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The Colonized Heart
Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
Sunday, May 12, 2002
Palo Alto, CA
Centering Words
"Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts,
whether your baptism be that of water or tears.
From the bosom of the devastated earth,
a voice goes up with our own.
It says, 'Disarm, Disarm!' "
---Julia Ward Howe
On this day, that many in the United States and around the world, celebrate as Mother's day amidst a wash of Hallmark sentiments, and inundated by media admonitions to laud our mothers with treasures flooding from the alluvial plains of American malls, on this day it is important to declare that truly authentic motherhood and authentic mothering challenges to those very forces that would idealize and exploit it. Mothering is, indeed, a drama unique in the experience of human kind, and it offers us lessons and instruction that call us to a deeper listening. Listen to some of the voices of women writers we don't hear from Hallmark. First, two from children's perspective:
Joan Didion: "I . . . have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood."
Ethel Smith: "We buried her . . . this mother with whom I fought so desperately, whom I loved so dearly, and of whose presence I grow daily more and more conscious."
And now two from the perspective of mothers.
Mary Kay Blakely, author of American Mom: "Being asked to decide between your passion for work and your passion for children was like being asked by your doctor whether you preferred him to remove your brain or your heart."
And, last, Marni Jackson, author of The Mother Zone: "Motherhood is like Albania---you can¹t trust the descriptions in the books, you have to go there."
On this day, then, we have to work to reconstruct reality, women's reality, and the reality of mothering, in particular. The gritty reality as well as the authentic spirit of motherhood require us to do so. The many attributes that constitute genuine mothering, not the least of which are courage and the tender mercy of nurturing, chide us and reprove us to look deeper. But if we were to truly celebrate mothers, their power and their fecundity, their courage and their tender nurture, how could we do so?
Throughout human history, there have been many different ways in which mother's have been celebrated, but there are three women responsible for the eventual establishment of a day to celebrate mothers here in the United States; these three women were very clear about how such a day should be celebrated. Each of them, two women each named Anna Jarvis (mother and daughter) and Julia Ward Howe, wanted to lift up mothers as a way to challenge cultural and institutional practices that brought misery to human kind.
The first Anna Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker, attempted in 1858 to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.
The second Anna Jarvis, the daughter, inspired by her own mother's social activism, worked hard to promote a day in honor of mothers. She was at first gratified by President Woodrow Wilson's institution of a national mother's day, in 1914, largely as a result of her efforts, but she then spent the rest of her life fighting its commercialization. Just before her death, at the end of her 84 years, in 1948, sitting in a room filled with commercial Mother's day cards sent from all over the world by misinformed admirers, she stated that she wished she had never started it at all.
The third woman, Julia Ward Howe, struggled in the late eighteen hundreds to galvanize a women's movement for peace, calling out especially to mothers to create a global day of peace and a movement for disarmament. You've heard the words, and though they are inspiring, her work ended in failure. No such day was established and the global situation today demonstrates the disdain most of the world's governments, including our own, have for disarmament and peace. Her work has some special relevance for me because my relationship to her story illustrates one of the difficulties that I had in writing this sermon, and, in fact, it illustrates the difficulty in understanding any work that involves women's experience. That is, women's history and contributions have been, and continue to be, tragically distorted and subjugated, overlooked and disappeared. Ward's story personally illustrates that distortion and disappearance for me because I participated in it. With what I considered to be correct information, that was actually gleaned from hearsay and misinformed supposition, I blithely claimed in my Bulletin (newsletter) announcement that Julia Ward Howe created mother's day. Now we all know that she didn't and that the Jarvis women did. My little slip was not all that little for it represents, in microcosm, an act of historical revisionism about women¹s experience that has been duplicated in equal, or far larger ways, across the world and throughout most of human history.
Today, I get the chance to do my part to set the record straight, and to add to the growing river of brotherhood that would join sisterhood in establishing a more functional equity between genders. And, today I get to lift up one of the important ways that mothers, mothering and motherhood, have worked and continue to work to make this world a safer place to live and to raise children.
It is important to lift up women's role in the resistance to violence and war, because their passions have been used in terribly opposite ways. Feminist Dorothy Dinnerstein writes, "Think of the saying, 'Men must work and women must weep.' Woman's tears over what is lethal in man's work, this saying implies, are part of the world's eternal, unalterable way . . . [Her] tears serve not to deter man but to help him go on [in his pursuit of violent solutions to human problems], for she is doing his weeping for him and he is doing what she weeps about for her."
Julia Ward Howe had a different answer, listen: "Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!
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 taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
Speaking truth about power. Speaking to those abused by power. Speaking from out of that place that is one of the fundamental powers of the earth, motherhood. Julia Ward Howe, mother of six, emerged out from under the shadow of her abolitionist husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, radical Unitarian and director of the famous Perkins School for the Blind; she emerged to stand fully in the scrutiny of the public eye as one of the foremost voices for women's suffrage. It was her vision of peace, and of the power of women's voices to press it upon the world's violent ears, that forged her path.
Likened to English Queen Victoria in her appearance and bearing, who was born only three days before Howe, Julia Ward Howe is a profound witness and example of the formidable powers of motherhood that is important for us here today---we here, whose country, according to our highest civil and military leaders, has entered a global war that many of them contend has no foreseeable end.
