"Mother's Day"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 13^th of May, 2001

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to remember, O Love,
that you are, to our hearts,
what the sun is to the rain-soaked earth,
and the north-star is to those who journey.

Song, refresh us. Story, instruct us.
Truth, unbind us. Silence, center us.
Now is the time when we are set free to be ourselves
and no one else.

(assembly) And may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Call to Silence [Next] [back to top]

And now, rise up in me, o song, o hymn,
rise up in me, o lullaby, o anthem,

o cantus of oboe, flute, cello,
o flutter of harpsichord,
rise up inside me, pluck the strings of my heart
as I stand in this place with the Beloved Community.

Move within me.
Be an echo of the music of the spheres
that hums in all things and between all things,
the lyrical tendon that binds up the life
of the common crow, cawing on the fence post
to my life and all lives, even the lives of children
in distant lands, whose names
I cannot even pronounce.

Pluck the strings of my heart with fingers of silence,
make in my frantic life a quiet music
that soothes and salves my inmost self.
Return me to the silence I heard,
which syncopated between the heartbeats
of the woman who brought me into the world.

Let me be quit of jangles and jarrings and jagged edges.
Let me remember the solemnities of the silence
I know, when I gaze alone at distant stars,
or when I keep quiet together with a friend
on a long journey,
or when I breathe together
with a companion of years. Ah!

(bell-sound)

We pluck the strings of the silence with
the fingers of names that rise inside us,
names of those whose life is entwined with our own,
names of those who love us, or struggle with us,
names of those who have died, or are about to,
names of those who rest in the arms of our
gratefulness. We set aside this moment to embrace
and be embraced in the solemnity of the silence.

(naming)

Let there be music, music which like life itself
is no formula of black and white on a page,
but rather a living expression
of that which truly transcends all expression.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from Theodore Zeldin's delightful book, "An Intimate History of Humanity" which I have quoted before. 1994

The belief that animals care only for themselves in their struggle for survival has been challenged by the discovery of intelligent co-operation. Even vampire bats, for example, contrary to their frightening reputation, returning successfully from a night's foray for food, give some of it to other bats who have had less luck. The white-fronted bee-eater does not just feed its own offspring, but also helps its parents to raise their new brood. However, the debate about whether humans and animals have a basic goodness, or nastiness, is not worth pursuing. It is the lessons they have learned, in the process of trying to be generous, that matter more.

Whenever families have widened their ambitions, they have had to invent new tools. For example, when they were no longer content with what their nearest neighbors could offer them, they used godparents to help them widen their horizons. In the Andes mountains, far from modernity, children may have as many as six godparents. People who are asked to be godparents cannot refuse. They are named at each of the child's major festivals - the first haircut at the age of four, at confirmation, at marriage - and having received a religious blessing, become real parents and behave as such. Fathers try to find godparents who will help the child in its career; peasants seek out merchants in the town, a mutually profitable relationship.

Now that understanding others has become the great ambition, the idea of godparents, and godsisters and godbrothers, takes on a new meaning. In the traditional system, each person has a different godparent, who does not have to be shared with a sibling and who can be an independent interpreter of what goes on in the natural family. The unexpected result of new technologies of communication is that it is possible to conceive a criss-cross of networks of people who expand that relationship, who care for each other, no longer just in the neighboring city, but anywhere in the world, and who, because they are not too close and not competitors, can put generosity before envy. This is where the human rights movement inevitably leads, and it may turn out to be as momentous a development as the growth of nations, which were the result of much more primitive forms of communication.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
is a beautiful poem by United States poet Pamela Gross. It's called "LETTING GO" and it was written just 6 years ago.

In summer, in that hour when the trees
take the light's leaving,
the world is all undersides.
Each of the maples' fat hands palms gold.
We open our own hands,
as if we could receive the glittering, fuss,
the flutter of the paired warblers flirting
with light, with shadow.
As if we could seize their dapple and splash,
the bright play
of these butter-yellow pieces of flight
in their spill, retrieve, spill.
We want to shake them loose and set
their perfect coins upon our eyes.

