Honoring
Peace and Mothers
(Mother’s Day 2007)
Acts 15:1-2,
22-29 Revelation 21:10-14,22-23
John 14:23-29
To the church in the diaspora[1]
& to the church of the unchurched[2]
Gospel
Jn 14:23-29
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to
you.
Not as the world gives do I give it to you.
Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.
You heard me tell you,
”I am going away and I will come back to you.”
If you loved me,
you would rejoice that I am going to the Father;
for the Father is greater than I.
And now I have told you this before it happens,
so that when it happens you may believe.
Introduction
The
liturgical now
“I
am going away and I will come back.” He
goes away in his death and ascension. He does not leave us orphans. He comes
back to us in the descent of his Holy Spirit upon us. Next Sunday is the feast of the Ascension and
the Sunday after that is the feast of the descent of the Holy Spirit of
Pentecost. With Pentecost we will return to Ordinary Time, and we will coast
along in it through the warm summer
months and then into late fall when on December 2 we will enter into the
Extraordinary Time of Advent in preparation for Christmas 2007. That’s the
church’s calendar.
The national
now
The
Nation has its own calendar, and that, too, plays an important role in our
lives. Today, the second Sunday of May, is Mother’s Day. Tradition
calls for the wearing of roses or carnations on this day — a red flower if your
mother’s living, and a white one if she’s deceased. I’ve been wearing a white
flower for 59 years in memory of a
mother who loved me with a love beyond all telling, but who in her life,
because of overwhelming circumstances, couldn’t do a thing to help me, just
like the Sorrowful Mother who stood at the side of Jesus.
On this national holiday, when we all endorse
motherhood, we give our mothers flowers and telephone calls and countless other
things dreamed up by the commercial world deeply concerned that we pay our debt
of filial piety. That commercial world puts its stamp also on our religious
holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah, and in the process it sometimes stamps
out their original intent and inspiration.
Honoring
peace on Mother’s Day
Julia Ward
Howe
That’s
what has happened to Mother’s Day. An
original intent and inspiration has been fairly lost along the way. In the
Howe issued a Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870 which in
part reads,
Arise
then Christian women of this day!
Arise,
all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears!
Say
firmly:
"We
will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.
Our
husbands reeking with carnage will not come to us
for
caresses and applause.
Our
sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
all
that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We,
the women of one country,
will
be too tender of those of another country
to allow
our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From
the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
our
own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!” …
As men
have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
at the
summons of war,
let
women now leave all that may be left of home
for a
great and earnest day of counsel.
Let
them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let
them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
whereby
the great human family can live in peace, man as the
brother
of man,
each
bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God….
Anna Jarvis
It was Julia Ward Howe
who made the first gestures towards a
Mother’s Day. It was Anna Marie Jarvis
(1864-1948) who got it inscribed on the
Nation’s calendar. During the Civil War her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis
(1832-1905), organized women to tend to
the needs of the wounded of both sides. After the war she became active in the
promotion of a Mother’s Day dedicated to
pacifism and social activism. She
organized meetings of mothers of soldiers on both sides of the late war.
Two years after her mother’s death on the second Sunday
of May,
Anna Marie Jarvis held a
memorial to her mother on May 12, 1907, and then went on a quest to make
Mother's Day a recognized holiday. Following an act of
Congress in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May
as Mother's Day.
A homily with the
original inspiration
The internet is an
absolutely wonderful miracle. It’s a
marvelous library right in your own humble abode. I surfed it in preparation
for Mother’s Day 2007. Though I usually
don’t go to the web for homilies, I stumbled across one, and it turned
me on. Below is an excerpt of it.
A Sermon for Mother’s Day
Fifth Sunday of Easter, cycle C,
by Most Rev. Dr. Robert M. Bowman,
residing Bishop, United Catholic Church….
Finally, it is fitting that on Mother’s Day we
reflect on the social application of motherhood -- peace. Mother’s Day,
contrary to popular wisdom, was not invented by the florists' association
nor by the telephone company. Mother’s Day was invented by a mother
protesting the killing in World War I. She got other mothers also to protest,
and pretty soon Congress got in the act. Finally, President Woodrow Wilson
pronounced the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, a day dedicated not to
honoring mothers, but to honoring their wishes -- that the killing be stopped.
This aspect of Mother’s Day is too often ignored,
even by the church. It should not be. It is central to the whole idea of
motherhood, including the motherhood of God. You mothers know the pain of
seeing your children fighting and hurting each other. Can you imagine the pain
of seeing one of your children kill another? Can you imagine seeing your children
divide into opposing armies and slaughter each other? That's what war is to
God.
