and set up housekeeping in a tent in northern Wisconsin for the first winter of her married life. Perhaps that experience ruined her for ideal motherhood. She never cooked if she could possibly avoid it, which was not a great loss since she was a terrible cook. Nor did she clean house or raise flowers or crochet doilies or any of the things the “ideal” mother is expected to do. “Life is too short,” she would say, “to spend it doing things you don’t enjoy.” She didn’t sing or read to me, but she steered me toward good books to read myself. I don’t remember her ever praying, Unitarian humanist that she was, and I certainly never envisioned her as a partner with God. Mostly, she did her own things, and left the mothering to my father.
With those examples, you can imagine that I wasn’t your ideal mother, either. I, too, never liked housework. But, unlike my mother, who never worked outside the home, I had the excuse of a busy career, which required a lot of time and travel. I did cook dinner when I was home, but never baked much. My kids came home to an empty house—no cookies and milk. I knitted a couple of sweaters, planted a few tomatoes, and I did read to the kids. I told myself we had quality time, even if not much of it.
Obviously, the mothers in my family don’t fit into the “ideal” category, where mothers are all sweetness and light, comfort and warmth, unselfish and sacrificing. And neither do a lot of other mothers. Still, we continue to put mothers on some kind of pedestal, and worship them. One of the Ideals poets said her mother was divine. The word sacrifice was used a lot. There was this underlying sense that mothers are somehow above all other human creatures, that they dwell in the realm of sacredness. Interestingly, sacredness, in this model, seems to add up to similarity. None of the mothers in the Ideals magazines were single parents. None were lesbian. None were working two jobs to make ends meet or were raising grandchildren long after they expected to be actively parenting.
What has happened? Are we so caught up in this foolish notion of ideal motherhood that we cannot accept and honor any other models? Have we forgotten the problems and the down side of a social system which requires everyone to act the same? Can’t we see the negative consequences of a one-size-fits-all definition of motherhood?
We need to stop idealizing motherhood, giving it a narrow definition that leaves out many mothers—and children. We need to stop looking at categories of mothers, and making assumptions and drawing conclusions and passing regulations about them. We need to look, rather, at individual women, and men, who are serving as mothers, and help them to be good parents. We need to realize that the role of mother is not necessarily, or even ideally, performed by the woman who gave birth to a child. I am suggesting that we are so caught up in defining “mother” as a noun—an ideal—that we lose sight of the role of mother as a verb—an action verb—which describes nurturing.
Children need mothers—someone doing the things that need to be done to raise them. Some lucky children have many mothers, including teachers, social workers, friends, day care providers, grandparents, and fathers. And so, on this Mothers Day, let us honor all the mothers, of whatever description, who so valiantly perform the job of mothering.
Happy Mother’s Day to you all!
by Edward Frost, senior minister, UU Congregation of Atlanta, Georgia
I have not forgotten—nor will I forget until all memory fades—the day, the moment, in which my father and I parted. We did not put an ocean between us, or a country. He did not disown me, nor I him. We parted, as a cloud passed between our hearts, shadowing what we had been, shadowing what we would be henceforth.
At this time, I was barely fifteen years old. We had come recently to America from England. There, he and I had been pals, chums, co-conspirators in fictions and fantasies. For as long as I could remember, each Sunday my father and I would set out together for tramps down village lanes, across meadows, through churches, churchyards, and burial grounds. We explored ruined castles, fought off Norman invaders, Vikings, and Black Knights.
This was who we were before the cloud passed between. Wizard and trusting apprentice, storyteller and credulous listener, teacher and student (my father taught me how to read and write before I started school). With him I interned in woodworking. Dallied with cooking (he had been a short order cook on Cape Cod during a sojourn to America in his youth). All this we brought to America and, for a while, attempted to nurture, though there were no hedgerows or ruined abbeys; no hairy Vikings, certainly, no sniveling Normans. We had come, it seemed, to a land of prosaic places. Each Sunday, as in former times, we set out on a quest to keep us as we were, to hold back my years.