A war that will never end? Waged by our country across the entire globe? A war that is the pretext for the largest military buildup by our nation, by any nation, in the history of the planet! A military buildup that proposes a budget of 325 billion dollars this fiscal year---a sum only five billion less than all other [U.S. discretionary] governmental expenditures, expenditures such as the next closest, education - 45 billion, health - 41, housing - 30, and on down to 3 billion for energy! [Mandatory U.S. budget items include things such as interest payments, social security, medicaid, medicare, unemployment insurance. See http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2002/pdf/guide.pdf for more information>] A war that will not end before any of us here in this room will die, nor any of our children, or our children's children, or theirs! In the face of all this, the quality of motherhood I want to lift up is: Courage and the tender mercy of peace that comes from courageous nurturing.
There are, of course, so many attributes that women as well as men bring to the act of mothering, and so many qualities that are subsequently developed by them as they engage with those they mother.
(I want to offer an aside here: perhaps those qualities do develop more naturally in women, perhaps there is a biological propensity to respond to the needy, the small, the infant human animal by women, yet we dare not exclude men in our lifting up of mothering, for all humans must employ and live out of those qualities during their lives, in fact, each day.)
To go on with my main concern: Sara Ruddick, writing in Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, explores a number of attributes of thinking and living maternally that she sees as central to the experience of mothering. She lists preservative love, nurturance, and training as some of the most central. And there is another that threads its way throughout her work, and the lives of mothers, and that is courage.
Erica Jong, in one of her early works, wrote, "Courage is the only Magick worth having." Julia Ward Howe shows us that, at least, it is a necessary Magick, a necessary power. Courage is both propelled by and, at the same time requires, clear vision. What Howe saw, clearly, was the stupidity, the insanity, the cruelty and the unnecessary tragedy of war. It took courage to see that, to see beyond the arguments for war that really veiled degrading attitudes about the expendability of human life and the glory of warfare. It took courage to walk on to the world stage and declare that stronger than the drive for retribution and revenge, is the commitment that "We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." It took courage then, at the turn into the previous century, and it takes courage now. It takes what mothers continually have to rely on, not only because our society continues to be fundamentally sexist, but also because caring for the young, tending to and assuring the on-going flow of life, generates the passion that is courage.
To be a mother, to give one's self to mothering, forces one to become flexible, which is another form of courage. Mignon McLaughlin writing back in the sixties, wrote, "The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next." Which is precisely what every artist knows, what every real activist knows, what every mother, contending with a wild variety of conditions and demands knows. Think of what it's like when you hear an infant scream, I mean really scream, what it does to your motivation to act.
And it is within that vision, of the screaming child, the child in intense need, that the tensile strength of courage joins with the tender mercies of nurturing. For in healthy mothering, what far outweighs any impulse to just stop the noise, just stop the demand to give everything up to respond to that other human in need, what outweighs frustration and impatience, what outweighs anger and the impulse to violence, is nurture. And in that impulse, you see, there are the profound roots of peacefulness.
There is a terrible and amazing example of that courage to peacefulness I want to share that Sara Ruddick recounted in her book. It was reported by Nathan Laks and describes the protests mothers in Argentina courageously undertook against the disappearances of family and loved ones that their repressive government committed. The protests began in Buenas Aires.
Once in power [in Argentina in 1976], the military systematized and accelerated the campaign of terror, quickly annihilating the armed organizations of the Left and the unarmed ones, as well as many individuals with little or no connection to either. The indiscriminate nature of the kidnapping campaign and the impunity with which it was carried out spread terror---as intended. Relationships among friends and relatives were shattered by unprecedented fear. Perfectly decent individuals suddenly became afraid even to visit the parents of a kidnap victim, for any such gesture of compassion might condemn the visitor to a terrible fate. In this terrorized society, a small organization of women, mothers and other relatives of kidnapped Argentines staged a stunning act of defiance. One Thursday afternoon they gathered in the Plaza de Mayo, the main square in Buenos Aires and the site of countless historic incidents beginning in 1810 with the events that led to Argentina¹s separation from the Spanish Empire. In the center of the Plaza de Mayo, within clear sight of the presidential palace, the national cathedral, and several headquarters of ministries and corporations, the Mothers paraded in a closed circle.
Sara Ruddick goes on, "The Madres [continued their defiance meeting] each other outside hospitals or prisons, where they took food and other provisions and looked for traces of the disappeared, or outside government offices, where they tried, almost invariably without success, to get some accounting of their loved ones' whereabouts. When they marched, the Madres wore White kerchiefs with the names of the disappeared embroidered on them. Often they carried lighted candles and almost always they wore or carried photographs of the disappeared."
How courageous. What a testament about the power inherent in mothering and motherhood. What an affirmative vision for us all, their refusal to accept the disappearance of their loved ones, and their refusal to accept the disappearance of their own significance in human society and human history. I am sure Julia Ward Howe and the Jarvis women were there with them in spirit.
And may all of them them be with all of us on this day, Mother's Day, 2002. May they be with us, offering their gifts of courage and nurture, as we seek lives of authenticity, lives inspirited by all the deeper gifts of mothering and motherhood.
Ashé-Amen-Amein, Shalom, and Blessed Be. Namasté.
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