It is not
enough to set aside a day to honor mothers. We must devote ourselves to ridding
our social institutions of the violence and killing which have caused so many
mothers so much pain and grief. We must try to imbue our institutions,
including the church, with the ideals and attitudes of motherhood. We must
strive for a society which reflects the nurturing, the sacrificing, and the
loving of mothers. For then they will also reflect the nurturing, the
sacrificing, and the loving of God, the mother of us all.
The
original intent and inspiration of Mother’s Day was not to honor mothers but to
honor their wishes that the killing of war be stopped. Amidst the daily carnage
in
Honoring
mothers on Mother’s Day
That
original intent and inspiration inspired by Julia Ward Howe and Anna Jarvis has
been lost over the years. Mother’s Day, which first honored the wishes of
mothers that the killing in war be stopped, now honors the mothers themselves
whether they are pacifists or just simply mothers. That development is natural.
What’s living develops. On Mother’s Day,
however, we don’t have to choose between honoring the wishes of mothers that
the killing in war be stopped and honoring the mothers themselves.
A Mothers’
Day story
As
we set out to honor mothers themselves on Mother’s Day 2007, we wonder what
gift we should give them. The commercial world has an endless list of
suggestions in addition to flowers and telephone calls. I have a simple
suggestion of my own, and it takes a simple story to tell it.
“April is the cruelest of months.” That’s the
opening line of T. S. Eliot’s poem The
Wilderness. It’s the
only line in the entire poem of that rather sophisticated poet that I
understand. He’s right. April is the
cruelest of months. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on
My grief at the time was
very deep and visible. A few days later, early in the morning, I had to shop
for groceries. Even though you’re grieving you still have to do such mundane
things. After gathering the food for which I had no taste, I noticed there was
only one clerk at the checkout counter. He was a young man named
Well, he did just that! When I broke the news, he immediately read my grief. Suddenly he reached for his wallet, opened the cash register, transacted something and then returned the wallet to his pocket. I had no idea what he was doing, and when I handed him my money, he refused it, saying, "I've taken care of it." That young man was black (and color is part of the story). Here was a young black man, who was a blue-collar worker, who had to dress in a white shirt but didn’t make fifty dollars an hour, and he was paying for my groceries!
Conclusion
No greater gift
Though that
happened a good ten years ago I remember it
vividly, and I tend to recount it as a Mother’s Day story.
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- - - - - - - - -----
Prayers of the faithful
Introduction
There is a philosophical axiom that the ideal does not exist; only the real does. That is to say, “mother” as a general idea does not exist; only individual mothers do. There is no “mother in general” out there somewhere. There are only mothers in particular.
There are mothers who are battling cancer
and still have children to rear.
There are mothers who have mentally challenged children
and who face a daunting task with the dawn of every day.
There are mothers whose sons and daughters
are estranged from the church,
or are estranged from each other,
or are estranged from their mothers themselves.
There are mothers who have children like
and who feel very blessed and fulfilled.
And there are mothers who wonder where they went wrong.
There is the mother whose son was the shooter at Virginia Tech.
There is the mother who recently died from cancer, though she wanted to hang on till June to see her daughter graduate.
There are mothers for whom we wear white carnations today
and mothers for whom we wear red ones.
For all these real mothers… In peace,
let us pray to the Lord.
That mothers
might cast their bread upon the waters and raise not just great doctors and lawyers and
merchants and chiefs but also and especially great human beings like
That sons and daughters like Vernon might give their mothers the best gift of all –-the gift of themselves as great human beings and Good Samaritans on the road of life … In peace, let us pray to the Lord.
That mothers who wonder where they went wrong might be at peace; for the path of parenting is painful, and few there are who don’t make mistakes… In peace, let us pray to the Lord.
That those mothers in heaven who left before their work was done might, from the throne of grace and power, do for their sons and daughters what they wanted to do here on earth but didn’t have time… In peace, let us pray to the Lord.
That those sons and daughters who recently lost their mothers might be comforted by us on this first Mother’s Day without them… In peace, let us pray to the Lord.
That mothers who feel the loss of human life more painfully than anyone else might remind us of the original intent and inspiration of Mother’s Day; that they might summon us to disarm and to stop training their children to injure children… In peace, let us pray to the Lord.
[1] Diaspora is a Greek word
meaning dispersion. Originally it referred to the settling of scattered
colonies of Jews outside
[2] By “the unchurched” is
especially meant not those who have left the church but those whom the church
has left!