Sensing the Web

Earth day was created in 1970 to encourage all of us to protect the earth. Yet since that time our sense of hopelessness and grief about the challenges and changes to our earth have led not to the kinds of collective action needed to change course, but to a sense of hopelessness and helplessness.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes:

“One otherwise unremarkable morning I gave the students in my General Ecology class a survey. Among other things, they were asked to rate their understanding of the negative interactions between humans and the environment. Nearly every one of the two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad mix. These were third-year students who had selected a career in environmental protection, so the response was, in a way, not very surprising. They were well schooled in the mechanics of climate change, toxins in the land and water, and the crisis of habitat loss. Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. The median response was “none.”

I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day— brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl—truncated their ability to see some good between humans and the earth. …. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like.

How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” [Braiding Sweetgrass p. 6]

This Earth Day I want to disrupt the idea that nature is better left alone. The web of life holds all living beings, including us. We have always been connected to that web, we still are, and we always will be.

This Earth Day I want to encourage us to pay attention the delightful, interesting and curious parts of the web of life, because it is a rewarding and important practice for noticing and healing our relationships to our neighbors, and because it is just fun. When I hear Mary Oliver’s poem about the toad, Look Again, I imagine her raptured gazing at her neighboring critters, noticing those little delightful things she had never noticed before.

Where we place our attention has power. Power to shape our own thoughts feelings and actions, power to nurture relationships, power to act effectively in the world.

My husband is always giving me updates about the construction projects he sees in downtown Ithaca on his walk to work. How did I not notice? I wondered as I made my own walk downtown to the library- and found my attention gravitating to the birds calling in the trees, and the new flowers planted by the city garden volunteers. Eric knows which cars our neighbors drive, I notice which trees the squirrels live in. Both of us discover good information about what’s happening in different aspects of our community. As a people who include among our UU Principles “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” It’s good to pay attention to what’s happening in the non-human parts of the web as well as the human.

Julie Good, wrote after participating in a program called “Sense of Place “All my life I’ve been an urban person. I learn where I am on the grid of sidewalks and freeways, and feel a bit lost if I am away from the grid. Through [Sense of Place] I’ve come to see how we inhabit and share a watershed. To think of my place, and to see the grid fading and the watershed standing out, has been an amazing shift in perspective for me.” [Exploring a Sense of Place p. 48]

When we shift our attention, it can shift our perspective. Over the years I have been amazed that when I pay attention to just about any living thing it reveals itself, and its relationship to others, in surprising ways. So, I invite you to consider a practice of paying attention, noticing, wondering as a way to connect to the web of life, to spirit of life, and to yourself.

One tried and true practice is to find a “sit spot” – a place where you can just sit quietly for whatever time feels right to you- maybe just a few minutes, or maybe you could really settle in for 20 minutes or half an hour to let the birds and other critters relax and go back to their normal behavior. Some folks will do this out in nature, but I’ve found even on my front porch in downtown Ithaca I can learn a lot about trees and squirrels and birds and what it’s like for them to live in our little city.

My friend Aileen had a similar practice- she took the same walk every day for years, and noticed the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of the years as she walked- how trees grew, how the peepers peeped.

Whether we chose a sit spot, or a regular walking route, we just open our awareness to the living things we see, and get to know them in their particularity.

Earlier this year I told you about the trees on my block, and how I’ve grown to know them, to admire them and see the gift they are to the neighborhood, to humans, squirrels, birds and lichen of my little ecosystem.

When I hear, then, about clear cutting of old growth forest, I sometimes feel sad and powerless. I can send a check or write a letter, now that my heart has been touched by my neighbor trees, but the problem feels too big for little me to fix.

But when I turn my attention to the honey locust, the stately maple, the flowering plum who are my neighbors, I feel more empowered. When I pass a young tree that has outgrown the protective cage the city puts around a new planting, it’s easy and natural to snap a photo on my phone and send it to the City Forrester. How lovely to come back around later in the week to see the constrictive cage gone. Like how if you know which car your neighbor drives, you can text them if they accidentally leave their headlights on.

Not everyone loves to geek out on trees- what interests you?

