I’d like to share with you five scenes about motherhood that I have recently encountered.
Scene 1: My 8-year-old daughter announces to me at the dinner table that she is not sure she believes in God. “I mean,” she says, “I think that things in this world just are the way they are, nothing more. I don’t think that God made them or is making things happen.” I gaze at her, all skin and hair and intelligence and beauty, and I know that the entire miracle of her own existence is all the proof she would ever need. How can I tell her that she came from seemingly nowhere into being, that her complexity fascinates me, that her love and affection take my breath away?
Scene 2: I am having lunch with a friend who has been trying to get pregnant for some time. She tells me about the miscarriage she suffered a few weeks ago. She tells me how startled she was by the blood, and how confusing it was to grieve. She admits to me that after that, she became intimidated by the intensity of it all. She took the books she had been reading on fertility and pregnancy and shoved them all into a closet-- as if to contain, to shut out, to tamp down, to deny, the life-giving potential they signified that she possessed.
Scene 3: I am at a birthday party listening to the mother of a three-year-old. She puts a hand to her forehead and says she cannot believe how difficult this phase of her very headstrong daughter’s life is. Every night, she and her partner wrestle with their daughter just to get through the basics of dinner and bedtime. And almost every night, she laughs, she calls her sister and asks, “do you want to take her home with you?”
Scene 4: I am at church talking with a woman whose teenage son has had developmental disabilities since birth. I ask how he is doing. She tells me, unexpectedly, that after living at home for 18 years, he has just that month had to move to an institution. His problems had worsened. She and her husband were not able to give him what he needed. They had gone to visit him the day before and he had only gotten angry at them.
Scene 6: I am walking into a building known as “the critical care tower” at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with my brother. We take the elevator up to the 7th floor to find our mother in a hospital bed, myriad tubes coming out of her veins and sensors attached to her scalp. We are so relieved when we hear it was not a stroke. But I feel the opening up of a wild kind of uprootedness within me, reckoning with the possibility of losing the body that gave me life.
Motherhood is not easy—nor is it straightforward or one-dimensional. I imagine this topic brings up a variety of feelings for all of us. Some of us are mothers, some of us are fathers, some are neither. All of us have a mother, but she may be close or far in emotional or geographic distance, or she may no longer be in this world. Some of us had wonderful relationships with our mothers, and some had quite painful ones. I’d like to welcome all of those perspectives into our space this Mother’s Day.
I am a mother, and this morning I’d like to speak to you from that location. As a minister, I have been trained to speak about how we can understand God working in our lives. As a mother, I have borne new life through my body, and have experienced the way that love has shown me what God is like. When my first baby was born almost nine years ago, I found the experience of pregnancy, birth, and caring for an infant to be overwhelming in its awe as well as its difficulty. To be able to witness the way life comes into being was so completely humbling that I felt I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude to God. The emergence of life is at the same time so radically embodied and so powerfully transcendent. It was such a powerful experience, in fact, that when I went back to the Bible and to Christian tradition to see what they had to say about the spirituality of motherhood, I was stunned that there is so little. We do inherit, unavoidably, a patriarchal tradition. And yet, at the same time, within the tradition we find resources for the encounter between embodiment and transcendence. So for these past nine years I have been very interested in weaving these two strands together—theology on the one hand, and motherhood on the other—to see how we might affirm what motherhood can teach all of us about spirituality.
This morning I’d like to pull just one thin sheet out of that giant proverbial book, and the topic I’d like to talk to you about is flesh. My point is that being flesh and blood in relationship is the best spiritual training we could hope for.
The Bible has a complicated relationship with flesh. In the Old Testament it is mentioned most often as something offered up for a sacrifice, or it used as a metaphor for the weakness of the Israelites’ faith. But in the New Testament Jesus glorifies flesh. Jesus Christ is himself the Word made flesh; he is God in human form. This is why Christian faith is at its heart incarnational—meaning literally “in flesh.” God took on human form in Jesus Christ and in so doing claimed human experience as a gateway to the sacred. It is, in fact, the only pathway we have to God. Jesus knew this about embodiment; in fact our entire ritual of communion is all about remembering the body of Christ. At the last supper, Jesus said to his disciples: this is my body; do this in remembrance of me;” and they took the bread and the wine. Some say that the ritual of communion is then about re-membering a body, as in putting a body back together; it’s about remembering that we now make up the body of Christ in the world. It’s also about recognizing that in our very human need to eat and drink, we are made in the image of God. Our vulnerability, our earthiness, if you will, is not a hindrance to approaching God but is, in fact, the only way we can.
