The Spirit of Mother

The celebration of Mother has a long history. It dates back to the time of ancient Greece and Rome. It is not merely, as some would suggest, a creation of the greeting cards company to make money out of us. The celebrations of mother and motherhood has been with us for many centuries. In Britain Mothering Sunday was about returning home either to family and or the Mother Church. Returning to a place of total acceptance and love, a place where the love within us can grow, a place of nurture.

 These days Mothering Sunday in the UK has become known as Mother’s Day, following the American tradition that is celebrated in May, and not the middle Sunday of Lent.

Mothering Sunday, Mother’s Day, whatever its actual true origins is enshrined in this image of returning home, and this sense of belonging to something more than ourselves. Whether that is actually of children returning to the family home having been working away or of people returning to the mother church. Either way it’s about returning home to a place of safety; it is about returning home to a place of renewal, of re-birth, not only for ourselves but for others too; it is about returning to a place of love and total acceptance of who we are, exactly as we, no matter what we have done or where we have been, we are accepted with open loving arms. It’s about returning to that place where love is not only born but nurtured and grown and brought into true being.

Mother’s Day is the celebration of being held and nurtured in the spirit of love. Mother’s Day is about celebrating the spirit of mother.

Today we celebrate the spirit of mother; today we celebrate and give thanks to those who gave birth to our being, but we do more than that. Today we celebrate those who have nurtured and brought to life the love within us whether they are the ones who gave birth to our bodies or helped nurture and bring to life something within us. Today we celebrate the spirit of mother; today we celebrate those who have nurtured our lives whether in body, in mind, in heart or spirit.

Also today in celebrating the spirit of mother we acknowledge our responsibility to one another as individuals and a community to nurture, to bring to life, the love within ourselves, one another and the wider human community.

The truth is that all of us are constantly giving birth to something each and every day. We are all a part of the Divine Creation and re-creation it is really important to recognise this. As Annie Dillard wrote “ We are here to witness creation and to abet it…We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are all around us and to praise the people who are here with us.”

This is nurture, this bringing alive the spirit of mother, this is what we celebrate this day.

There are many ways to nurture and countless opportunities each and every day to do so. What have you given birth to and nurtured today? Perhaps a new sense of family or community? Perhaps you have held or encouraged another, given them hope? Perhaps something to improve your local community or wider society? What can you give birth to or nurture today? What gift have you been given that could be brought to life or what could you encourage to bring to life in others?

In what ways can you bring to life the spirit of Mother?

Over the last few weeks I feel I have awoken once again to the spirit of Mother, the spirit of nurture. I felt powerfully caught up in it only last week as I attended the parliamentary workshop and reception on combatting obesity. I participated in the roundtable discussion looking at ways to reach men. Many avenues were explored. At one point we discussed children and the role that not only mothers but fathers play in nurturing their children’s eating habits and how this would be one way to reach men to help them live healthier lives. It was reassuring to witness the recognition these days in men’s roles in nurturing children.

During the day I witnessed this nurturing love being expressed and participated in conversations about how we all have a role in bringing it to life. I saw a deep sense of collective responsibility and witnessed numerous examples of ways in which we can all show the way. None more so than in Baroness Benjamin, a wonderful example of mother. I’m not just talking about childhood memories here either. Although I did remember being a little boy and watching with my own mother as she touched so many children’s lives in the 1970’s. What I witnessed and was honoured to be in the presence of, was the embodiment of nurture, such a warm and deeply loving human being who just put you at ease by their presence. Someone who made you feel welcome as you are and someone who by simply being themselves invited you to be yourself. This is the spirit of mother for me and also the model for religious community too, the mother church a place of nurture, love and acceptance, a place where you can be yourself and your spirit can grow.

I felt powerfully the spirit of mother that day.

Subsequently I have felt a sickening sadness this week as only seven days later this very same place was a scene of bloodshed and murder as the Houses of Parliament came under attack from a man with murderous intent. That terror, that fear, will not overcome love though, of this I am certain. The spirit of love, that embodies the spirit of mother will overcome the spirit of destruction that occurred that day. We have seen this spirit come to life as people have come together ever since this appalling atrocity was committed...The spirit of love will always over come...

Today we honour the spirit of mother. Yes we honour the mothers who gave birth to us and raised us but also all the others who have nurtured and brought to life this love within us. We also honour that which lays within us, that spirit of mother that can help bring the very same love alive in others.