Some of you garden, some of you fish. It’s hard not to love gazing at a lake or wading in a creek if you are lucky enough to have one handy.
Is it toads? Birds? Fireflies?
Clouds? Wind? Don’t get me started!
What interests you? What do you want to pay attention to this season?

Starhawk encourages us, while we are practicing paying attention to the web, “with your attention on what is around you, say to yourself, “I wonder…”

I wonder what attracts that bug to that flower?”
I wonder why there are 2 different colors of rock in that streambank?

Starkhawk says “This is a great exercise to use with kids. You might ask then, “How many I wonders can you find in five minutes”’ [ The Earth Path p. 67]

It can be nice to learn the names of things, or researching the answers to your wonders but it’s not required if that bogs you down. I often just use descriptive names for things- puffy clouds – the little purple flowers, little brown birds. And of course there are books and Facebook groups and YouTube videos on just about anything you could love, but the practice is always go back to the thing itself. As John James Audubon wrote “When the bird and the book disagree, believe the bird.” Remember, the goal here is not to become an expert, just to be a friendly neighbor. Ordinary people like us are forever learning new things about their niche in the web of life. For example in 1973, a fencing contractor in Australia spotted the bridled nail tail wallaby, which everyone had thought was extinct, and alerted authorities. “The Queensland Government bought the property to protect the few hundred wallabies that remained, and it became part of Taunton National Park.” [i] Your neighborhood, your ecosystem is amazing and precious. The same way we keep an eye out for our human neighbors, it becomes natural to keep an eye out for all our neighbors in the web of life.

Mary Oliver writes in her beloved poem “The Summer Day” shares an encounter with a grasshopper:

“This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,…”

This year as spring unfolds and turns into summer, I encourage you to pay attention to the web around you. To notice your non-human neighbors, and let them reveal themselves to you in all their unique beauty.

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[i] https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2018/04/meet-the-wallaby-that-was-saved-by-womans-day-magazine/

Finding Easter

When I was a kid, Easter was new handmade dresses from Gramma for me and my sister, and going to my Unitarian Universalist church with the whole family. There was always an Easter sweater we had to put over our dresses- because Easter is colder than you think. After church it was plastic eggs filled with goodies, and hard-boiled eggs that were more fun to decorate than to eat. One year I got a plush bunny in my easter basket, and you can tell by the fact that I still have it that it was special to me.

As an adult, a parent, and a minister, it became less and less clear to me what the Easter of Jesus had to do with bunnies and eggs. I learned that Easter comes from the name of an old Anglo Saxon Goddess, called Oestara, in an ancient German earth-centered tradition. Called Eostre in England, celebrated at the beginning of spring in those old pre-Christian traditions.

It makes sense, if you live in our part of the world, to celebrate these days of growing sunlight, the return of life to the world. Every day I go outside and watch the ground near my house go from grey and frozen, to muddy and sprinkled with the first green shoots emerging. Some sunny days you can practically watch them grow! Last week the little purple crocuses in my yard that had come up through the snow were waiting, waiting, waiting in the cold and grey, until finally a sunny day came and they stretched their petals wide like they wanted to hug the sun, and the bees, which had been hiding wherever bees hide in the cold and grey, were humming from blossom to blossom. The birds are so noisy now when I get up early in the morning to walk my dogs. I hear new songs I haven’t heard all winter. They chase each other and I think many of them are trying to find a partner and a nest where they can have children like the rabbit in our story.

One spring I did see a bunny in my backyard, but most years I don’t see any rabbits. Squirrels though we have in abundance. The Squirrels have spring fever for sure. Many UUs who celebrate Easter, are celebrating this season of growth and new life in nature- that moment when all the plants and critters in your ecosystem know in their bones and roots that the hardest part of winter is past, and as we will sing in a moment “nature wakes from seeming death” and the wheel of the year has turned, and now it feels like spring, and we can get on with the joyful and challenging work of growing. As we sung earlier “Herb and plant that, winter long, slumbered at their leisure, now bestirring green and strong, find in growth their pleasure”

We know from our history books that when the Christian church was forming, they often put their new Christian holidays at times when people already had celebrations, and Easter is a good example of this. In the Christian tradition, Easter is the end of a long story, with many challenges along the way, the story of the life of Jesus, his teachings, and the brutality and sadness of his death. Because of course when Jesus died, everyone thought he was gone forever, that this big swell of energy he had built, all his teachings, all they had come together for, we gone, crushed by the Roman government. And so there was a sad desolate time of mourning after his death, until 3 days later when the tomb where Jesus had been laid was empty, and Jesus showed himself to his followers, alive again, miraculously resurrected.

