Sermon by the Reverend Charles J. Stephens
Mother’s Day May 10, 2015
When I was in my twenties and thirties, starting out as a father, no one ever told me that parenting would be easy. Still, never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine the magnitude of feelings I have encountered as a parent. I certainly was not ready for the exciting and gratifying rollercoaster ride of highs and lows that came while seeing my three children born, grow to toddler stage, mature through their childhood years and into young adulthood and become adults.
Today is Mother’s Day and I am wise enough that I would never equate being a father with being a mother. Being pregnant, giving birth, and all that goes along with it is miraculous to me and holds its own unique gifts and challenges as well as costs. Yet, I recognize the reality that some men can be very good nurturers and some women can be less adept at nurturing. Clearly, being a parent or for that matter a parental figure in a child’s life is both gratifying and humbling in many ways.
My question about how children remember their parents has no one answer. We remember our parents in diverse and extremely different ways. Author Delia Ephron was very honest about her childhood. She wrote, “I am the child of alcoholics — two alcoholics, actually, but more importantly my mother. I was 11 when my parents became alcoholics. … I believe that nobody has the same parents, that you’re born into a family at a different time; that your parents relate to you differently depending on what your personality is and how they connect… And when you’re the child of an alcoholic you are worried all the time. All you can think is, “Are they gonna start drinking tonight?”
What happens is you grow up and you’re still worrying. You’re looking left and you know something is coming from the right. So you’re trying to look in two directions at once, which is completely impossible, as we all know. Those things you develop as a child, those survival things, they hang on and they stay in your life and I really needed to write a lot about that to sort of exorcise the demons.
Most of us can relate to what Delia Ephron wrote in “A Moms Life.”
Take your plate into the kitchen, please . . .
Don’t hit your brother.
I’m talking to you.
Just a minute, please, can’t you see I’m talking?
Did you brush your teeth?
What are you doing out of bed?
Go back to bed.
What do you mean, there’s nothing to do?
Go outside.
Read a book.
Turn it down.
Get off the phone.
Tell your friend you’ll call her back. Right now!
Did you go to the bathroom?
If you don’t go, you’re not going.
I mean it.
Why didn’t you go before you left?
No, ten minutes are not up.
One more minute.
How many times have I told you, don’t do that.
I’ll think about it
Not now.
Ask your father.
We’ll see.
Mother’s Day is not a favorite Sunday for everyone who attends worship services. Indeed some people have told me that they intentionally avoid church on Mother’s Day. For that reason, Mother’s Day can be a difficult Sunday for us who are preachers. It is essential that we take into account the women who wanted to but could never become mothers. There are many women who have adopted children and there are many who became stepmothers. Likewise, it is important for us to remember there are women who never wanted to become a mother and who became one anyway. And there are many who choose – for a whole variety of reasons -not to have children. And among all those there are those who become stepmothers. The same can be said for men becoming fathers – of course with some variations. And equally important to remember is the fact that there are many people who are not biological parents but who willingly take on a loving and nurturing parental role for countless children. Suffice it to say the role of motherhood, fatherhood and parenting as a whole is a complicated realm in which to make any generalizations.
We sang the words “Can a father see his child weep, nor be with sorrow filled?” and “Can a mother sit and hear infant groan, an infant fear? No, no never can it be!” Those are evocative and emotional expressions of care and compassion. It is easy to think they are always true and can be sung about mothers and fathers in general. We can easily slide into generalizations about parents naturally being nurturing and loving in ways we would all like to be treated. In reality, few of us, whether we are parents or not, can be expected to live up to always being supportive and loving. And another reality is that there are far too many people, whether we are parents or not, who can be downright cruel emotionally and physically.
Stephen Berg’s poem paints a picture showing that there are many varied and complicated relationships between mothers and their children and I can vouch that it is so between fathers and children as well. Berg wrote:
“I took my mother’s face into my hands and kissed her face
and put my face
against her face and pressed my face against her face her tears
my tears
and kept my face against her face listened in the dark hospital room
‘My mother never held me I never told anyone . . . this . . .’ Then Berg adds:
“How we managed to live so much in the trivial emotion of the daily when we knew what’s really important lurks there waiting for us, and, always, one way or another, finds us, ’wrote my friend Charlie and Chekhov’s ‘The soul of another lies in darkness . . .’”
We do manage to live much of our daily lives in the trivial emotions of the surface reality, while at the same time knowing to varying degrees that what is really important lurks just below the surface waiting for us, until at some point it finds us.
Still, such occasions as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are important days for many people who wanted to become parents and then became one or who became a parental figure and who have had relatively positive relationships with their children. Likewise it can be a great day for children to convey their appreciation to parents and parental figures, even if they are not 100% grateful for them.
For the many children who are estranged from their parents or who were abandoned by a parent or have some long-standing resentment that prevents them from having a close relationship, days of recognizing one’s parents can be painful.
Some are able to do as pictured in Stephen Berg’s poem: taking his mother’s face into his hands, kissing and pressing her face and tears against his own. I appreciate the active openness in his poem. In my first reading of the poem, I thought it was he who had never been held by his mother and kept it secret. But now I think that it was his mother who shared with her son that she had never been held by her mother and never told anyone.
The reality is that “The soul of another lies in darkness . . .” until someone or some occasion gives it the opportunity to peek out of the darkness and see the light of day.
How do children see their parents? It is never simple nor is there only one way. When as children, we grow and mature, we begin to see our own inner complexity and we began to realize the inner complexity of our parents.