All of us have the potential to give birth and raise something in the world. Not all of us can give birth to children, but we can give birth to ideas, to art to music to all manner of creativity, we can all give birth to love through our very being. Some of us raise children, but children are not the only things that we can raise. Some of us can raise animals or flowers and vegetables; some of us can raise those in our community to be the best that they can be; some of us, later in life, find ourselves raising our own parents as they come to end of their lives; some of us can raise interest in a cause that we feel is worthy of working for, for me in recent times it is obesity and issues about our own bodily being. A love that has grown from my own pain and suffering and struggle. If we cannot raise interest we can raise money to support causes or just point out to others where love is needed. We can all raise and nurture love in this world, we can all give birth to love through our being. We can invoke the spirit of mother through our very own human being.

So on this day that honours mothers, let us do so in the true spirit of mother. Let us honour the mothers who gave birth to us and those who raised us. Let us give thanks for all they gave, whilst acknowledging their human limitations. Let us also give thanks for all those who have shown unconditional love and acceptance to us, those who have nurtured that loving spirit within us, who encouraged us to be the best that we could be. Let us also acknowledge that spirit of mother within each of us, that capacity to accept, love, encourage and nurture. Let us acknowledge our responsibility not only for ourselves but for one another and the whole of humanity.

Let’s all of us pay homage to the spirit of mother…

Returning Home to "Mother"

“Mother’s Day” and or “Mothering Sunday” has a long history. It dates back to the time of ancient Greece and Rome. It is not merely, as some would suggest, a creation of the greeting cards company to make money out of us. The celebrations of mother and motherhood has been with us for many centuries. In Britain Mothering Sunday was about returning home either to family and or the Mother Church.

These days Mothering Sunday in the UK has become known as Mother’s Day, following the American tradition that is celebrated in May, and not the middle Sunday of Lent as it is in Britain. Interestingly though this Mother’s Day was as much about returning and bringing healing and wholeness as Mothering Sunday. The original Mother's Day was organized 1868 as a way to bring families together who had been torn apart by the “American Civil War”. Four years later Julia Ward Howe, an important Unitarian activist and author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, attempted to set June 2nd aside as a day when mothers would "especially pray that war may not come to slay any mother's son." The idea did not take hold though and slipped away. Then in May of 1907, the daughter of Anna Reeves Jarvis, also named Anna, began the Mother's Day which is celebrated in the USA today. Her intention was that it be "religious and personal", a day when Americans would attend church and wear a red carnation if their mother were alive, and a white flower if deceased. President Woodrow Wilson added a patriotic flavour to it in 1914 when he signed a Congressional resolution establishing the second Sunday of May "for displaying the American Flag as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country."

Mothering Sunday, Mother’s Day, whatever its actual true origins is enshrined in this image of returning home, and this sense of belonging to something more than ourselves. Whether that is actually of children returning to the family home having been working away or of people returning to the mother church. Either way it’s about returning home to a place of safety; it is about returning home to a place of renewal, of re-birth, not only for ourselves but for others too; it is about returning.

So there was always a sense of a celebration of something more than just our own mother’s in “Mother’s Day” whether that be the “Mother Church” or the “Mother Land”, there was always a sense of belonging to something greater than our individuals selves and even our biological families in “Mothers Day”, returning to a place of love and total acceptance of who we are, exactly as we, no matter what we have done or where we have been, we are accepted with open loving arms.

This always brings to mind those beautiful words by Rumi that I often sing in the “Singing Meditations” I lead. Although interestingly perhaps the most important words are often missed out.

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”

By Rumi

In many ways the key is in the words we don’t sing “It doesn’t matter…even if you have broken your vows a thousand times”

When we return home to the loving arms of our idealised mothers we are a returning to a place of total acceptance. It doesn’t matter where we have been or what we have done. The love is there, the total acceptance is there. Now for me this is the ideal of religious community and I suspect it is also what the “Kin-dom of God” would look like, what the “Commonwealth of Love” is meant to be like. It is the prodigal son or daughter returning to the loving arms of the “Mother Community” totally accepted as they are and ready to begin again in love.

This brings to mind some beautiful words of prayer, a redemptive prayer, I first heard many years ago.

"We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love."

For remaining silent when a single voice would have made a difference

We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

For each time that our fears have made us rigid and inaccessible

We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

For each time that we have struck out in anger without just cause

We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

For each time that our greed has blinded us to the needs of others

We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

For the selfishness which sets us apart and alone

We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

For falling short of the admonitions of the spirit

We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

For losing sight of our unity

We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.

For these and for so many acts both evident and subtle which have fuelled the illusion of separateness

We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love

When I think of Motherhood and or the Mother Church I think of returning to a place of sustenance of nurture where one feels that they can recharge and renew in safety. A place where you are accepted wholly as you are. From here you can begin again in love, you can if you like be born again, be given birth to once again.