Then, that Sunday morning, my father came out to where I shuffled in dread in the gravel driveway. I didn’t know how much damage I was about to do, but I knew I was about to cast us away. He came to me with sandwiches for us, and a thermos in his bag, and asked if I was ready to go. “Gee, Dad,” I said, “a couple of my friends are picking me up and we’re going to go over to the baseball game.” “Oh. All right,” he said. He turned and walked away, the golden cord unraveling as he went. Somewhere on a distant hill, in the tower of an ancient parish church, a bell tolled.
We were not the same again, of course. We continued to grow apart in the years that followed until, at his death—now years ago—it seemed we were barely acquainted. My adolescence, it seemed, was beyond him. He watched, as if helpless, as I tried out various foolish and dangerous ways to take on what then passed for manliness.
As I continued in my education and pursued my own dreams and ambitions, I left his knowledge and his understanding far behind. He had left school in the sixth grade to help support his mother and sister after his father gave up and ran away. He taught himself and was often mistaken for an Oxford man. But my journey left him by the wayside—as, so he felt, had life, and all hope and possibility. There he rooted in anger, regret, and self-destruction.
He was a man who, had he had a fathering father, had he not been born into abject poverty, had it not been for this or that, for fate or happenstance—had all that beside-the-point not been so—would have been a man whom all the world knew by name. But the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons from generation unto generation. And, instead, he became like a trapped creature gnawing away at himself, desperate for freedom.
What did I expect from my father, I wonder? What was it I so desperately needed, after it was too late, after he could no longer give it? Robert Bly, that poet-guru of the men’s movement, said what boys and young men need from older men is blessing—because too few are blessed by their fathers.
Blessing is the bestowal of approval and encouragement. “Blessing,” says Webster’s dictionary, “is a thing conducive to happiness or welfare.” And without the blessing of the father all else, it seems, fails to be conducive to happiness or welfare.
For some of us, without the father’s blessing, his approval and encouragement, nothing fully satisfies. Always there is the rising urge to take the small or large success and burst with it through memory’s door shouting, “Hey, Dad, guess what?” And if he is not home, or occupied with his failings, or deep in his despair, his hopeless anger, his envy of his children, where, then, shall we go for blessing? Sons, daughters, longing hopelessly for the father’s blessing, may seek it in mismatched marriages, furious and soul-killing jobs, or the brief safety of aloneness.
Of course, parenting is an impossible undertaking—fathering or mothering. The expectations, always changing on us, can never fully be met. But it seems to me that, in general, we judge our fathers to have fallen short more than we judge our mothers. What is it about fathers that has them brought so often and kept so late in the court of their children’s judgment? I’m not talking about the obvious failures, the drunks, abusers, and the runaways. I mean what we call the “ordinary Joe”; your father, my father. You. Me. What is it about the task of fathering that so many fumble with and finally put aside?
Well, I have a theory about fathering. It needs work and, like any good theory, many will find good reason to find it implausible. But I propose that much of what makes fathering so difficult is that fathers identify as men. That’s not the whole of the theory, but that’s the reality, the ground on which the theory is built. I’ll go on to propose that men—most men, the vast majority of men—focus the greater part of their attention, their mental and emotional energy, and their time and attention on achieving and maintaining what they have been led to believe it means to be a man.
It has long been required of men that they be strong. Dependable. In charge. Be all that Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “If,” says one must become in order to be a man:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breath a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”; If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch; If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run— Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!
I believe that to be one of the most frightening poems in the English language. And that’s only half the poem. Those are only half of the requirements for manliness. What do I find frightening about Kipling’s poem? Well, I remember one of my psychology professors, talking about all these “ifs” for becoming a man and saying, “Your work is to be done, ladies and gentlemen, among those who whisper to themselves, ‘But what if I can’t?’”
