HOW MY MOTHER SAVED ME FROM THE BOMB
A Mother's Day Sermon
by Forrest Church
May 8, 2005
In 1870, five years after the cessation of hostilities between North and South, the Franco-Prussian War broke out in Europe. A senseless conflict, it galvanized the small but growing band of international peace activists, among them Julia Ward Howe, prominent Unitarian layperson and author, somewhat ironically given her later peace work, but understandable given her abhorance of slavery, of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, founder of the first American women ministers group, popular poet, and author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Howe, who was an abolitionist had strongly supported the Union cause, now figured prominently among the American crusaders for peace.
She wrote a manifesto against the Franco-Prussian War, had it translated into five languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish), and then set out for Europe intending to deliver it at international peace conferences in London and Paris. But because she was a woman, the European organizers denied her a place on the program. Angry but undaunted, she hired her own hall, and posted broadsides inviting the public to hear her. Few people came. So she returned to the United States, not broken but inspired with a new idea. She called it Mother's Day.
In Howe's original conception, Mother's Day was designed to draw attention to several basic liberal values. Her object was not to put mothers on a pedestal. She wanted to draw mothers out of their kitchens and parlors into the public square, to unite as many women as she could in a common cause: the protection of children from war. Or as she put it, "to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace." Significantly, she didn't call her annual festival International Peace Day; she called it Mother's Day, knowing no group that could more naturally or persuasively sponsor an annual festival of love and peace.
On June 2, 1870, Howe issued the first Mother's Day proclamation. We read part of it in our responsive reading this morning. She called upon "all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears," to say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall 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 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 bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Linking motherhood, mother earth, womanhood, and peace, Howe asserted that the unconditional love they hold for their children invests mothers with a natural and deep interest in preventing bloodshed. Fathers send their sons to war; mothers remain at home to grieve. Who could better symbolize the need for peace than any soldier's mother? Mother's Day would remind everyone that the whole world would be a better place, if only everyone might rise to the challenge of motherhood: nurturing life, fostering peace, giving love. "Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel," she proclaimed. "Let them meet first, as women to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then 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."
For several years, on June 2 in New York, Boston and Philadelphia-also in England, Scotland and Switzerland-Mother's Day was celebrated in this spirit. As with many of our national festivals, more recently it has fallen on hard times. What began as a celebration of the second great commandment (to love thy neighbor as thyself) has developed into a commercial holiday cosponsored by the florist and card industries.
Rather than calling on mothers to unite, rally, march and proclaim to the world the values they so liberally bestow on their children, we have celebrated their domesticity with flowers and clichþ rhymes.
I have a modest proposal. With war-driven and domestic violence just as pervasive and far more deadly than it was a century and a half ago, perhaps we should consider reopening Julia Ward Howe's book and sending peace cards on mother's day, perhaps even finding ways to commit ourselves to the effort of working for a more peaceful world, which can only be accomplished one neighbor at a time. Right here at All Souls our Peace Task force is one vital, well run, and constantly vigilant group that you might join, attending one of their many events and then getting involved in the work of peace. Our nuclear disarmament task force also is leading the denomination's efforts to advocate an end to nuclear proliferation, all the more important in a week when the United States joined Iran of all people in refusing to abide by international mandate to cease and desist in the building of new nuclear weopons. Mother's Day will be then be celebrated in the spirit its founder intended. As Julia Ward Howe would have been the first to remind us, it's about time.
In this same spirit—the true spirit of Mother's Day, let me say a few words about my own mother.
Her name is Bethine-be thine-and that's the way she's lived her life, for others. But also for herself. As those women know who have given themselves away without return, to love your neighbor as yourself is a cruel adage if you don't love and respect yourself. Yet, as with many women, any superficial description of my mother makes her sound like someone else's property. The daughter of a governor, Chase Clark. The wife of a U.S. senator. This is misleading.
Actually, she's the best politician in the family, knowing better than any of us that "politics is people." She certainly would have understood and rallied to Julia Ward Howe's vision of Mother's Day.