These two very different Easter celebrations, really have nothing to do with one another, except for that one thing they both say to our psyches, our hearts and spirits- that even when there are no signs of life, when there seems to be no reason to hope, perhaps there is still life waiting beneath the frozen ground, even in the tomb. For people who live in a climate like ours, the spirit naturally wants to celebrate this turning of the wheel, after the long cold bleak winter, the bursts of yellow and green and purple. Our psyches see the harmony between the Christian and earth-centered spring holidays of rebirth and resurrection. When we see proof of life returning, proof of rebirth and resurrection, it’s a relief and a joy. And it reminds us of something that happens in our hearts, in our spirits when we ourselves are surprised by new life.

One confusing bit is that Easter moves around the calendar- it’s held on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon, the first full moon after the vernal equinox. (I was this many years old when I learned that.) Wednesday night was our full moon, so here we are, celebrating Easter. That also means some years Easter is earlier, and some years later. I remember one year I was preaching at the UU Fellowship of Big Flats one March Easter, and my son volunteered to hide all the eggs outside so they’d be ready for an egg hunt after the service. Well, all through the Easter service we watched the thick snow falling fast through the big windows. The sky was grey and dark. It snowed so hard no one could find the eggs when the service was over- they were all buried! I will tell you it was hard to hope that Easter, even though I was the one in the pulpit saying that spring always, always comes, even when it seems like it never will. Those are the times when stories of renewal and resurrection are especially important, to show our spirits that what feels like an ending, can be the start of something new. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes: “Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged or cornered. Story… shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls.” [Women Who Run with the Wolves p. 20]

That is why in the Christian tradition, Easter follows the long season of Lent, where observant Christians are encouraged to take the time to dive deep into their own spirits and into their relationship with the divine. There can be no resurrection without all the other pieces of the story.

The same is true for the earth centered traditions who mark spring with celebration. The stunning gift of the yellow daffodil is that it emerges in the cold and grey when few things are yellow. The beauty of the crocus is that it risks blooming in the snow and frost, into the messy leaf litter of last year’s trees.

Celebrating Easter means Listening into the season -- of our web of life, of our spirits. We pause today for a long loving look at this unique year that will never come again and has never been before. How is it with your spirit this Eastertime?

Although Christian churches all around the world are telling the same story this morning, celebrating the most important and holy day of their church year, there is no moment when all of spring happens all at once- the trees like to sleep in a bit after the crocus and daffodils wake up and start their year. From my office window I can see the little tree buds swelling, but I haven’t seen any leaves yet.

So spring, if by spring we mean that moment when petals and leaves and wings unfurl and soak in the sun, it comes at different times to different plants, and different creatures. While a couple bees buzz in my crocus blooms now, some pollinators sleep in until May, which is sensible, because there’s only those 5 flowers in my yard right now, not enough pollen for everyone.

I live down on the flat part of my town, but my friends live up in the hills. Just last week I saw cars driving down into the town with snow on them and I wonder at how differently the seasons unfold in different places. Sometimes it can be weeks before the same flowers bloom up on the hills, weeks before their snow melts. In our congregation this morning we have folks form all over- One family is joining us from south Carolina where it has been definitely spring for a while now. The sweet children's story "The Bunny Who Found Easter" assures us that “At Eastertime there are always rabbits.” But it simply cannot be true that everywhere around the world there are rabbits at Eastertime.

This is all to say, that Easter is a movable feast. It does not come at the same time every year. It does not look the same for all of us. I also mean the Easter in our spirits-- the calendar of our spirits sometimes does and sometimes does not line up with the calendar of the banks or of sun and moon. It can be sad if everyone around you is celebrating “Now the dark, cold days are o’er, spring and gladness are before” and your spirit feels like it is still in the tomb, like it is that last tree with no leaves.