Columbian author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wrote in, “Love in the Time of Cholera”, “…human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but…life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

Our lives often take different directions at times. We turn down a new path way, again and again and again. Often we will go down blind alleys, again and again and again. Often we repeat the same mistakes again and again and again. We do not always learn from our mistakes. This is so very human and even if we have made those mistakes a thousand times, we can always begin again in love, we can always return home to a place of acceptance.

This brings to my mind the wonderful poem “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters” by Portia Nelson

1. I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost … I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

2. I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

3. I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in … it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

4. I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

5. I walk down another street.

We can begin again a thousand times if we need to. We can turn down a new path, or we can return home to the very beginning. It is ok. 

It is a curious phrase to turn, or to turn again or even to return. Did you know that to turn or to re-turn was the original meaning of the religious word “conversion”; “conversion” is rooted in the Latin word “convertere”, which meant to turn around to transform.

Now for a long time I use to think that if a person had been converted that this was the end of a process. Thankfully I no longer live under this delusion. Today when I think of conversion I think of it as the beginning of something of the start of a journey. Today I see conversion as an ongoing process, not a once or perhaps twice in life time experience. We can begin again even if we have broken our vows and made same mistakes a thousand times. We can begin again in love. We can turn again, we can return to a place of re-birth.

Herein, I believe, lays the association with Mothering Sunday and this idea of returning to the Mother Church. I believe that is the purpose of communities such as ours to be a place that welcomes the traveller home, to the loving arms of mother. A place of total acceptance, wherever they have been. Not merely tolerance, as I don’t think that that is enough, no a place of acceptance, where you can come as you are, exactly as you are in this moment. A place of loving nurture where you can either continue or if need to begin again in love, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.

I believe that the purpose, of free religious community, such as the Unitarian congregations I serve is to nurture one another’s spirit. Our purpose is to nurture that love that is present deep within the souls of every one of us. To nurture and develop these qualities in each other is not just the responsibility of our mother’s, we all have nurturing qualities and we can all help to bring out the best in one another.

We can all offer one another unconditional love. We say that all our welcome here. This though must be an active quality, rather than merely words. To love each other unconditionally is to love as a mother loves her only child. This of course is easier said than done. For those of us who have been hurt by those who were supposed to love us to offer love unconditionally is not easy. Therefore before we can offer that love to others we must first of all become reconciled with our own pain and our own suffering. This is one of the purposes of a church that calls itself free, to offer a safe secure space where one can come to terms with themselves and their lives. Security and protection are both nurturing qualities of motherhood. They are also qualities which a free religious community needs to help develop in those who come, so that they will feel safe enough to develop their souls. To be who they are and to become who they are, not just to come as they are. It is the purpose of the beloved communities I serve, to create an environment that is secure enough to enable each who come to explore in a safe and secure environment.

A free religious community exists to nourish and feed all. This requires those who come to give and not just take from what they find here. For each soul to be fed each needs to give and receive wholeheartedly. This requires the development of both sensitivity and understanding towards one another and the openness that allows all to learn from the wisdom of each other, from those who have walked many and varied paths.

Perhaps the greatest quality though needs to develop is humour, one the most wonderful qualities of motherhood. Humour helps us to deal with life’s trials and tribulations. It also helps us to explore those most difficult and testing issues that as a spiritually vibrant community needs to explore. Humour is something that is present within the communities I serve.

So on this day set aside to honour Mother’s let’s remember those who have offered us the unconditional and wholly accepting love of the mother ideal. Those who have offered their unquestioning love to us, even when we have broken our vows a thousand times, those who have offered their nurturing heart and encouraged us to begin again in love. Let us also though commit to living this way ourselves to offer this love to all that we meet. To not just tolerate the people we meet as they are, but to love them and accept them, even if they have broken their vows a thousand times. Let’s offer to them the nurturing hand of love and to do so with real humour. Let us all begin again in love.

Prayer for All Who Mother

We reflect in thanksgiving this day for all those whose lives have nurtured ours.

The life-giving ones
Who heal with their presence
Who listen in sympathy
Who give wise advice ... but only when asked for it.
We are grateful for all those who have mothered us
Who have held us gently in times of sorrow
Who celebrated with us our triumphs -- no matter how small
Who noticed when we changed and grew,
who praised us for taking risks
who took genuine pride in our success,
and who expressed genuine compassion when we did not succeed.
On this day that honours Mothers
let us honour all mothers
men and women alike
who from somewhere in their being
have freely and wholeheartedly given life, and sustenance, and vision to us.
Dear God, Mother-Father of us all,
grant us life-giving ways
strength for birthing,
and a nurturing spirit
that we may take attentive care of our world,
our communities, and those precious beings
entrusted to us by biology, or by destiny, or by friendship, fellowship or fate.
Give us the heart of a mother today.