Kipling’s man was the idealized Victorian model. He was epitomized by the British officer, ramrod straight on his white horse, buttoned up to his beard in a wool uniform in the middle of the desert prepared to show those ragged beggars screaming before him how an Englishman dies. If, by some chance, this quintessential male did not die out there buttoned up with his boots on, he went home to teach his children how to be just like him—endeavoring not to get too close to them in the process. His children, like those ragged beggars out there, were in need of being civilized.
What all that really boils down to is…success. Fathers must, above all, be successful. And they must be successful at everything from running companies, preaching sermons, playing basketball in the driveway, earning a living, staying alive, and obviously, above all, not failing. For some men, successfully cutting in line at the exit is about the only hope for self-esteem they’ll have today. I contend that that’s a lot to handle and that, for most fathers, it doesn’t leave much left over for blessing our children, for being a successful father, or for even being conscious of what that might mean.
I never met my father’s father. To the best of my recollection, my father never mentioned him. Certainly, there had been no blessing there, no approval, encouragement, nothing conducive to happiness or welfare. And so my father strove to succeed without blessing, and always success eluded him and with that, he failed to bless his son. And the sins of the fathers, visited upon the sons, from generation unto generation.
Well, a sad story—mine, maybe yours. What’s hopeful about sermons is that there’s usually some hint of redemption at the end. This poem, by David Ray, speaks to the redemption of fathers. It’s called “Thanks, Robert Frost.”
Do you have hope for the future? Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied, that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was. Something we can accept, mistakes made by the selves we had to be, not able to be, perhaps, what we wished, or what looking back half the time it seems we could so easily have been, or ought... The future, yes, and even for the past, that it will become something we can bear. And I too, and my children, so I hope, will recall as not too heavy the tug of those albatrosses I sadly placed upon their tender necks. Hope for the past, yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage and it brings strange peace that itself passes into past, easier to bear because you said it, rather casually, as snow went on falling in Vermont years ago.
That’s what redemption is: giving the past hope where the past itself held none. “But surely,” you ask, “what was, was?” No. What was always is, blessing the present or reliving its sin generation after generation. The only hope for breaking the cycle, for our children’s sake, is for us to redeem the past, which is to forgive it all, to bless it—a thing conducive to happiness or welfare.
To those early into fathering and yet-to-become fathers, I say this:
Above all, continually give your children your blessing, that is to say, your approval and your encouragement. This is a thing conducive to happiness and welfare. And it is what your children seek when they turn and look at you.
By Katie Lee Crane, minister, First Parish, Sudbury, Massachusetts
My friend Mary calls Memorial Day weekend “the Friday night of summer.” It’s just beginning. We have it all to look forward to. The wonderful change of pace that we expect with Saturday and Sunday is ours for June, July and August. In Mary’s definition of summer, July 4th, is, as you might expect, high noon, and Labor Day is Sunday night.
Of course there are flaws in Mary’s metaphor. Many of us work on weekends. Some work even harder and longer on summer weekends to make Mary’s kind of summer possible for the rest of us.
But I can’t help it. I still love the idea of it—the Friday night of summer. It takes me back to childhood, when school was almost out and I had the whole summer ahead of me to play and play and play.
In my youth Memorial Day was called “Decoration Day.” It was the day that my Mom decorated the graves of people I had never known: grandfathers, grandmothers, great uncles and aunts. We took flowers to the cemetery. I did not understand death as a very young child; all I saw there was life. I saw the spring-flowering trees. I saw the pansies and geraniums. I saw the bright green grass, fresh cut. I saw hundreds and hundreds of tiny flags waving proudly, in rows, “for the soldiers,” my mother said. To me, the flags, saluting me from their straight rows, looked like soldiers I’d seen in parades.
Not yet knowing death, I thought of freedom, “my country…sweet land of liberty.” Everywhere I looked, I saw and smelled summer. It all heralded my freedom.
