Many Mothers and the Way of Peace

On this Mother’s Day, our world beset by war and division, we acknowledge the peace advocate roots of Mother’s Day, the multiple ways mothering can manifest, and the many feelings this day can give rise to.

 

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Many Mothers and the Way of Peace

Rev. Joe Cleveland

May 12, 2024

 

One August morning in 1875, the poet and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe wrote a few sentences in her journal:

There is no hell like that of a selfish heart, and there is no misfortune so great as that of not being able to make a sacrifice.  These two thoughts come to me strongly this morning.  It is something to have learned these truths so that we can never again doubt them.

Don’t be selfish seems like a simple enough message to preach.  We should be thinking of others rather than of ourselves.  Or, rather than only of ourselves.  As it is Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about how to be a mother is held up as the example of not being selfish and instead being selfless, sacrificing for your children, doing for others.  And I do want to preach today about the practice of thinking of others, and to be a parent is to commit to thinking of others, but there is a trap here.  The way people talk about being a mother—and it is telling that we don’t talk about fathers this way—the way people talk about being a mother: it’s like she is the best mother who succeeds in erasing herself.  That’s not right.  I don’t think that’s healthy.  And it falls into the trap of believing that any of us can be a person, much less a parent, without other people, all on one’s own.  We hold mothers to a standard of selflessness that we don’t hold anyone else to.  We certainly don’t hold fathers to the same standard of selflessness.  

Julia Ward Howe was asked to make some remarks at the 1892 Parliament of Religions, and she focused on the question of “What Is Religion?”  While she talks about religion being about the relationship to the divine, she also makes a more radical statement:

I think nothing is religion which puts one individual absolutely above others, and surely nothing is religion which puts one sex above another.  Religion is primarily our relations to the Supreme, to God . . .  And any religion which will sacrifice a certain set of human beings for the enjoyment or aggrandizement or advantage of another is no religion.  It is a thing which may be allowed, but it is against true religion.  Any religion which sacrifices women to the brutality of men is no religion.

That is certainly true.  And I think we can often have in our mind the idea that it is the job of a mother, especially, to sacrifice themself for the advantage of another.  

The writer Anna Malaika Tubbs shares that she lived in many different countries during her childhood and that her mother judged all these different places and communities where they lived by how well they treat the mothers.  

Everywhere we went, my mom would comment on the ways mothers were treated.  She often said, “If a mother is treated well in her community, that community will do well.”  If the opposite were true, my mother believed that the community would suffer on all health and wellness indicators.  She could find a way to relate everything back to the treatment of mothers.

When she was making the rounds to promote the book she wrote about the mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, she heard from 

… many moms who initially struggled with motherhood largely because they felt that their needs were no longer a priority or because it didn’t seem like anyone cared about what they were going through.  They gave birth and then were thrown into mothering as if it were a journey that one should be forced to embark on all alone.  I didn’t only hear this in regard to biological motherhood: Adoptive mothers, too, shared that their needs were treated as less significant after they became parents.

We shouldn’t be doing that.  You all know this.  The problem is that we think that only some people—mothers, people who get gendered as female—have to do the troublesome thinking about others thing.  If the fundamental essence of motherhood is caring about the wellbeing of another, we all need to be part of mothering.  

Take a look at the hymnbook for a moment.  Turn to reading number 596.  This is a version of the Buddhist metta meditation, the loving kindness meditation practice.  In this version, it explicitly says that we all need to take on the attitude of a mother.  This mothering is not something that some people can be free of to do other things; it’s not something that only one gender is expected to do.  It’s only as we adopt this practice of care that we will be free to thrive.

I worry that this is an essentializing way of talking about mothering.  I worry that it is a way of encouraging the notion that it is simply natural to mother and that mothering is only natural to one gender.  But when I hear the words of Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation, I can’t help but be moved.  With something like thirty-four thousand dead in Gaza, of which nearly fourteen thousand are children, Julia Ward Howe’s words feel addressed to today.  “The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!”  That applies to the heinous attack by Hamas on October 7th, and it applies to the violence, the leveling of cities, the blocking of aid supplies and ruination of hospitals that has been the response of Netanyahu’s Israel.

It is shocking that for months now, lack of basic sanitation is a concern for the people of Gaza.  It feels like 19th century stuff.  And it is exactly this sort of situation that Mother’s Day grew from.  A woman named Ann Maria Reeves, in 1858, started Mother’s Day Work Clubs in West Virginia towns to improve sanitary conditions for people and families.  And when the Civil War started, she shifted to providing aid to both Confederate and Union soldiers.  During the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe and her husband served on the Sanitary Commission.  The carnage of the war wasn’t just on the battlefield.  “More men died in the Civil War from disease in prisoner of war camps and their own army camps than died in battle.” (“Mother’s Day: A Campaign for Peace and Justice”) In 1870, Howe wrote what she called an “Appeal to womanhood” in response to her Civil War experience and the Franco-Prussian War that broke out that year in Europe.  She tried to establish a “Mother’s Day of Peace” on June 2nd every year, but while she hosted a few events in Boston, it was the daughter of Anna Reeves, Anna Jarvis, who was able to get the holiday established in 1914.  Anna Jarvis’s emphasis was more on thanking and paying homage to mothers than it was on rallying mothers to advocate for peace.  Maybe it was easier to promote that as a state holiday than it was to promote a holiday that called the state to task.  Howe’s appeal began:

Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

And as I hear Julia Ward Howe’s words, I can’t help but think there is an insight into compassion and pain and loss and love that mothers can have that we need to learn from.  

In Anna Malaika Tubbs’ book, she details horrors of racial violence that made up the context in which Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin, and Louise Little grew up and then raised their children.  Anna writes the book because while we tend to know the names Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, we don’t know Alberta, Berdis, and Louise.  Martin and Malcolm and James didn’t arrive on the earth fully formed to be leaders in the movement for civil rights and liberation.  They became who they became because of the variety of caring and loving they received from their mothers. Even just becoming aware of their existence, we realize that “Mothers are holding and shaping the constant reimagining and evolution of our world,” as Anna says.  Alberta, Berdis, and Louise were very different from one another.  They had very different talents and dispositions, though all loved fiercely.  Louise was a confidant of Marcus Garvey and an activist.  Alberta was a teacher, musician, and church leader.  Berdis single parented nine children, and focused on them while maintaining a love of language that she passed on to her son.  Anna writes specifically to Black women and mothers, but I think it does us good for the rest of us to listen in, too, when she says: 

… each of the three teaches us that wherever we come from, outside of the United States, a big city, or a small village—no matter where we live, the East Coast, the Midwest, or the South—and no matter our level of education or varying levels of access to resources, we have much to offer: each of us carries the potential to transform the world.  These women did so through their own actions and through raising sons who became internationally recognized for their transformative power.  They teach us that we possess inherent worth, and we must recognize that worth in each other.  We are likely very different from one another, but we can still offer each other affirmation and guidance.  We must take pride in ourselves, in our children, and in our shared mission for each person to be granted the basic right to live life with dignity, happiness, and recognition.

We need to call ourselves to feel the recognition of loss and pain along with love and commitment — the both and many in which mothering, nurturing, growing is rooted.  

Raising Black children—female and male—in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy.  If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.  And in order to survive they must let go.  This is what mothers teach—love, survival—that is, self-definition and letting go.

 

Amen.



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