Surrender's hard work is slow.
Inhale reluctant to relinquish its exhale,
so fearing the lung will starve.
The body, captive to its notions of next and beyond,
and the heart riveted
to the first truth of letting go:
that it begins with holding.

Sermon: Mother's Day [Next] [back to top]

My sermon begins simply enough, with a flower on my desk.

Each year for ten years, when I entered my former office at my church in Hayward, California on Mothers' Day, I found a gorgeous flower in a vase on my desk. It could have been a mum, a peony, or a rose. But it was always a single blossom. And propped against the vase was always a card, which read "Happy Mother's Day."

It was never signed. I never caught anyone leaving it, no matter how early I showed up in the morning. But it was always there.

I never knew who left it. I never found out why whoever left it, left it.

But even though I am, obviously, technically not a mother, I always was delighted by it, and took it as a very sweet and honoring gesture.

My own mother was here this week, along with my father. They drove down from Detroit on Thursday morning and left Saturday at noon. My mother asked me over supper what I was going to preach about on Sunday.

"Family," I said, "and what we learned about it that day when I was fifteen years old and you told me about Eduardo Pozzi."

"I don't remember telling you about Eduardo Pozzi" when you were that young," she said, softly, which I took as a prompt for me to tell her my memory.

"We were studying about genes and chromosomes in biology class in High School. Fr. Galvin told us about Gregor Mendel, and then he tried to explain about modern genetics. We talked about eye-color and how that goes down from parents to children. We learned the phrase "to skip a generation." And then someone brought up the subject of baldness. He asked in class if the old saw was true, that a male always inherits baldness from the mother's side of the family."

"Oh, I remember now," she said. "You were concerned that your grandpa Galli was completely bald and that you might inherit it."

"That's right," I said, " and then you looked at me kind of doubtfully, like you had to say something that you didn't know how to say. Then I remember that you furled your brow, and said very seriously, 'You know, Mark, grandpa Galli is not your blood grandfather. My actual blood father's name was Eduardo Pozzi, but he died at age 30 of spinal meningitis up at the Mayo Clinic. I was only two years old, so I have no memory of him at all. Your grandma was a single mother until I was eight. Then she married Umberto Galli and he adopted me as his daughter. So, as you see, you cannot look to him to figure out your genetics.' "Then, remember, you asked me, 'Does that bother you, Mark?' And I answered, 'Does what bother me?'"

"You seemed surprised that I didn't know what you were asking, so you made it plain: 'Does it bother you to know that your grandpa is not really your grandpa?' And then I was the one who was dumbfounded, and I said to you,'What do you mean, Ma? Of course, he's my real grandpa. He loves me and sits me down and teaches me about things. He takes me to the opera and helps me learn the metric system. That makes him my real grandpa. The fact that we don't share the same blood-line doesn't mean anything.'"

I asked her if she knew anything at all about Eduardo Pozzi. She said only that he had been a coal miner, like both my grandfathers had been. That was all she knew. And she said that she was glad that I understood. She told me that Umberto had always been her "real father" in the same way he was my "real grandfather."

My mother loved being reminded of that formative story, and I loved telling it to her, because it surely is one of the principle things I learned from my parents: Contrary to what the Greek playwright Euripides asserted 2400 years ago in his play "Andromache,"

Blood is not necessarily thicker than water.

My parents taught me this truth in many ways. My parents, you see, are both single children. So I had no aunts, no uncles, no first cousins. Yet I always called my parents' best friends, Elaine and Navio, Aunt Elaine and Uncle Navio. My father sometimes called Navio his brother, and vice versa, even though Navio was the 4th of many brothers.

As I said, I am clearly not a mother. Nor am I a father.

And yet I am a godfather to many children. Sometimes I was asked by the parents of a certain child to be just that, a godfather. Sometimes, godfatherhood evolved more slowly as I developed a special relationship with the child of a friend. In some cases, there was no Naming Ceremony or Christening; in other cases there was. One child is named after me, Mark. He is the youngest, and at age three and a half, he has just recently figured out who I am. I just saw my oldest godchild, Adam, on my trip up to Chicago last week. He's twenty-five years old, a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Toby, his brother, is living for a while in Barcelona, over in Spain, and his letters to me are a delight. My middle godson, Ben Ramsden Stein, lives in San Jose with his two moms. He seems as worldly as someone three times his age, but he was adopted by them at birth, only 16 years ago. The next time I see him, he assures me he will pick me up at the airport in his car.