Amen

Mothering Sunday: Every Birth is Sacred

The following was sent to me by a friend, they thought I might be able to use for Mothering Sunday, they were correct...It is taken from “Spiritual Midwifery” by Ina May Gaskin

"Every birth is holy. I think that a midwife must be religious because the energy she’s dealing with is holy. She needs to know that other people’s energy is sacred.

Spiritual midwifery recognizes that each and every birth is the birth of the Christ child...

By religious, I mean that compassion must be a way of life for her. Her religion has to come forth in her practice, in the way she makes her day-to-day, her moment-to-moment decisions. It cannot be just theory. Truly caring for other people cannot be a part-time job.

During a birthing, there may be fantastic physical changes that you can’t call anything but miraculous. This daily acquaintance with miracles – not in the sense that it would be devalued by its commonness, but that its sacredness be recognized – has to be a part of the tools of the midwife’s trade. Great changes can be brought about with the passing of a few words between people or by a midwife’s touching a woman or the baby in such a way that great physical changes can happen.

For this touch to carry the power that it must, the midwife must keep herself in a state of grace. She has to take spiritual vows just the same as a yogi or a monk or a nun takes inner vows that deal with how they carry out every aspect of their life. A person who lives by a code that is congruent with life in compassion and truth actually keys in and agrees with the millions-of-years-old biological process of childbirth..."

I was recently talking with a young woman who is re-training to be a mid-wife. She is a mother herself and no doubt it is this that has sent her down that root. It was so beautiful listening to her talk of her job and the sense of awe and wonder that comes with being present at the beginning of life. She also spoke of the sense of connection she feels with the woman she works with as they move through the stages of pregnancy. There is a real pastoral nature to the work it seems and this seemed especially true with women who are troubled or who have addiction and mental health difficulties as well as issues such as poverty and homelessness. The job must be extremely painful at times.

We also talked of faith and belief. Conversations that people often wish to have with me. It’s interesting that most of the time I say very little, I tend to listen while they give birth to their own thoughts and feeling. It seems this young woman is going through seem real changes.

I have known here for many years, her older sister has been a friend since I was a teenager and we were out celebrating her sisters 40^th birthday that day.

It was lovely listening to her talk about how her work and motherhood had led her to ask those questions about meaning; about her search for a centre and how she admired so many of the Muslim women that she met in her work, who seem to have this centre and purpose and meaning. She said that in contrast this was something that was lacking in the lives of so many of the more troubled young women that she came into contact with. She told me that she didn’t really know what she believed in herself, just that she found this centre in her work. I know what she means. As I have said many times the God that I have come to know really comes to life as I find and give from my heart to another and when I allow another to give from their heart to me. In those moments that loving spirit comes to life.

I love the following “For a Mother” by John O’Donohue. It is taken from "Benedictus: A Book of Blessings"

“For a Mother” by John O’Donohue

Mother,

Your voice learning to soothe

Your new child

Was the first home-sound

We heard before we could see.

Your young eyes

Gazing on us

Was the first mirror

Where we glimpsed

What to be seen

Could mean.

Mother,

Your nearness filled the air,

An umbilical garden for all the seeds

Of longing that stirred in our infant hearts.

You nurtured and fostered this space

To root all our quietly gathering intensity

That could grow nowhere else.

Mother,

Formed from the depths beneath your heart,

You know us from inside out,

No deeds or seas or others

Could ever erase that.

After worship last Sunday I was speaking with a member of the congregation about the hymns we sang in worship. He mentioned one that he believed we had never sung in the two and half years that I had served the congregation. He named the hymn and number and I insisted that we’d sung it recently. I even had it in my mind and sang the first verse back at him. As I got in my car I promised that we would sing it soon, but couldn’t next Sunday as we had already picked the hymns for Mothering Sunday, when the worship group had recently met.

What a fool I am. I got up on Monday morning to make a start on the service, opened the worship group book and there it was. We had decided to sing the hymn weeks ago, as the opener to the “Mothering Sunday” service. This is why it was on my mind and the words and tune were in my head. Just another beautiful example of synchronicity.

I love the opening verse and it is appropriate for “Mothering Sunday”

“Now Thank We All Our God,

With heart, and hands, and voices,

Who wondrous things hath done,

In whom the world rejoices;

Who from our mothers’ arms

Hath blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love,

And still is ours today.”