There is a crooked Catalpa tree in our back yard that is always the last to leaf out. “I think that one’s dead” said my husband last year. But I remembered how it was with this tree, and sure enough when the time was right the tree burst out these gigantic heart shaped leaves giving shade to the whole back yard just in time for the hot sun of summer.

How is it for you, right now, today? Does your heart feel like a daffodil in full bloom? Like a bird singing as it waits for sunrise? Like a bunny overrun with young ones? Like a bee bravely looking for the first flower? Or do you feel more like a flower bulb that is still waiting in the dark earth for the right time to emerge? Like the great Catalpa tree who wants more sun before it can leaf out?

Easter is a season of the spirit and not of the calendar. Here, today in the twin tiers, it’s a great day to notice the first buds on the bare trees, the rain and the mud, the green shoots, and how the flowers change from day to day. All of these are spring, all of these are life. If your hearts are leaping with the spring, let them leap. And if your heart is still waiting in the chilly earth, let our Easter celebration remind your tender spirit that when the season is right for you, your spirit will unfurl and bloom.

Co-Creativity

A few years back, I was on my first retreat at Eastern Point, and the more I gazed at the ocean, the vibrant colors of sunrise, the shells on the beach, the rocks, the more I felt compelled to try to draw them. This was weird, because I don’t draw. But the colors and shapes were so beautiful I felt the need to somehow respond. I was so excited about this idea, but when I finally went to put colored pencil to paper, it was frustrating and discouraging. My friend the artist offered to help me get started. She put a drop cloth on her dining room table and filled it with supplies. “Just play” she said. I stopped trying to make something in particular, and just figure out how to make the brush work. I learned that afternoon that there were certain things each brush, and those acrylic paints were good at-- bright bold colors, layering, textures. None of it looked like anything, but some of the shapes and textures pleased me. I learned that day that if you are going to make something with paint, you are going to have to do it in partnership with the paint, and the brush, and the canvas or paper or whatever you are painting.

This is true no matter what we are creating, no matter what medium we are using, whether we are making dinner, or a worship service, or a raised bed garden. When we bring any idea into the world, it is made out of matter that has its own nature, its own capacities and limitations. Even the most faithful reproduction is a new creation.

We too, the makers, have our own capacities and limitations. I was listening to an interview with singer songwriter Diane Cluck one time, and she asked the interviewer to name something he disliked about his own voice. He had a wobble, he said, that he never felt good about. They talked about how such a characteristic of the individual voice was part of what made your voice distinct, could be a foundation of personal style.

It occurs to me that whenever we create something, we are never creating something out of nothing, we always begin with what is already there. Even when we make a cake “from scratch” we mostly don’t mill our own flour, or grow our own wheat. In fact, wheat only evolved about 10,000 years ago, before that it was something else. Our unique bodies and selves shape what we are creating, even without our conscious choice. And everything happens in a community of living and non-living beings in a landscape that has been shaped long before we began.

And much as we try to make things that last unchanged, creation continues working on what we have created almost immediately once we have finished making the thing. Consider how a cake changes once out of the oven, over hours and days. The raised bed for our garden, how the natural forces work on the wood over time. Life itself is ceaselessly creating, as it has been for millennia. In truth, whenever we create something, we are actually co creating.

Consider, for example the creativity of the tree that became the wood for the raised bed. As William McDonough & Michael Braungart write in their essay "The Extravagant Gesture"

“Four billion years of natural design, forged in the cradle of evolution, has yielded such a profusion of forms we can barely grasp the vigor and diversity of life on Earth. ... “

and how the creativity of one species shapes the response of other species:

“Responding to unique local conditions, ants have evolved into nearly 10,000 species, several hundred of which can be found in the crown of a single Amazonian tree..”

And you yourself are no less unique, and your unique way of creating is vital and full of life, whether it is extravagant or simple, practical or whimsical. Whether what we create is exactly what we had in our minds, or full of mistakes and missteps that we never imagined or wanted.