It amazes me that he is so much taller than me now. My goddaughter, Andrea Maria Salome Carryer Molina, also 16, is visible on the cover of your Order of Celebration, riding her horse down on her farm in Tegualda, Chile. I only get to see her face-to-face rarely, when I make a trek down there, or she comes up here. Last summer I had the sad task of burying her grandmother up in Michigan. So I did get to spend a great deal of time with her at that season, talking with her about grief, as well as hearing her speak with great passion about the next Star Wars movie and our common passion, art.

There are no books on being a godparent. All I can give you is my personal confession…that the love generated by being a godparent sustains me by day and upholds me by night. Theodore Zeldin, in the first reading, at least talks about some of the tasks of the godparent…to help the parents in various areas.

And I do help out now and then. I have babysat, of course, but to the older kids I have also given feedback on poems and papers, had long discussions about the various meaning of falling in love, and bailed them out of jams, with money sometimes. There are birthday gifts and dinners, long walks and longer emails, and summersaults in the park. Adam told me a joke while he was sitting on my lap as an 8-year-old that I still tell, 15 years later. Toby still remembers the dangerous look on my face when he was staying with me out in California and managed to erase several important files from my computer. Andrea's young drawings decked my refrigerator until the magic-marker colors had finally blotted out of existence, years later.

It moves me when they seek me out to discuss things they have not quite got the nerve to tell their parents yet. And yes, I have had to have serious heart-to-heart's with some of them when I have been frustrated, or disappointed, or angry. But these only seemed to deepen the sense of love I've felt for them. We have no relationship by blood, but they are family nonetheless. As Zeldin says, we godparents "are close, but not so close" that we get caught up in "envy." The generosity of spirit flows unclogged. I can help each of them get a sense of what their blood family or adopted family is like from the outside. I can confirm or deny their observations, helping them to become closer to their own central families. Just last week, I shared with Adam the beautiful poetic thing his father said on the day he was born. Chuck sat up on a high hill overlooking the Pacific. He was completely exhausted. But, after some silence, he said, "I get it now. I get it! I understand why people write all the fabled stories! Where are the magi? Where is the star for my son? Why haven't the shepherds arrived yet?"

The small nuclear family of twentieth century America and Europe, as most of you know, is a relatively recent invention. For example, when the ancient scriptures offer the simple descriptive sentence "Jesus and his mother Mary and father Joseph lived in Nazareth," the modern mind in American may think of something like a ranch home (albeit somewhat primitively built), with a family room and a three bedrooms. But throughout human history, most people hearing that sentence would get the real picture…one small room, with animals and people sharing the same space. And not just Mary, Joseph, Jesus and his six siblings either, but Aunt Sophie, Uncle Jake, Cousin Yohan, Grandma Sephora and Greatgrandma Salome too, all living under one roof. On any given day, most kids in the world may not even see their parents for very long. But they will still have plenty of family in their life.

The idea of taking godparenthood seriously is, as Zeldin says, the fruit of the human race learning how to be generous. Chuck and Jane Rzepka have been very generous with me. They have enlarged their idea of family on the pattern of the ancient models, and on the pattern of much of the animal kingdom, as Zeldin reminds us, by inviting my cooperation in the great task of growing extraordinary human lives. There is an expansiveness of spirit in such generosity that is good for the world, I think, and I am the luckiest of men to be so much the benefactor of such generosity.

The immense generosity of my friends, in wanting me to be a part of their expanded family, has also served as my teacher. Along with every parent who ever lived and loved their children, I have been taught what I call "the practical Buddhism" of watching kids grow up. You love them so much you don't know if you can stand to live with that much feeling…and then they grow and change, and you have to find new ways of learning to love them. You have to let go of what they were, and greet what they have become, as the second reading asserts, that beautiful poem by Pamela Gross. And there is nothing harder than that. Why? Because "the first truth of letting go," says the poet, "is that it begins with holding."