Best of all, where I grew up, Memorial Day was when the town swimming pool opened for the summer. So Memorial Day launches a fleet of memories by the pool, at the lake, on the porch and in the garden. The long days. The lazy afternoons. The books I chose for reading, gulping in novels and, later, discovering poetry ideally suited for a summer day.
Today, I understand death, at least more than I did then. I have seen it first hand. I have graves to decorate, loved ones and soldiers to remember. And summer has long since ceased to be a seemingly unending time of unfettered freedom. Work, responsibilities, disappointment and even depression no longer take a holiday in the summer.
And yet for me, Memorial Day still holds the hope of the Friday night of Summer.
for the CLF Gathering at the Mountain this Labor Day weekend, September 3-6, 2004. Go to www.clfuu.org and click on the Gathering for more information.
by Jane Rzepka, minister, Church of the Larger Fellowship
Every UU minister knows the conundrum of Mother’s Day. There are so many different experiences of mothering and motherhood, all of them deeply felt. We have CLF members who have deep emotions about having been adopted, or feelings one way or another about their mother’s death, or their own total disinterest in children, or their inability to give birth, or emotions about children who let them down, or their mother who let them down, or about being a so-called non-traditional family, or having an unusual way of life—the list goes on and on. On Mother’s Day we are dealing with memories, ambiguity, warmth, pain, indifference, happiness and hope, because we were once each born. How to honor all that?
In a collection, published for the first time ten years ago, called Faith in a Seed, Henry David Thoreau supplied me with an answer.
Thoreau was not a woman. He never had children. He never had a partner. In American cultural mythology, Thoreau represents the individual living a solitary existence. He was as far from being the stereotypical mother as one can imagine. Yet he has left us a legacy of nurture, earth-centered spirituality, connection to nature, and an expectation of wonder.
Of course Henry, while not a mother himself, did have a mother. We are told she was a big, talkative mother, a mother who put on grand airs in town. Henry was very attached to her. He grew up with his parents, went off to Harvard, and, before it was fashionable, went home after college to live with his parents—back to his old room. In fact, when he asked his mother at graduation time what career he might follow, she replied, “You can buckle on your knapsack and roam around abroad to seek your fortune.” At the very thought of a trip far from home, Henry had a sudden fit of weeping, and he went back to live in Concord, Massachusetts for the rest of his life.
We are used to Walden’s Thoreau, a man who cares about the growth of the “self.” In Faith of a Seed, however, we meet the Thoreau who cares about the growth of communities and the rise of new generations. In Walden we know a man who is unattached and uncommitted; in Faith of a Seed we read about “fertility, fecundity, and interconnectedness.” In other words, in the more recent book we meet the Thoreau one might talk about on Mother’s Day.
Thoreau walked most days with Transcendentalist Ellery Channing, and his great friend and mentor was Unitarian Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whose family he lived at one point. All of these people had as their spiritual base a rootedness in the wonder of nature.
Emerson bought some land along Walden Pond. He let Thoreau build a little house on the land. At the age of 28, Henry moved a twenty-minute walk from Concord and tried living alone.
I can’t help but wonder what Henry Thoreau’s mother must have thought! Oh, my. Henry moves home after college, gets a job as a teacher, loses the job as a teacher. Eight years go by. He doesn’t seem to find himself according to the standard of the day. No job. No wife. No children. All his contemporaries and friends are out doing things: Melville spends four years at sea. Channing does a sojourn on the Illinois prairie. Emerson has two books published by now. Henry just hangs around. At one point, he and a friend accidentally burn down 300 acres of woodland. The people of Concord think her son is an odd one, or worse, a rascal, an idler who could work but doesn’t, a polluter, a “woods-burner.” And now a tiny cabin in the woods!
During the months at Walden Pond and his years in Concord, Thoreau came to know the woods and swamps, even individual trees, with an intimacy we can only imagine. He had a reason. There was an argument afoot. Conventional thought said that some plants spring up “spontaneously”—not from a root, cutting, or seed. Thoreau, on the other hand, reported that in all his years of observation, he had never found a true case of spontaneous generation—it’s just that seeds, he believed, are dispersed in an amazing variety of ways. Of course he was right.