So what is motherhood, well it certainly isn’t gender exclusive. It is something we all do and it something that a true spiritual community must be involved in. Remember that one aspect of the original meaning of “Mothering Sunday” was a return to the mother church.

To mother is to serve others. Certainly I see this when I think of the example of my mother and others who have mothered me; when I think of the deep love that they have shown in their actions.

Mothering is about a commitment to love. Not in some soft and mushy way, no it’s about giving of yourself for others. We all mother when we cultivate relationships, spiritually intimate ones, with each other; mothering is something we do when we give ourselves fully to life, to nurture the world outside of our own bodies. Good mothering is also about encouraging others to care for one another too, in deed and word. This to me is the primary purpose of spiritual communities like the ones I serve, for me a spiritual community is a breeding grounds for compassionate living. In my eyes religious communities are the birth places of compassion, the Unitarian communities I have been a part of have certainly helped to nurture that aspect of me.

I believe that we are all called to the sacred work of mothering; mothering that teaches us that real love is part and parcel of that mysterious life force that strengthens us in life’s vicissitudes, that brings us to wholeness both within ourselves and others and enables us to find the courage deep within to be dedicated in thought, word and deed to whatever our task may be.

Mothering Sunday reminds us that we are not here purely for ourselves; it reminds us that we are here to care for and to nurture one another. We are here to bring that invisible force, the love that I know as God, into life through our own human hearts and in our thoughts, words and deeds.

"Prayer for All Who Mother" By Victoria Weinsten

We reflect in thanksgiving this day for all those whose lives have nurtured ours.

The life-giving ones
Who heal with their presence
Who listen in sympathy
Who give wise advice ... but only when asked for it.
We are grateful for all those who have mothered us
Who have held us gently in times of sorrow
Who celebrated with us our triumphs -- no matter how small
Who noticed when we changed and grew,
who praised us for taking risks
who took genuine pride in our success,
and who expressed genuine compassion when we did not succeed.
On this day that honours Mothers
let us honour all mothers
men and women alike
who from somewhere in their being
have freely and wholeheartedly given life, and sustenance, and vision to us.
Dear God, Mother-Father of us all,
grant us life-giving ways
strength for birthing,
and a nurturing spirit
that we may take attentive care of our world,
our communities, and those precious beings
entrusted to us by biology, or by destiny, or by friendship, fellowship or fate.
Give us the heart of a mother today.

Amen

"It was truly awful, it was full of awe"

"The white twisted clouds and the endless shades of blue in the ocean

make the hum of the spacecraft systems, the radio chatter, even your 

own breathing disappear. There is no cold or wind or smell to tell you

that you are connected to Earth. 

You have an almost dispassionate platform - remote, Olympian and yet so moving that you can hardly believe how emotionally attached you are to those rough patterns shifting steadily below."

Thomas Stafford Apollo 10.

I can only imagine what Thomas Stafford must have felt as he orbited the earth. Very few of us will ever experience that sense of total physical disconnection from our home, the earth. Yet from this distance Stafford began to appreciate that from which he came. From space he looked on the earth in awe, not wonder, awe. Although he was physically disconnected, his soul appeared completely connected to what he was gazing upon, it shut out all the noises of his spacecraft and even his own breath. Staring down at the earth, took his breath away. It must have been an incredibly beautiful and yet in some sense frightening experience. To me this is worship, this sense of connection that moves way beyond the confines of the physical.

We often hear about the need to develop a sense of wonder, in order to give life meaning. I do not believe that this is enough. What is required is a reawakening of our sense of awe. Awe and wonder are not exactly the same, although the words do appear to be used interchangeably. They both posses an element of surprise or even astonishment about them; they both grab our attention and focus completely; they both awaken our senses. Awe though is different to wonder, there is more to it, this is because it possesses an element of fear and reverence. It is perhaps best described as revered wonder with a sense of fear or trepidation blended in. Wonder opens the senses, where as awe brings them to a different level of being. There is a greater power in awe, than in wonder. It is almost overpowering, over whelming.

I was recently talking with a mother who described the birth of her daughter as the most awful experience of her life. I was a little taken aback by the use of the phrase awful, it didn’t seem right. Then she explained! At the first sight of her daughter she was just full of awe, not wonder awe! She was blown away, by this tiny presence right before her eyes, that she loved revered and worshipped. She described the feeling as over powering and to some extent frightening. It was truly awful, it was full of awe.

Isn’t it strange how awful is understood negatively, where as wonderful has only positive connotations. I suspect that this is because we fear that sense of being out of control that accompanies awe. We do not like to experience powerlessness; we like to believe we are masters of our destiny, masters of the universe. We are not, life is fragile. That’s what makes every moment, every experience, potentially awesome.