As a UU history nerd, I have always wanted to preach about Mother’s Day. Did you know, it’s one of those pieces of American history that came out of our religious heritage? And further, it has a more radical history than the Hallmark version of this day might suggest.

For our reading earlier, Reverend Tom shared a text that I want to discuss with you today. It was written by Untarian poet, lecturer, and feminist leader, Julia Ward Howe in 1870. Entitled, “An Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” We now know it as the original “Mother’s Day Proclamation” because it was written in an effort to propose this new holiday.

As you might have guessed from hearing it read, Howe’s version of Mother’s Day was not a cozy day at home meant only for breakfast-in-bed and declarations of appreciation for those who raised us, however nice such a celebration may be. No, she wrote this as an act of witness and of protest against the brutal wars of her age.

This was just a few years after the end of the American Civil War, and violent nationalism was well and alive in the Franco-Prussian War. This proclamation was the launch event of what has been known as Howe’s “one-woman peace crusade.” Her vision was of an International Women’s Peace Congress where women of the world could gather to strategize and use their moral influence to resolve world conflicts without bloodshed. Instituting a Mother’s Day, then, was a tool to drum up support for this shifting of women’s roles in the world.

So, here we sit, a century and a half after this proclamation. Frankly, there are pieces of this story that are hard to relate to. For one, our culture is beginning to understand gender and gender relations in much more complex and non-binary ways. And there are so many other ways that life on this planet keeps getting more complicated.

I’m sure that very few of us believe any single group of people could sit at a table together and figure out how to put an end to violence and international conflict. If the elite intellectuals of the world could theorize their way to peace, then it would have happened by now. Instead, violence continues to be a reality that shapes this human experience.

Here is the piece of Howe’s work that feels relevant for today: wars half a world away are reported in our news, and break our hearts daily: Ukraine, Palestine, Ethiopia, and so many more sites of extreme violence. We bear witness while feeling that as individuals there is little if anything we can do about it. I know Ukraine, especially, has been heavy for folks in this community. We mourn the murders of civilians. We mourn what soldiers on both sides are forced to do in the name of their nation-states, much like Howe did.

And then, there’s the news about the Supreme Court leak foreshadowing the end of Roe v. Wade. If we needed a sign that the lived realities of women and people of other marginalized gender identities aren’t given a central enough role in our national conversation, this is it!

Frankly, I didn’t expect to be talking about Reproductive Justice at length when I first wrote this sermon description. But, I do believe that the Mother’s Day Proclamation has something to say about it.

The very premise of this document, calling wives and mothers to take action for peace, acknowledges that our most intimate, familial relationships are the places where we experience the world. They are places where us living out our values are most potent.

Reproductive Justice is defined as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, to have children, to not have children, and to parent the children we do have in safe and sustainable communities. With her proclamation, Julia Ward Howe is making it very clear that a world shaped by war is no world to be raising children into.

She asserts this when she declares, “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.” 

It is in this way that we can honor the fact that a huge part of our power in the world is enacted through our relationships.

As an example of what I’m talking about, I’m willing to bet that for all of you, like me, the COVID-19 pandemic has been experienced on an intimate and personal scale far more than an abstract global scale. We think about the precautions we took, the hard conversations we had with loved ones, and the losses we and those close to us experienced before we think about the way this pandemic has shaped our larger political context. Whether we would choose so or not, our families, both by blood and by choice, are the places where our work begins.

In this way, the Mother’s Day Proclamation is a call not only to act in the name of peace. It is also, in a way, a vision of Reproductive Justice because Reproductive Justice is about creating a world that cherishes and supports families of all shapes and sizes. A world where we all can give of our gifts to celebrate and nourish each new generation, as parents or not, without fear of losing them to violence.

And, dare I say it? Let us be inspired by these words from our spiritual forebear to resist, despite it all. Despite the sphere of our influence feeling so small, despite the problems feeling so big, we can still find creative ways to resist. Because we must.

Howe declares, “Arise, all ye who have hearts!… From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own!”

In the end, Howe’s International Women’s Congress never came to be, despite her years of traveling and promoting it. In the end, war goes on. In the end, Mother’s Day for Peace has been co-opted by greeting card companies.

Even so, we can still find creative ways to resist, because we must. And let Howe be an example for us. In the end, she lived well because she was making her voice heard, putting her life’s labors into building a better world. After decades of playing along in deference to the men in her life, Julia Ward Howe finally grew into her feminist era. After this happened, a friend remarked, “It gave a new brightness to her face, a new cordiality in her manner. Made her calmer, firmer.”

This week, I have had the privilege of working alongside Reverend Bill as this faith community takes in and responds to the news. There is something he said a few times, in a few different places, that I want to paraphrase and repeat here so hopefully, you can hear it if you haven’t yet:

This is not a time in the world when our efforts to reach toward the Beloved Community in our shared public life will be met with much success. In fact, we are looking into a time when many-years-old advances towards rights, justice, and equality are under attack, being systematically dismantled everywhere we look. The pendulum is swinging in a very dangerous direction.

There is much to mourn. It’s hard to even keep up. To stay in this work will take more of our energy, and more persistence than we may be used to. Therefore, we cannot expect to be sustained by victory, and must rely on faith instead.

I am already experiencing this wisdom from Reverend Bill to be true. This is the community that I trust to hold us through this time. In this past week, I have spent many hours with you all, while we have held each other in grief, and anger. And, we are already making plans, leaning into community partnerships in order to navigate these next moves, together. There is a real faithfulness in this, and it is sustaining me.

I have to say, that among all the other feelings of this week, I have felt gratitude. Yes, I am grateful for this community where each of us can be both held and urged forward. And, there is even a joy in answering this call. A quiet, firm joy that says “Yes, this is the way we are to live during times like these. We are supposed to get through this together. We are to be caring, honest, grateful, and unwilling to surrender in despair.”

I want to close with the same quote I included in this week’s Staying Connected blog because it is so powerful for me at this moment. It comes from Rebecca Solnit’s essay collection, entitled Hope In the Dark.

This, by the way, is a book I highly recommend for these times we are in. Her central thesis is that the course of change in human history is chaotic and unpredictable, and we can never know the full impact that any action can have. With all of this being true, victories for a better world have been chaotic and unpredictable, yes, but they have also only been made possible when humans seize their own power and fight for what they value, despite the evidence.

In defining hope, Solnit writes:

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future–and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable”

Now, I am not a mother, so I can’t say much about what motherhood means, but my own mother and her three sisters have been good examples for me. From them, I’ve learned that motherhood is an act of giving one’s life energy to support the flourishing of a new human, to dream them up with love, to celebrate the person they become. To be a mother is an act of hope, to give yourself to the future.

So today, in honor of motherhood, in honor of our sacred right to become parents on our own terms, let us hold onto the kind of hope that shoves us out the door. May we give of ourselves to the future.

Prayer

Will you pray with me?

Spirit of Life and of Love, thank you for your presence with us.

Please, help us to give what we can.

Let us mourn, and then let us take up the work that is ours to do.

Help us to hold and cherish one another in our most intimate lives.

Remind us that bodily autonomy is a sacred right no one can take away.

Remind us that we are worthy of finding, growing, and loving the family that is right for us.

Remind us that we have the power to heal.

Spirit of Life, we ask that you move through us, as we are instruments of Your Love in this world.

Our voices matter.

Our actions matter.

And we have each other.

Amen.

Topics: Threshold