So Henry spent his days observing new growth and collecting seeds from trees. The work was not glamorous. From his journal of September 9th, 1857:
To the woods for white-pine cones. Very few trees bear any, and they are on their tops. I can easily manage small trees, fifteen or twenty feet high, climbing till I can reach the dangling green pickle-like fruit with my right hand, while I hold to the main stem with my left; but I am in a pickle when I get one. The cones are now all flowing with pitch, and my hands are soon so covered with it that I cannot easily cast down my booty when I would, it sticks to my fingers so; and when I get down at last and have picked them up, I cannot touch my basket with such hands but carry it on my arm, nor can I pick up my coat which I have taken off unless with my teeth—or else I kick it up and catch it on my arm. …. It is the stickiest work I ever did; yet I stick to it. I do not see how the squirrels that gnaw [the pine cones] off and then open them, scale by scale, keep their paws and whiskers clean. They must possess some remedy for pitch that we know nothing of, for they can touch it and not be defiled. What would I not give for the recipe! How fast I could collect cones if I could only contract with a family of squirrels to cut them off for me!
To the woods for white-pine cones. Very few trees bear any, and they are on their tops. I can easily manage small trees, fifteen or twenty feet high, climbing till I can reach the dangling green pickle-like fruit with my right hand, while I hold to the main stem with my left; but I am in a pickle when I get one. The cones are now all flowing with pitch, and my hands are soon so covered with it that I cannot easily cast down my booty when I would, it sticks to my fingers so; and when I get down at last and have picked them up, I cannot touch my basket with such hands but carry it on my arm, nor can I pick up my coat which I have taken off unless with my teeth—or else I kick it up and catch it on my arm.
…. It is the stickiest work I ever did; yet I stick to it. I do not see how the squirrels that gnaw [the pine cones] off and then open them, scale by scale, keep their paws and whiskers clean. They must possess some remedy for pitch that we know nothing of, for they can touch it and not be defiled. What would I not give for the recipe! How fast I could collect cones if I could only contract with a family of squirrels to cut them off for me!
Henry spent his days close to home and mother and nature. His life was one of small observation, small joy, and an unusual awareness of the miracles around him. He wrote:
One September I gathered some of the peculiarly formed nuts of the witch hazel, which grow in pretty clusters, clothed, as it were, in close-fitting buckskin, amid the yellowing leaves, and laid them in my chamber.… Three nights afterward, I heard at midnight a snapping sound and the fall of some small body on the floor from time to time. In the morning I found that it was produced by the witch-hazel nuts on my desk springing open and casting their hard and stony seeds across the chamber.… Thus, it spreads itself by leaps ten or fifteen feet at a time.
What his mother must have thought. Her boy goes off down the road to Walden Pond, making a big show around town of his solitary life, but is, in fact, coming on home to mother for a little visit every single day. He is supposed to be grown up, but he spends his days poking his knife at witch-hazel nuts, seeing if he can make them fly, and worse, letting them sproing around his room on their own as he sleeps.
I don’t know anything really about Thoreau’s mother. And frankly, I’d rather not learn. Because I like to imagine that she came to be proud of her son, proud that he heard a different drummer, proud that he grew to be a nurturer and expected wonders out of seeds. She had a boy there who saw meaning in the minute. He wrote:
About the 9th of May we begin to see the dandelion already gone to seed here and there in the green grass of some more sheltered and moist banks…. It is commonly the first of the many hints we get to be about our own tasks, which our Mother has set us, and bringing something to pass ourselves. We may depend on it that our Genius wants us and always will, till we can blow away the firmament itself as a puff.
Henry sees a dandelion gone to seed and that seed speaks to him of getting about his own tasks. He sees purpose in that seed, and purpose is part of what religion is.
