My daughter and I had a conversation the other day – about Mother’s Day.

“The one thing I always associate with Mother’s Day when I was in school,” she told me, “is getting empty milk cartons from the school cafeteria, and cutting off the tops and washing them out, and planting marigolds in them. Don’t you remember getting marigolds from us every year –planted in old milk cartons?”

I do remember, in fact. Many’s the year I had one lonely marigold planted somewhere in a flowerbed, hanging on to life. I’m not really much of a gardener in the first place, and these marigolds were usually a little stressed by the time Mother’s Day morning came around. And more stressed by the time I got them set out in the garden.

But the point I took from Emily’s story was not about gardening. It was about life. All those seeds germinating on classroom window sills. All those marigolds growing up in paper pots, year after year. All those live Mother’s Day gifts, coming home on school buses and in backpacks and carried carefully in little hands. What our children are learning as they grow up their marigolds each year, is that Mother’s Day, in the last analysis, is about life.

Life in all its unpredictability. Life in its fragility and promise. Life in its persistence and in its pain.

Mother’s Day as popularly celebrated in this country has become less than a fully-rounded holiday. “Remember Mom on Her day,” say the signs in store windows. “We love you, Mom,” and “Motherhood is a partnership with God,” declare the church marquees. Decked out in flowers and candy and Sunday brunches, Mother’s Day rests on the fiction that every one of us had an idyllic childhood; every one of us was nurtured by a loving mother; every one of us is appreciative and kindly disposed towards her. The reality is far more complex.

Psychologist Carl Jung recognized both the significance and the complexity of the relationship between human beings and their mothers in his designation of the “mother” as one of the core archetypes of the collective unconscious. Deeply engrained in the human psyche lives what we might call an “expectation of mother-ness,” which may or may not be fulfilled in our individual lives and experiences. The mother is the first person with whom we form a relationship, and she is the relationship that shapes who we become. Mother is the one upon whom, for better or for worse, we are most dependent. For each of us, and for every culture, the mother may be a real person, and she may be embodied or symbolized by a mythological or story-book character – or by a natural or cosmic or social entity: Eve or Earth-mother; mother-land or nation, forest or ocean or mother church. [http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/jungpersonalitytheory.html]. In contemporary America, perhaps the idealized mother of the Mother’s Day holiday is, in fact, that mythological or story-book character, created and sustained by a collaborative dream, a collective wish to be, to have been, the blessed and grateful child of such a perfect mother.

Julia Ward Howe, born in 1819 in New York City, had her own unique perspective on motherhood.

The third of six children, she was left motherless at the age of five. Her father, a wealthy banker, was fiercely protective of his children, and he provided them with a wealth of intellectual, cultural and social advantages. Julia was tutored at home – in a home that included an extensive library and art gallery. When she was older she attended private schools, studying French, Italian, German, Latin and Greek; music lessons and voice training. After leaving school, she began, in her own words, “ to study in good earnest,” reading literature, history, and philosophy, and writing literary criticism which was published anonymously. She read widely in religious writings, as well, beginning with the Calvinistic Episcopalianism in which she had been brought up, but eventually, she later wrote, “I studied my way out of all the mental agonies which Calvinism can engender and became a Unitarian.” [http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/juliawardhowe.html] A list of her friends and acquaintances reads like a who’s who among Unitarians of the time, and includes Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Freeman Clarke, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, and Margaret Fuller.

At the age of 22, Julia Ward met the dashing Samuel Gridley Howe, renowned for his work with blind students at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. The two were married two years later, and the first of their six children was born in the following year. Thus began a life of tension and paradox for the witty and brilliant Julia. Over the next 33 years she was intimately acquainted with the joys and heartaches of raising her children, one of whom died in early childhood. In this arena of her life, she was presumably supported and encouraged by her husband.

Not so in the intellectual and literary arena. Julia Ward Howe wrote social and literary criticism, a number of poems, and a book of poetry that was published anonymously and very favorably reviewed. In 1863 she wrote in her journal “I have been married twenty years today. In the course of that time I have never known my husband to approve of any act of mine which I myself valued. Books – poems – essays – everything has been contemptible in his eyes because not his way of doing things. … I am much grieved and disconcerted.” [http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/juliawardhowe.html] The girl who grew up without a mother, herself mothered five children to adulthood. All the while she struggled against daunting opposition to claim and to celebrate the literary offspring of her creative spirit, the rich and natural outgrowths of her brilliant education and her passionate spirit.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic is perhaps her most famous literary accomplishment. In 1861, in the bleak middle of the Civil War, Julia and Samuel visited Washington, DC as part of their work with the United States Sanitary Commission, forerunner of the American Red Cross. The city was filled with troops, moving, marching, singing marching songs, among them the mournful “John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave, his soul is marching on.” Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke, who encouraged Julia to preach in his Boston pulpit, offered her an invitation – or perhaps it was a challenge. “Why don’t you write some good words to that stirring tune, Julia?” he asked. “I have often wished to do so,” she is said to have replied. [Kendrick, Stephen. 1988. “Julia Ward and Samuel Howe” in A Faith People Make: Illustrated Unitarian Universalist Lives. p. 91.] The sound of marching continued through the night, under the window of the hotel room where Samuel and Julia slept – until she woke suddenly in the early morning with the lines of a poem marching, marching through her mind. Shielding the candle light with her body, so as not to wake Samuel, she wrote line after line, verse after verse. Not “John Brown’s body…,” but “Mine eyes have seen the glory…” The poem was published in the Atlantic Monthly in February, 1862.