As we do our creative work, whatever that may be, it becomes a spiritual practice as we consider how it is working on us, connecting our own spirit and self to the work. How does it feel as it moves through us? Is it fresh and vital? Does it touch something new and inspiring? Is it steady and patient, does it calm us and those around us. One of the things I like about the hug shawls is that I use a simple pattern, and so not only do I create a shawl I hope will be soothing and comforting to another, but the repetitive act with the soft yarn in the pleasing color is soothing and comforting to me as well. As Matthew Fox has said “…the most beautiful thing a potter produces is... the potter.” As we are drawing or singing or building or cooking, we make not only the cake but we make ourselves. I will tell you that one of the reasons I like being a minister for these congregations, and can see myself continuing into the future, is because I like the self that is created as I do this work.

Our creative work also connects us directly to one another and to the web of life. My raised bed garden is co-created with and impacts thousands of species seen and unseen. The cake I bake has in it the contributions the farmers who grew the wheat, the ecosystem where the wheat was grown, and in turn helps form the bodies of those who will eat the cake when it is finished.

This is a time when great creativity, in the sense of innovation, is needed. We have enough things, too many things, the great industrial machine creating great quantities of things must be replaced by a calling to create of the right things, for ourselves, for our world. We have an opportunity to co-create our world in a way that will impact our communities and our ecosystems and generations to come. Paying attention, noticing, and responding is important in our acts of creation.

Consider a common way we have of constructing, say, a new development or shopping center. Step one is to bulldoze everything, to create what we imagine is a blank slate on which to build our human vision. But of course even once a field is leveled down to bare soil, still we build in a watershed that rains and floods and is shaped by weather beyond our control, we build for people with growing evolving needs, we build in an ecosystem with the beings who have always lived in that place, whose displacement impacts other communities and ecosystems.

Perhaps it is time to think creatively about creation. If we understood creation as not the heroic act of an individual, but as an inherently collaborative act, a communal act, we might stop as Wendell Berry said in his essay “Solving for Pattern” creating “Solutions that cause a ramifying set of new problems”

“A bad solution is bad, then, because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained ... most likely, because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them. A bad solution solves for a single purpose or goal, such as increased production. And it is typical of such solutions that they achieve stupendous increases in production at exorbitant biological and social costs.

"A good solution is good because it is in harmony with those larger patterns ... the way a healthy organ acts within the body.” ... “A good solution causes a ramifying series of solutions.”

A collaborative style of creation that is in harmony with larger patterns is all part of what I mean when I say “Co-creation.” Co-creation is an idea that works well with our Unitarian Universalist theology- that we are forever collaborating with the Spirit of Life and all other living beings in the continuous creation of the world we live in, of all we are and all we see. In our story that creative force is called God -- a personified being with a voice. Many UUs struggle with a personified God, but there’s a school of thought called “Process theology” which is a better fit for many UUs. It was founded by a mathematician in the 20th century who describes a God that could be found in nature, and harmonized with reason and the evidence of senses. Imagine if what we called God was a process working within and among all processes. To Henry Nelson Weiman “God is a part of nature, the part that brings forth the increase in good…. In short, God is creative transformation, the growth of meaning and value in the world.” It’s an interesting way to look at the world- that God is more like a process than a being, that this process God is inseparable from transformation, from the ongoing reality of creation, which we are all involved in together.

Consider taking this as a spiritual practice- as you are creating whatever it is you create, notice those sacred intersections of your own creative efforts with those of our community, our web of life, and the mysterious spirit of life that works with us and through us. Notice the ways we create together what one individual cannot create in isolation.

Music producer Rick Rubin writes in his new book “The Creative Act: a Way of Being”:

"Every manifestation of this unfolding is doing its own work on behalf of the universe, each in its own way, true to its own creative impulse.

"Just as trees grow flowers and fruits, humanity creates works of art. The Golden Gate Bridge, the White Album, …, the Sphinx, the space shuttle, the Autobahn, … the Roman Colosseum, the Phillips screwdriver, the iPad, Philadelphia cheesesteak.

"… Each of these is humanity being true to itself, as a hummingbird is true to itself by building a nest, a peach tree by bearing fruit, and a nimbus cloud by producing rain. "

I encourage you in the coming days, to notice how you are participating in the creation of our world, how you are co-creating with the creative force some call divine, how you are co-creating with your community and with the web of life. Listen to and collaborate with all who co-create with you, and in so doing, observe how you are co-creating your self- your great masterwork.