Henry sees a seed and he knows that anything can happen. He sees hope in that seed, and hope is part of what religion is.
Henry sees a seed and he sees the future in that seed. He sees faith in that seed, and faith is part of what religion is.
Henry David Thoreau wasn’t anybody’s mother. But he knew faith, and he knew hope, and he knew purpose, just like any mother does.
May the mother inside us all grow strong.
The CLF has for many years provided worship and religious education resources for small groups of Unitarian Universalists through its program called Church on Loan. Groups can pay a reasonable program fee and have access to the CLF Library, Quest, and our most popular resource, the Month of Sundays notebooks. We are delighted to announce that we have put more than 80 of these services (now called Sundays Online) up on the Church OnLine website. Church on Loan groups will have a user ID and password so they can enter this brand new area which has all of the CLF worship and RE materials gathered together for easy access, as well as many links to other on-line resources in the wider UU world. Not only will our present Church on Loan participants have more materials available to them, but also Unitarian Universalists in other countries will be able to participate in this on-line program.
Please contact Lorraine Dennis for more information at 617-948-6166 or ldennis@clfuu.org.
by Helen Zidowecki, acting minister of religious education, Church of the Larger Fellowship
What better month for remembering and celebrating than May?
The first Sunday of May honors May Day.
Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, May is a time to celebrate the renewal of life. May is named for Maia, grandmother, the Goddess of death and fertility. The day is celebrated with flowers and signs of spring.
In some cultures, the May pole represented the world center, or alternately, the hub of the Wheel of Heaven. In ancient times, the dance of weaving cords around the pole was a magical attempt to direct Nature, which had become topsy-turvy over the course of time, back in order. So dancing the May pole today provides a sense of weaving the magic and wonder of life.
Activity: Decorate a basket with greens and ribbons. Put small gifts, messages and flowers in the basket and leave it for someone special to find. In traditional May Day fashion, you can even leave the basket outside a door, ring the doorbell, and run away. Or children can prepare a basket and take it to a family or small group gathering where the gifts and messages are pulled at random and enjoyed by everyone. There is magic in our appreciation of each other.
The Second Sunday brings us Mother’s Day.
Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian abolitionist, was inspired to write “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” when she visited military camps near Washington, D.C. in 1861. However, the horror of the Civil War inspired her to call upon women to work for disarmament. She published a “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” calling for peace, and in 1872 she suggested that people observe a Mother’s Day on June 2 as a day dedicated to peace. For several years, she held an annual Mother’s Day meeting in Boston.
Anna M. Jarvis campaigned for the nation to adopt a formal holiday honoring all mothers. The idea probably came from her own mother, Mrs. Anna Reese Jarvis, who died in 1905. Mrs. Jarvis had tried to establish “Mother’s Friendship Days” to help heal the scars of the Civil War in the late 19th century. In 1910, West Virginia became the first state to recognize Mother’s Day. On May 8, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a Joint Resolution establishing Mother’s Day. By late in her life, however, Miss Jarvis disowned the Mother’s Day holiday for its commercialism.
Activity:
The third Sunday of May celebrates Mothering Sunday.
The ancient Greeks held a festival each spring in honor of mothers, and offered tribute to Rhea, the mother of all the Olympian gods. “Mothering Sunday” became a tradition in England in the 17th century. The 4th Sunday of Lent (the period before Easter) was set aside to visit and honor mothers. Special cakes, called “mothering cakes,” made the visit festive. Tied in with this tradition is the ancient custom of visiting the “mother church” (the principal or oldest church in a country or district).
Activity: We do not have a UU mother church, although we have churches that are over 200 years old. For thousands of CLF members our “mother church” is on-line at www.clfuu.org. Or, you can explore the UUA website at www.uua.org. To find out more our historical roots as Unitarians, you can learn about Transylvanian Unitarians at the website of the UU Partner Church Council at www.uua.org/uupcc.
