Sermon Archive
Mothers
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 6 March 2005, Mothering Sunday
One of the big bookshops on Princes Street last week had a special display for what it called “Mothers’ Day”. It included the current issue of the quarterly literary magazine Granta. This particular issue is entitled Mothers, and on its cover there is a fuzzy coloured photograph of a youngish mother dressed in the style of the 1950s and a boy of about 10. Both are wearing enormous red boxing gloves and the mother is encouraging her rather reluctant looking son to aim a punch at her. Some of the writers in the magazine appear to have taken up the challenge – with a vengeance. Most of the mothers they write about, including their own, are portrayed warts and all, and at least one of the mothers is very nasty indeed. None, clearly, were saints, at least not to most of the writers in the magazine, their now grown-up children, some of whom appear to have no reservations about speaking ill of the dead. Not that they are particularly forgiving about themselves either, especially when they detect some of their mother’s traits coming out in their own male or female adult selves. With some exceptions, the contributions to the magazine present a pretty bleak view of human life, and a ruthless determination to be honest about this. In their book, the worst sin is hypocrisy.
Now it is tempting, of course, to say that authors with such a bleak view of life and their own mothers, are suffering from a modern literary over-reaction to the portrayal of motherhood in the sentimental poetry and novels of the 19th century, or indeed to the ideal of motherhood often held up by the Church. But to say that, or to dismiss contributors to literary magazines as a fashionable elite, is too quick and easy a reaction. For one thing, there are and always have been some mothers who are very nasty indeed; and for another, if such writers believe that the worst sin is hypocrisy, they are in good company: something very similar was said by Jesus in his dealings with the Pharisees.
But there is something else in what these authors write about their mothers. Although their picture of them may be unflattering, it is also an attempt to take them seriously not just as mothers, but as individuals, as people with lives and feelings of their own – rather like the patient in the popular poem who asks her nurse to see ‘not a crabbit old woman… but me’. One of the contributors, a Polish author recalling his childhood during the horrors of the Second World War, when his mother took her children across the country in a desperate flight away from the fighting and in search of his lost father, writes "When those of us who were children during the war recall that time and say 'father' or 'mother', we forget, because of the solemnity of those words, that our mothers were young women and our fathers were young men and that they desired each other strongly, missed each other terribly, and wanted to be together."
What such writers are attempting then, could be seen as trying to get beyond their own perhaps unconscious need to settle childhood scores (whose occasion their mothers have long forgotten, and perhaps were even unaware of at the time), and so trying to understand their mothers as they understood themselves. Not all of these writers may be successful in this attempt: one at least is so negative about his mother as to make one wonder if he can ever escape from her malevolent influence. But that is not for us to judge, and when one considers how psychologically difficult it can be to see one’s parents, not as we or others have seen them, but as it felt for our parents to be themselves, then perhaps the rest of us have something to learn from what such writers are attempting.
Mothers are not just mothers, but themselves. What the Princes Street bookshop called “Mothers’ Day”, the Church calls "Mothering Sunday"; and as I mentioned earlier, the Church has often held up an ideal of motherhood which runs the risk of sentimentalising it and obscuring the fact that mothers are also people. Yet if we listen attentively to readings like those we heard this morning, we soon realise how little room there was for sentimentality in the biblical view of mothers, and certainly not in the lives of the mother of Moses, who brought him up only to be adopted by a rich woman, or the mother of Jesus, who brought him up only to have a sword pierce through her own soul also when he was crucified – or perhaps even earlier, when she and his brothers wanted to speak with Jesus while he was teaching, and he replied "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” An old Bible Dictionary I have remarks that “As presented in Scripture, [Mary] is simply a beautiful example of a devoted and pious mother.” But I cannot help wondering: was that how it felt to be her?
Even so, listening to these stories about Mary and the mother of Moses, however unsentimental, it may be difficult for a mother today to identify with them. That is not just because of the great social changes which have taken place during the last half century or so, whereby many women have to juggle with roles at work as well as at home and often to come to terms with divorce as well as death. All of that makes it difficult enough to identify with the very different world of the biblical ideals. But the ideals themselves are often of women whose sons, like Moses and Jesus, can be seen in retrospect as having made a real and lasting difference to the world. In retrospect they, and their mothers, appear to be heroic figures. But we no longer live in a heroic age, and what many mothers today aspire to, is not that their sons should be heroes, but simply that their children of both sexes will manage to find sufficiently gainful employment to leave home and set up on their own.
We no longer live in a heroic age, and so it is difficult to identify with the biblical ideals. But again I wonder about that, and for two reasons. The first is the one I’ve already alluded to. Was the ideal how it actually felt to be the mother of Moses or of Jesus, not in retrospect, but at the time when Moses had to be given up for adoption to Pharaoh’s daughter, or when Jesus seemed to reject his mother and brothers? What hidden fears and inner inadequacies did these two women feel as they tried to come to terms with abandonment of, or rejection by their child, experiences which are still not uncommon today? And then the second reason. Do we no longer live in a heroic age? Or is it that we’ve got the wrong definition of ‘heroic’? In her poem ‘Alfred the Great’, Stevie Smith tells us: Honour and magnify this man of men Who keeps a wife and seven children on £2 10 Paid weekly in an envelope And yet he never has abandoned hope. Well, the minimum hourly wage in Britain is now greater than Alfred’s weekly £2 10. But there are still plenty of Alfreds and Alfredas, in developed as well as developing countries, who deserve to be called heroic, not because they have done things that are out of the ordinary, but because in ordinary circumstances which might have overwhelmed them, they never have abandoned hope.
And that, I think, brings them very close to the Kingdom of God. Those who never abandon hope have faith, and as the sociologist Peter Berger writes, “Faith is trust in the goodness of the world…Faith is to bet on the ultimate validity of joy.”
The stories we heard in this morning’s readings were about ordinary women who also, despite everything, never abandoned hope. Their sons were two of the most exceptional men who ever lived. But what made them exceptional, and what sustains the two great faiths they founded, was that they taught ordinary men and women to hope beyond hope, and despite everything, to trust in the goodness of the world. Could they have done this had their mothers not conveyed something of that hope to them? Probably not. Yet those mothers had no more reason, and perhaps less, to hope beyond hope than any mother today, or indeed anyone else has. As one of the writers in the magazine I’ve referred to puts it: “We come from darkness into light and grow in the light until at death we return to that original darkness.”
But then this same author, who unlike some of the others in the magazine, remembers his mother with gratitude and affection, writes of her Catholic Faith. “My mother spoke to me of heaven as concretely and with as much love as she named the wild flowers. It was her prayer and fervent hope that we would all live there together in happiness with God for all eternity.” That ‘concrete’ way of speaking about heaven is less common today. But if we ask why mothers ultimately matter, not just as temporary links in some great genetic chain of being, but as the individual people they are and feel they are, an answer may come from the deeply felt sense that, despite evidence to the contrary, reality in the end is personal and not indifferent to us. Despite everything, people still pray; and as Peter Berger remarks, “the urge to pray is so powerful that it can be found in all traditions, including those [like Hinduism and Buddhism] whose most sophisticated representatives taught that the ultimate reality is impersonal”.
Now that, of course, is far from providing demonstrable proof that persons do ultimately matter, and that faith is right to trust in the goodness of the world or bet on the ultimate validity of joy. Faith is faith, ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’. And it is for each person to decide for him or herself. So let me end on a personal note. Looking through my mother’s address book last week in search of the name of a distant relative, I came across a quotation from G K Chesterton which she had copied into it shortly before she died. It was this. "If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars?" The assurance of things hoped for. The conviction of things not seen.