Mother's Day- the Ideal and the Real

Me and Mom, home from the hospital

I’ll be honest with you- I don’t love Mother’s Day, especially since I’ve become a mother myself. There’s nothing like a holiday to remind you of that gap between stories and expectations and the reality of our human lives. From the Mother’s Day where everyone got a stomach bug just in time for the Mother’s Day brunch at the fancy restaurant where we had long anticipated reservations, the Mother's Day everyone forgot, the Mother's Day where the ruined pancakes made everyone grumpy,  the 2020 mother’s day when we waited 3 hours in a parking lot for mother’s day take out...I could go on, but suffice it to say I would gladly replace Mother’s day with a normal ordinary Sunday with no expectations. Maybe I just have some sort of Mother’s Day curse, but I think there’s something more. I think that like most consumption driven occasions, it draws our attention to the gap between who we really are, what life really is, and the ideals we hold -- a gap commercials tell us can be filled with things like jewelry and flowers and fancy meals.

The impossible thing about parenting, is that all parents are ordinary humans, with needs and weaknesses and faults and habits and desires and preferences. The child is also an ordinary human with needs and weaknesses and faults and habits and desires and preferences. There will be times when the two will come together in harmony, and other times when the parent, being the full grown one, will sublimate our own needs to support the needs of the growing child. And there will be times when the parent is dealing with their own mess and is not actually give the child what they needed most, or maybe can’t meet the child’s needs at all.

When we are little parents have such power in our lives- they are our whole world. Then as we grow up and begin to individuate, we notice the ways in which our parents couldn’t or wouldn’t meet our true needs, and we grieve that gap. We begin to imagine how we might have parented ourselves better than our actual parents did. I’ll just speak from my own experience, because I know every family is different, but my parents were generally decent human beings who tried to do the best by me they were able, given their own gifts and challenges, and brokenness and world view. And I tried to be generally the best child I was able, given my own gifts and challenges, and brokenness and world view. After I left home I spent some time in therapy figuring out who I am and what I need, and here I am, a functioning adult, Phew! Even my parenting still shapes me, and impacts me, for better and for worse.

Me and my son

Now, as a parent myself, I have seen the impossibility of being the perfect parent of any child. I grieve the ways I was not the parent my son needed. Nick is now 21 and on the brink of graduating from college- As I look back I can see that sometimes I was a good parent to him, sometimes I missed the mark because I was a human having a bad day and was not the parent he needed me to be. I can also see mistakes I made because I parented my son as I might have needed, and not as a totally unique person who experiences the world differently.

One thing that this whole Covid period has changed for me and my family, is I let go and let go and let go of what I should be, what we should be, and I feel like it is quite a lot to just support one another in our humanness. It is quite a blessing to find a few other humans you trust enough to share your true self, and support one another just as we are. To support one another imperfectly because to be human is to be imperfect.

I must acknowledge that some families have great tragedies in them, of neglect, of trauma, of loss and grief. Some folks in our beloved community did not have “good enough” parents. The responsibility for nurturing you into the beautiful people you all are today was not met by your parents, so perhaps you had to nurture yourself beyond what any child should have to take on their own shoulders. Perhaps there were other people outside your family that supported you and nurtured you. I honor and make space for your reality today- whatever that may be. Your reality matters here.

Part of the reason that even talking about mother’s day is challenging, is because the idea of a mother is both amorphous and complex. It’s a concept shaped by stories and myths and commercials and Instagram. I wonder what that looks like in your imagination? What picture do you see in your mind when we use that word “mother”

Jungian folks make a distinction about the individual, the collective and the archetypal. And mothers are all 3. Each of us has our own person with a womb who brought us into this world, each of us had people who nurtured us as we grew. Maybe there was a person called “mom” that we think of on mother’s day, or maybe there wasn’t, and we feel that absence on Mother’s day. This modern cultural holiday can remind us acutely of those absences, those gaps, so it’s up to us as a faith community to support that complexity of our human experience.

Ideas in our Collective consciousness are those ways of thinking and understanding that bind us together as a culture, as a community. The collective consciousness shapes our thinking about the word mother. Every mom character on TV, every Instagram post, commercials, yes even Mother’s Day sermons shape our thinking about what a mom is, what is normal, what should be. We know this changes:

When some of us were growing up, (or so I get the impression from what I see on TV) the cultural idea of a perfect mom wore a tailored dress and petticoats, loved her new vacuum, and kept her suburban home and children clean and orderly for when her husband got home from work. My mom’s generation often had a full time job in addition to mothering, and wore navy blue power suits, and were supposed to be like the woman in the perfume commercial “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan.”