There is a lot of flesh in motherhood. There is an awful lot of flesh. A lot of motherhood is holding flesh, bathing flesh, feeding flesh, kissing flesh, clothing flesh. It is all so bodily—it is so much about flesh and bone, body and blood. (It’s a lot about poop too, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate to go into that in a sermon.) Motherhood reminds us that this is what humanity is. All around the world, and from the beginning of time, humans have been embracing one another or lying in bed with an illness, taking a first step or taking a last breath. So one thing that motherhood teaches is that new creation happens in and through our bodies. Being human is messy, it is earthy, and it is the ground through which inspiration and creativity come into being. This is the medium through which God works.
Another thing that motherhood teaches us about spirituality is that love is the creative, dynamic, soul-stretching force which is both the source and goal of life. In the best of circumstances, a baby is conceived out of love between two people. From that love comes a being with bones and a nervous system and a preference for peas or pears. It is knit into the design of life that parents nearly always automatically love that little being. But the most amazing thing is that the little being loves them back! In this design, we find an echo of the Swedenborgian understanding of divine creation itself: God is love, and since the nature of love is to love something other than itself, God had to create the world in order to have something to love; in order for God to be God. And not only that, but God’s creation had a purpose: to love God in return.
In the journey of motherhood we find that the project of love is a challenging and exacting spiritual teacher. The truth is that having a child reveals to us our own self-centeredness. A child needs our attention, love and care, and with every cry for help he or she is pulling us away from what we were doing or wanted to do; from who we thought we were and what we wanted. Over and over again, caring for someone else will reveal to us the millions of attachments we have to our time, to our ego, to our productivity, to our solitude, to our need for acceptance, to our vanity. Practicing the art of love asks us to give up these attachments and to enter into the pure presence of being with another. It calls us as well to our highest selves—to be healthy in the fullest sense that we can, to let go of destructive behavior so that we can model the best for the new beings who have been placed within our care. As any parent will tell you, this process is not easy and it is not fun. This love, in the end, calls us out to be our humblest, realest, healthiest, most honest selves.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the hardest of all our tasks, the ultimate test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation . . . Love . . . is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in herself, to become a world to herself for another’s sake . . . and human love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”
Emanuel Swedenborg teaches us that the human being corresponds, in its wholeness and in every least part, to spiritual and heavenly realities. In describing heaven, Swedenborg wrote that what heaven most closely resembles is a BEING that is conscious, relational, loving and alive. He called it the universal human. He described in great detail how the different parts of a human body correspond to different dimensions of heavenly life. This is a claiming of the entire embodied human enterprise as sacred. It is saying that what God is, we are. It is saying that what we are, God is like.
Swedenborg also says that this correspondence is the genesis of human life and continuance. This means that God is the source of human life. And the human being is contiguous with the source of life, with God. To me, this brings an entirely new dimension to thinking about motherhood. Motherhood is thus allowing divine life into one’s physical body, bearing it out and fostering it into the world. This is radical creativity. This is divine creation in motion. It reminds me of the lava fields on the Big Island of Hawaii where you can watch new land being formed. Mothers get to watch new humanity being formed. But they also get to shape it.
We can all learn this spiritual lesson from the example of motherhood. We are all invited to bear forth new life through our bodies and to participate in the ultimate creativity of divine providence. This is what we have been created to do: in flesh and bone, body and blood, we are meant to love.
Neither Sarah nor Mary could believe the incredible thing that the angel of the Lord had come to tell her: that she would bear a child in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Today, I invite you to believe this incredible thing that the Lord is saying to you: you will create new life through your own flesh and blood.
How do you wish to participate in the flow of divine providence? What and whom do you love, and what will that love create? What life do you wish to bear into the world through your body and blood? Allow your flesh and bone to be a conduit for God’s inflowing love and wisdom. Let yourself believe that what the Lord has said will be accomplished. Give yourself to the exigencies of love; let it stretch you to give up your attachments, to pull you away from your self-centeredness and closer to God. As Jesus said, this is my body. Do this in remembrance of me.