The fourth Sunday gives us Memorial Day.
This celebration in the United States also comes from the Civil War. As the Civil War came to a close in the spring of 1865, Women’s Auxiliaries of the North and South joined in efforts to preserve and decorate the graves of soldiers on both sides of the war. By the late 1800s, many communities had begun to celebrate Memorial Day and, after World War I, observances also began to honor those who had died in all of America’s wars. In 1971, Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday to be celebrated the last Monday in May.
Memorial Day is for remembering the difficulties of war and for capturing the vision of a world at peace. Olympia Brown, the first woman Universalist minister, states “This Great Lesson”:
We can never make the world safe by fighting. Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are children of God, and must share the wealth of the world. You may say this is impracticable, far away, can never be accomplished, but it is the work we are appointed to do. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, we must ever teach this great lesson.
Activities: If there is a cemetery nearby, look for graves that are marked with flags or other markers to indicate that the person was in the military at some time. How old were these people when they died? Or visit monuments honoring people who have died in wars. In cemeteries and on war memorials, look for symbols of war and peace—sometimes these symbols are on the same monument. Draw your own symbols of war and peace, or choose what you might want carved on your own gravestone.
There is more information on the CLF Website’s Religious Education section about all these celebrations.
Merry May to you, the month of memories.
You’ve been gathering seeds, testing them out on new ground. Some take hold germinate, grow within. Others fall away, finding fertile fields elsewhere. To ground your life To remind you of the connection to earth, the connection to the sources that nourish your body, your very self: Seeds. The Seeds of Change Heirloom seeds Organically grown seeds. Summer savory, crookneck squash, foxy foxglove... Glean the information from the packet, wait ‘til the conditions are right... Some you plant now, some in late summer, some you’ll hold ‘til next spring. (Packed for this year, they’ll keep just fine.) Walla Walla onion, edible chrysanthemum, jalapeño chili... Good work for your hands, your soil, your soul. Planting seeds...nurturing life...feasting at harvest... gathering seeds for the next generation. Mustard greens, eggplant, sweet keeper squash... Seeds of change. May you find in them the complexity of heritage and the deep goodness of life itself.
You’ve been gathering seeds, testing them out on new ground. Some take hold germinate, grow within. Others fall away, finding fertile fields elsewhere.
To ground your life To remind you of the connection to earth, the connection to the sources that nourish your body, your very self:
Seeds.
The Seeds of Change Heirloom seeds Organically grown seeds.
Summer savory, crookneck squash, foxy foxglove...
Glean the information from the packet, wait ‘til the conditions are right... Some you plant now, some in late summer, some you’ll hold ‘til next spring. (Packed for this year, they’ll keep just fine.)
Walla Walla onion, edible chrysanthemum, jalapeño chili...
Good work for your hands, your soil, your soul. Planting seeds...nurturing life...feasting at harvest... gathering seeds for the next generation.
Mustard greens, eggplant, sweet keeper squash...
Seeds of change. May you find in them the complexity of heritage and the deep goodness of life itself.
by Carol Hepokoski, assistant professor of religious ethics, Meadville Lombard Theological School, Chicago, Illinois
...that we have a new fundraiser? You can purchase UU-themed Note Cards from the CLF. Go to www.clfuu.org and click on the Gift Shop to order online or call the CLF office at 617-948-6166.
July, 2003 Guidelines for Quest submissions
We welcome your sermon submission. Don't be shy!
Please submit sermons (up to four) electronically to ldennis@uua.org. If your sermons are posted on the Web, simply tell us the URL. Sermons are fine "as is"--they will be professionally edited.
Sermons should:
Once you have submitted your sermon, you will hear from us only if our editorial board wishes to publish it--it could be months or even years later. But please know that we appreciate your work and your generosity in making your work available to us.
Last updated June 12, 2005
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823 Phone: (617) 948-6166 · Fax: (617) 523-4123 · E-mail: clf@clfuu.org