Looking back on my boyhood, as a mother Bethine was a quintessential liberal. Even Dr. Spock proved insufficiently permissive. To my great delight, from first grade on we conspired to see how many creative excuses we could come up with to keep me home from school. My mother was what these days we call a codependent. I came home one year with three Cs and three Ds. She blamed my teacher.
She even saved me from the bomb. It was 1958. Fire drills in elementary school had been temporarily replaced by nuclear attack drills. The alarm would go off and all of us would dutifully tuck ourselves under our desks. From the moment of the first alert to the arrival of the missiles, we had ten minutes. Three times a year we practiced this. I can assure you (and some of you will remember), ten minutes pass very slowly when you are crouching under your desk waiting for an imaginary bomb to fall.
So I planned my escape, and practiced by running home after school every day. Despite an innate lack of athletic ability, I finally got it down under ten minutes. One day I arrived panting at the door, and my mother fearing that once again I had attracted the attention of neighborhood bullies, asked me why I was so winded. I told her my plan. She understood completely. "If there ever were a nuclear attack, I'd want you here with me, not at school under your stupid desk."
So my mother went to the principal and requested that, in the event of nuclear attack, I might have permission to run home and die with her. The result was a new school policy. Should a nuclear attack take place, upon securing parental permission those children who could get home within ten minutes would be excused from school.
Each of us learns different things from his or her parents, but there are ways in which all nurturing parents are alike. Through the unconditional gift of their love and the security offered by sheltering arms and the comfort of home, we learn to trust others and life itself. More by example than instruction, our parents also teach us how to balance freedom and responsibility, individual wants and community needs. Both are first modeled in the family, with its one body and several members.
My mother taught me this. She taught me that all of us are related; we are kin to one another in a single human family. She learned this liberal principle-of neighborliness-from her grandmother, whom she called "the most ecumenical person I ever met." Speaking at the Martin Luther King Jr., celebration recently in Boise, Idaho, my mother told a story about her grandmother to illustrate two things: Though we are each different, in essence we are one; and, because we are different, we have a hard time understanding one another sometimes.
"My grandmother Clark was very upright and moral," my mother began. "She told me that her favorite poem was 'No sex in heaven.' Given how prim and proper she was—I can't remember her wearing anything that wasn't either black, white, or gray—the title of her favorite poem, "No Sex in heaven" caused me some confusion.
"In this poem, everyone went down to the River Jordan, and on the trip to other side, all their robes and vestments were washed away. This, too confused me-that she could approve and be so pleased about all these grown-ups walking out of the water in their birthday suits. Only later, when I could read, did I discover that the word "sex" in the title, "No sex in heaven" was spelled "S-E-C-T-S."
My mother spoke that day of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. She spoke of the bravery it took to march up to the schoolhouse door in Little Rock, to march for integration in the South, to defy the bans against free assembly in South Africa.
Julia Ward Howe would have been proud, proud to hear my mother give public expression to the maternal ethic of care and tenderness. She would also have understood her choice of holidays in which to proclaim these liberal values. Until today, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday has been a far more appropriate occasion for their expression than is Mother's Day itself.
In 1913, when Congress moved Mother's Day's date from June 2 to the second Sunday in May, it also changed the significance of the holiday. What had been festival in which mothers might witness publicly to maternal values has been reduced to a private holiday on which their husbands and children send them cards and roses, itself not a bad thing surely. In fact, in the cause of family peace, it is something I strongly recommend any of you who may have forgotten to find some ready substitute for immediately.
Yet, in the larger picture, Julia Ward Howe and my mother had it right. Motherhood has nothing to do with pedestals, and everything to do with love, justice, non-violence and peace. As Bethine Church said in her closing words about Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Let us here today and in our daily lives all be prepared to love and care about each other, to let our differences strengthen rather than diminish us. Let us give up fear of each other and change it into belief in ourselves and our ability to add healing in this often injured world." Good words for Mother's Day, or any day in fact. Words to take to heart.
Amen. Happy Mother's Day. I love you. God bless us all.