When I was a young mom, I knew a good mother practiced attachment parenting, and something called “positive discipline.” We had paid work outside the home (because what family could live on one salary?), was infinitely patient could leave her work-for-pay job at the drop of a hat to take her kids to their many activities, and somehow had time for yoga and a mom’s group.

Today’s parents are having fewer children and having them later. The ideal parent has achieved work life balance, were juggling their jobs and parenting and their own mental health needs during a pandemic, and still was supposed to time to post on Instagram how good they looked doing it.

Though the image of a perfect parent changes, each we all feel pressure to conform with the collective vision, and find ourselves, or our own families wanting.

Then there is the archetypal level. And mother is a powerful archetype of creating and nurturing life. Archetypes are the deep symbolic images that are not only shared by our culture, but are shared by many generations over the millennia. As long as there have been humans, there have been mothers. There’s not just one single “mother” archetype, but many facets and faces of the great mother. My symbol dictionary says She is “the origin of all flie, the containing principle; she symbolizes all phases of cosmic life, uniting all the elements, both celestial and chthonic. She is the queen of heaven, mother of god, opening of the way, keeper of the keys of fertility and the gates of birth, death and rebirth. …All great Mothers are weavers and spinners, weaving the web and pattern of life with the thread of destiny, she has the dual nature of the creator and destroyer, and is both nourisher, protector, provider of warmth and shelter, and the terrible forces of dissolution, devouring and death dealing. She is the creator and nourisher of all life and its grave.” [p. 108] Wow.

In the Christian religious tradition, the one mother archetype out of all of that which is revered is Mary, mother of Jesus, peaceful and compassionate. But there are so many other images of the Great archetypal mother. The symbol dictionary again says “In Buddhism and Taoism she is the passive, static principle, wisdom, realization and beatitude, with the lotus and open book of wisdom as her attribute. In her beneficent, nourishing, creative aspect she is … Isis, Hathor, Cybele Ishtar, Lakshmi, Parvati, Tara, Kwan-yin, Demeter, Sophia, Mary…as ensnaring and death dealing she is Astarte, Kali, Durga, Lilith, Hecate, Circe…[she] has serpent-hair or is of frightful appearance” [J.C. Cooper p. 109]

Because we are human, we can’t be all that, we can only be who we are. Some tiny piece of the great mother.

But because we are human, we need that great mother, our spirits need one larger than our little selves to be there before it all began, and to accompany us all through the end. We need the deep calm of the peaceful passive moon mother, and we need the fiery defender – the great bear defending her cubs. We need the mother earth who nourishes and feeds us, and my spirit longs for the great archetypal lap into which we can crawl, when I need to feel small, and comforted.

I saw on a friend’s fridge a photo of Michelle Obama with her daughters on her lap, but my friend and her buddy had photo-shopped their heads onto the photo. They thought Michelle Obama would be an ideal mom, and were inspired by this as they re-parented themselves. I love that idea- it’s so empowered. WE can finally be the parents to ourselves that we always needed. But I bet even Michelle Obama has bad days, even the Obama kids are going to have to re-parent themselves at some point as they grow into who they are, and know what they really need.

I’d like to invite you to consider: what images of mother are surfacing for you this year at Mother’s Day? What support do you need as you notice those gaps between what you long for and the reality of what is?

Let's close in the spirit of meditation/ prayer:

We call to mind with gratitude all who gave us life and nurtured us.

We acknowledge all our human parents could not be for us, even though we needed it deeply

We empower ourselves to be the parents we needed, to fill those gaps as we are able, and to ask for help supporting and nurturing ourselves in our human imperfection and frailty

We are called to birth, to hold, to comfort, to support, to nurture life as we are able in our own unique and imperfect human capacities

Finally we imagine the great archetypal mother who is so timeless, so huge, that even we full grown adults could rest into their love, feel supported by the life giving forces larger than ourselves, and held by the nurturing web of life

Amen