Mary and Margaret and Margaret and Mary:
A String of Pearls for Mother’s Day

Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, May 9, 2010

            Mother’s Day is a great day—for restaurant owners, and florists, and the people at Hallmark, maybe. It’s a great day for mothers, often, too; and for those of us who have mothers (which I guess covers just about everybody).

            But Mother’s Day can be a tough day, too. If we’ve lost our mothers; or if we never knew them; or if we had a difficult relationship with them, or some other “issues”. Or if we feel inadequate in our own parenting skills; if we feel as though our relationship with our own children isn’t quite what we might like it to be. Mother’s Day can be tough sometimes, if what we’ve experienced doesn’t quite “measure up” to the ideal so often extolled on this special day.

            Mother’s Day can be tough for ministers, too. (Woe is me!) Just as on days like Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, it’s hard to say something that hasn’t already been said—and usually better—by someone else, so on Mother’s Day, it’s tough to come up with something new and fresh, year in, year out.

            And, if we’re honest, and at least a little humble, we ministers know the truth of the old Spanish proverb that “An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.” Mere words about mothers or mothering or motherhood  (however effusive and sentimental and even sincere they may be) do not the joy and challenge and power of mothers make.

            Our mothers have given us so much—indeed, the very gift of life itself—and what do we offer them in return? A sermon, perhaps; mere words. It’s sort of like the lanyard Billy Collins gave his mother, in the poem we read at the start of our service. “She gave me life and the milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard.”

            We can never really repay the gifts that others have given us through life, and nowhere is that more true than when we speak of our mothers.

            But we do our best. And even though I hated the movie Pay It Forward (you didn’t ask my opinion, I know, but you can have it anyway), the concept of paying the good we have received forward has much merit and wisdom: We repay our mothers (dimes on the dollar, perhaps) by trying to share, as best we are able, those gifts with which their lives have blest ours down through the years. By paying their care and kindness forward, to our own children, our own families and friends, and to all of those with whom our lives come in contact. That is how our lives have meaning and purpose, and how our mothers’ lives, truly, are redeemed. It is how we are redeemed, too, and how we achieve a sense of harmony with the divine; how we gain atonement-- at-one-ment-- with God, as well.

            As I’ve mentioned before, I have in my personal devotional and spiritual life a particular interest in and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary—unusual for a non-Catholic; very unusual for a Unitarian Universalist, and really very unusual for a UU minister, to boot.

            There are, no doubt, many reasons for why this is (we are all complicated critters, spiritually speaking). But one of them is, for me, that Mary keeps alive, within the Christian tradition to which I still feel strongly attached, the feminine face of the divine. Not because Mary, to me, is god or goddess (she’s not). But because Mary reminds me that God is neither male nor female, but radiates forth for us the best characteristics of all categories of human living (including maleness and femaleness).  As our opening hymn reminds us so beautifully: there are “many names” for God, including Father—and including Mother. In the Protestant tradition, we have largely forgotten that. (An interesting bit if trivia is that “Bring Many Names” was originally written for the Methodist hymnbook. But the Methodists, good Protestants that they are, couldn’t handle that mother imagery for God, so they rejected it. Their loss is our gain…)

            Mary, though, keeps that thought of the feminine side of divinity alive; she is not goddess herself, but she is the bridge to the maternal side of the divine. As Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I (another lodestar in my rather peculiar devotional life) said shortly before his death in 1978: “God is our Father, but even more our Mother.” (Actually, what he said, in Italian is that “God is our Papa. But God is even more our Mama!”)

            That’s a lesson that another Mary taught us, too: the feminist theologian, Mary Daly, who died back in January of this year. Mary Daley was, for many of us, a kind of spiritual mother (though she would probably hate that term, and she probably wouldn’t like me very much; she had, admittedly, very little use for any males of our species whatsoever).

            But mothers (whether of the spiritual or biological sort) are not always easy to live with; they can be difficult, and our relationships with them can be fraught with tension and pain and even anguish. We can find ourselves going off in different directions; communication between us can become strained, if not impossible. As the years pass, we might not understand each other very well any more.

            So it was, for some of us, with Mary Daly. Her early works thrilled us, and opened our eyes to new possibilities in our religious tradition. But then, as she veered off onto roads that left us behind—roads that, to some of us, seemed absurd and needlessly provocative and just weird and as alienating and energy-sapping as the patriarchy she spent her life fighting-- then we felt first sadness, then resignation (for we all have our own journeys to travel). But back, in 1973, when our own Beacon Press published Daly’s Beyond God the Father, /i>it was as though a revolution in the sphere of spirituality had been launched. And truly, it had:

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