The major factors in the lives of our parents and our grandparents combined to influence how they responded to us as children. My father lost his mother when he was 8 or 9 and then his two sisters went to live with other relatives. His father never remarried and at an early age dad left school to work on the farm. My grandfather’s eyesight was damaged when he was a child so he never learned to read or write. When I contemplate his childhood I marvel at what a good father he became. My mother’s parents were both Czech immigrants and she grew up in a close family with lots of siblings. I often wonder how they ever found common ground to raise their five children.
Within families with more than one child, we discover the reality that no two people can expect to have the identical relationship with their parents. The siblings in my family all perceived our parents differently. First of all, there were 22 years between the eldest and youngest children. A great deal changes in any individual over two decades. And needless to say, a great deal changed within our society between 1930 and 1952.
Our personalities caused us to relate to our parents differently and even though I think they loved each of us equally, they related to us in different ways because of birth order, gender role expectation, their economic situation and the wisdom gained and the tolerance of experience as well as their aging process.
Being a parent clearly can bring great joy and fulfillment, but being a parent can also bring long periods of utter boredom, exhaustion and sorrow. I am certain that my mother must have experienced all of those feelings and more. I was a horrible speller in grade school. My mother spent hours and hours helping me learn my spelling lists. (Talk about boring.)
My dad never finished 8th grade so didn’t have the confidence to help me with school work. And yet dad was a fantastic carpenter and stone mason who could build beautiful things with merely an image in his head. I loved to help with things he was building and often used his tools on projects of my own. Dad must have gotten exasperated with me when I would lose or break one of his tools. I remember one period in my childhood when, fascinated with how dad’s tape measurers worked, I broke at least three of them.
I did know how proud and excited my mother and father were when I graduated from college and went on to study at the seminary to became an ordained minister. Dad showed his pride by always addressing the letters he sent to me with Rev. Charles Stephens, (not just the envelopes, but the letters too) And later he sent letters to my younger brother who became a veterinarian as Dr. Bruce Stephens. They took great pride in the accomplishments of all of their children, praising us and bragging to their friends. They were very excited when my sister, my brother, and I had children of our own, making them grandparents, but they were equally excited and proud about the lives and activities of my two sisters who never had children.
On the other side of the ledger, I know how sad my parents were for me when my first marriage broke up and I went through a divorce. They listened to what I had to say, comforted me, and took it all in. Then, when I left the Lutheran ministry, they didn’t say it, but I knew they were disappointed. They had been proud when I was ordained at my home church in their little town. It gave them some bragging rights there. They experienced their disappointment quietly but never stopped loving and supporting me. When my mother told one of her sisters that I had left the Lutheran Ministry and had become a Unitarian Universalist minister, that sister told my mother that that Unitarian Universalism was a cult. At the time, my mother didn’t have a clue what UUists were, fortunately, she had enough confidence in me to say that as long as I was involved, Unitarian Universalism couldn’t be bad.
I read a great deal of poetry and prose in preparation for this sermon and I can say without question that the role of Mother and the role of Father are iconic. There are descriptions of mothers and fathers that are so very perfect, self-sacrificing and all-loving that no mere mortal could ever live up to the expectations. And if we ever tried to live up to such images we would either drive ourselves over the edge or live in a fantasy land.
I consider myself fortunate because I feel like I had really good parents. They were not perfect. And I confess, there were times when I wished they could have been different than they were. But I marvel at how well I was treated as a child.
It reminds me of a saying often attributed to Mark Twain but in truth wasn’t said by him. Still, I think the anonymous quote makes good sense, “. . . when I was seventeen I couldn’t bear to have my Father around while we were discussing important questions but when I was twenty-five it was wonderful how the old man had improved.” So true: the longer I have lived, the better my parents have looked to me. I hope the same is true for my children.
I have known many people who unfortunately had or who have inadequate and downright abusive parents. The way they see their parents is of course colored by how they have been treated. They as individuals have to come to terms with their memories and their feelings. Some have come to forgive even while not forgetting what they experienced. Others are not able to forget or forgive. In either case everyone needs to learn a way to move on and make sense of how they want to live their own life.
If as a parent you are like me, you have moments when you wonder how your children see you. It is amazing how children will often interpret a parent’s behavior or a parent’s mood as being directly related to something they, the child, has done or who they are as a child. Children can even feel like their parents’ divorce has happened because of something they did. Children of an alcoholic parent can grow up feeling like they were somehow responsible for their parents’ mood or emotions. Even worse, children who experience emotional or physical abuse often have the feeling that they did something to cause it.
As Robert Fulghum wrote: “Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” What we say may be important in life and in parenting, but what we do is critical, especially in parenting.
Robert Keeshan was someone many of us grew up watching on TV as Captain Kangaroo. He said that, “Parents are the ultimate role models for children. Every word, movement and action has an effect. No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent.”
My way of understanding the first and last of our Unitarian Universalist principles is that we ought to see ourselves as the mothers and fathers of all children. We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person – every child. We affirm and promote a respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. We could say that we are all part of one large interdependent family.
All children, each and every child, deserves to have someone be strong for them when they are weak, to be a voice for them when they are not able to speak, and be their eyes when they cannot see. All children, each and every child, deserves to have adults, their parents and other adults, who will look out for them and like Rachel Naomi Remen’s Grandfather, see the best there is in them.
We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person –of mommies who used to be girls when they were little and of daddies who used to be boys when they were little but also when they grew and became women and men with children.
We affirm and promote a respect for the one large interdependent family of which we are a part.
Closing Words:
To be a successful parent or parent figure requires that we strive to follow the advice given by Mary Oliver. “To Live In This World”
To live in this world
You must be able
To do three things:
To love what is mortal,
To hold it against your bones knowing
Your own life depends on it;
And, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