When Abraham Lincoln first heard the Battle Hymn, sung by a Union soldier who had found strength in the song during his confinement as a prisoner of war, Lincoln is said to have wept, and shouted “Sing it again!” [Kendrick, p. 92].

But The Battle Hymn was far from Julia Ward Howe’s proudest achievement. During her long life she preached sermons, she published essays and papers and critiques and a play, and a second book of poetry; she worked with William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist movement and she became increasingly committed to the cause of equal rights – equal civil and social and legal rights – as a logical consequence of the natural rights of every human being. She joined her own talents to those of other women in a women’s movement that grew from the New England Woman’s Club into the New England Woman Suffrage Association and finally into the American Woman Suffrage Association, counterpoint to the more radical National Woman Suffrage Association of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Thus, Woman’s Clubs evolved into a political force powerful enough eventually to secure the vote for women. Robin Toner, writing in the New York Times exactly five years ago, on May 8, 2000, points to that early women’s movement as an outgrowth and an expression of the moral authority of women - particularly of mothers. Toner quotes Rheta Childe Dorr, who wrote in 1910 that “a woman’s place is in the home. But she added ‘home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the family. The public school is the real nursery. And badly do the home and the family and the nursery need their mother.’” [http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20000508monday.html]

As time went by, Julia Ward Howe’s home and family and nursery expanded to include the world. Sensitized to the human price of war by her experience of the Civil War, she was quick to understand that the Franco-Prussian war that broke out in the 1870s was unnecessary and unconscionable, in her words “a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed.” [http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/juliawardhowe.html] Single-handedly, she began a crusade for peace, calling across the artificial boundaries of nation and culture with her stirring proclamation: “Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears!” [Reading before the sermon, #573 in SLT]. She envisioned a worldwide network of women – wives, mothers, human beings – and founded the Women’s International Peace Association. She worked to organize an international Women’s Peace Congress – calling and working for peace – though it did not thrive. And in Boston, she initiated a Mothers’ Peace Day observance on the second Sunday in June.

This Mothers’ Day is a far cry from the hearts-and-flowers celebration that supplanted it, beginning in 1907 and declared an official American holiday by president Woodrow Wilson in 1914.

For Mothers’ Peace Day is rooted in the life-giving relationships that unite all who mother, that link all human beings who “bewail and commemorate the dead.” It is rooted in the heartbreaking reality of every parent and every child taken out of their homes “to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.” It is rooted in the painful history of “questions answered by irrelevant agencies;” of soldiers “reeking with carnage” seeking “caresses and applause.” But more. This Mothers’ Peace Day is rooted in the hope and the vision of “the great human family … liv[ing] in peace,” transcending the petty differences that divide us, affirming the great underlying unity and human goodness that are at the heart of idealism, yes, and of mother-love, yes, and also of the optimistic Unitarian faith that inspired and sustained Julia Ward Howe. [all quotes from reading before the sermon, #573 in SLT].

Mother’s Peace Day is no longer celebrated, not internationally, not in the United States, not even in Boston. Instead, on the second Sunday in May the complex reality of life, its unpredictability, its fragility and promise, its persistence and pain give way to the idealized vision of a collective wish, a collaborative dream, a perfect childhood. The vision fits for some of us, and Mothers’ Day becomes an affirmation of our deepest needs met, our highest hopes fulfilled. But for some of us reality bears little resemblance to the vision, and Mothers’ Day becomes an exercise in reconciling the reality we know with a history we struggle to understand, an uncertain future, waiting.

And yet, the spirit of Julia Ward Howe, the moral authority of mothers in all their archetypal complexity – these remain strong and true. On Mothers’ Day in May 2000, organizers of the Million Mom March claim that 750,000 mothers and others gathered on the Mall in Washington DC to call for stronger gun control laws that might reduce the number of children and partners and innocent victims killed by gun violence in the United States. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, women’s marches for marriage rights and reproductive rights – these gather together the combined power of many individuals in the hope of shifting public, social, political, even moral paradigms. As the mother relationship forms the basis for much of what we know about each other, and ourselves so an expanding understanding of home and family and nursery call each of us to response, to responsibility for teaching, for learning, for using our own gifts to bring forth the children of our bodies and the children of our spirits into a world we shape with love, a world infused with life.

In her later years, Julia Ward Howe understood that The Battle Hymn of the Republic, that moving song of war, served her as an entrée into meetings and gatherings and places and relationships where a different, more radical message might then be heard. Her gift of poetry, a child of her heart that she struggled to bring into the world, served that other, later, even more beloved child of her heart – her passion for peace.

May life, and your life, grow into affirmation of all the children of your heart. Whoever you are, may the mother in you embrace them, and nurture them, and bring them into the fullness of life. And may you begin now, in silence and in peace, on this Mothers’ Day morning.

The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.

Silence
Music

Amen and blessed be.

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