I held Adam as a little baby, as his mother placed a streak of red clay across his forehead, naming him Adam, Hebrew for "creature of the red earth." But last week, as the handsome twenty-five-year-old introduced me over and over again to his friends, he announced, "This is my friend Mark." No longer a godfather, but a friend. No longer able to hold him close on my lap as a child, or play tag with him in the back yard. No longer the secret confidant but the friend. The tender holding that began my career as a godfather, I now have to let go of, even as all mothers and fathers are invited to let go as well. And so it will be with young Mark in twenty some years, although I think that by then I will be grateful to say goodbye to those breathless games of tag in Golden Gate Park that leave my 5-year-old body sore for two days.

But the "practical Buddhism," the constant affirmation that letting go of what you hold onto will be at the heart of all the moments of your life from here on in, remains the truth that grounds my life. I get it now. It all flows, it all flows, like water in a river. And that flowing water is indeed as great a binder of present heart to present heart as the blood that flows in our veins connecting us to our ancestors a thousand years ago.

Some of you may never have been a godparent. Others may have not had the concept in their family or religious background, and so it does not come up. Not every Naming Ceremony we do here involves them explicitly. But often they are there implicitly. And, some of you may even now have godparents in your life that you do not necessarily call by that name. But of course "a rose by any other name"… etc.

Still, no matter what, my main statement today is that generosity is not just about money or holiday gifts or about contributions to charity or church. Generosity is also about the making of great families, astonishing networks of love that enrich us all across the generations. The generosity of love is the greatest generosity, the generosity of the spirit that deepens all things.

For just as my friend Barbara last week introduced me to the waiter serving us as her brother, and just as I introduced my best friend Richard to the members of this church at General Assembly two years ago as my brother; and just as I call my dear friend Jacqui James, when I see her, mom…the metaphor of friend and family may come around again full circle one day. As Zeldin says, not just godfathers and godmothers, but godsisters and godbrothers as well.

Zeldin goes so far as to say that such a generous understanding of the family may one day prove to be as much a revolution in the civilized world as was the development of the nation states was in the late Middle Ages. In any case, I pray some day, as the years deepen love, I myself might have generosity of spirit enough to introduce Adam to my friends here in Columbus not as my godson, or even as my friend, but as my brother, my family.

Clinton haters can snicker all they want at Hillary Clinton's book title, "It Takes a Village To Raise a Child," but she's right, as most of the tribes and nations of this world were right for so many centuries. It takes a lot of loving people to grow a soul.

And the fact that I have as little hair on my head as my real grandfather, Umberto, strikes me as a good parable of the fact that water is as least as thick as blood. I inherited my head from him even though we do not share ancestry.

And to whoever put the flower on my desk every year back in California, thank you for honoring me by daring to suggest that Mother's Day might even be for the godfather.

Prayer: Maternal Antiphonal for Two Voices [back to top]

All the mothers that are.
Mothers who carry children to term and raise them.
Mothers who don't.
Mothers who find they cannot conceive.
Mothers who mourn what was taken from them.
Mothers who mourn for what they have given up.

All the mothers that are.
Mothers who adopt and love.
Foster mothers who do not adopt and still love.
Single fathers who think of themselves sometimes as single mothers.

Friends whom we say mother us when we are hurt.
All the mothers that are Godmothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
Mothers who grieve, knowing that their son has died.
Mothers who grieve, knowing that their son has killed and will be killed by the state.
Mothers who stand at the foot of the cross.
Mothers who stand at the desk of a nation.
Mothers who serve as an image of Earth itself.
And mothers who serve as a different image for Heaven.

All the mothers that are.
Mothers as a memory that shapes a life.
Mothers with all their doubts and regrets.
Mothers with smiles and sharp or faulty memories.
Mother as midwife of the generations.

All the mothers that are, the joyful and sorrowful,
the present and parted, the fulfilled and forgotten.
Blest is this day that will not turn from any of them.
Blest is this day of love and remembrance.
Blest is this day. Amen.

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