Sunday, May 09, 2004
"What's Love Got to Do With It?" - May 9, 2004
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed, because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
Last Sunday was an amazing day for me. I am grateful for all that you did to celebrate my twenty-five years in the ministry. Among the events was a story about my life that Roberta told to the children. In that context she said that I was the youngest of four, but then she asked who was my mother's favorite. The whole church school seemed to respond, Mark. That was a predictable answer, but it is also an accurate answer. I was the last to be born into my family, my Mom's baby with the big dimples and her jet black hair. It often felt like I could do no wrong in her eyes. This was also slightly embarrassing last week to recall this, as my oldest brother was present. There were the usual expectations for the oldest with him, and his relationship with my mother was not always smooth. Yet it still felt like one of those old Smothers brothers shows, where Tom invariably said to Dick, "Mom always liked you best."
My Mom was easy to be with, especially for me. She was quiet and introverted, and ready to respond to my every need it seemed. Trained as a nurse, I knew if I was ill or uncomfortable in any way, she would do whatever she could to care for my every need. This was so unlike my father who was extroverted and opinionated, and also had a lifelong addiction to alcohol. For a child who was quiet and introverted as well, my mother was a gentle respite from the frequent loud, boisterous, activity in our household. I felt safe, cared for, and nurtured. Those were wonderful gifts my Mother gave me. I thought of those qualities the other day when I picked up my boys at school. Two little girls, recent immigrants from Russia, were playing in the playground. For some reason their mother left the playground, and they realized she was no longer there. Frightened they somehow connected with an adult, even though they didn't speak much English, and she brought them over to Dana's teacher who I was speaking with. She scoured the area and found the mother, who then proceeded to scream at the girls for leaving the playground, even though she had initiated the problem by leaving herself, making them feel deserted. Of course the mother became frightened , too, because she thought the girls were missing. Both girls burst into tears, sobbing as the mother berated them. Here they were deserted and frightened, and had actually done the right thing by seeking out an adult, only to find themselves reprimanded and verbally assaulted by their own mother. I said to another parent, "Hug them first, tell them its ok, and that everybody is safe, and then tell them not to leave the playground if she has to be called away." Surely their trusting sense of being watched and cared for took a blow that day.
I thought of my mother because I am like her when it comes to watching my kids. I have always had high anxiety about losing them. In that rural place where I grew up, where as Roberta also said last week, I had no friends, my mother was constantly yelling into the woods to make sure I was near by when I played my Civil War games. I too, try to keep a watchful eye on my sons, although much of that energy now focuses on our baby, who is five. This is more than your average parent's protective eye, I am aware of extra anxiety and protectiveness that seems to be in those genes I inherited from my mother. In the novel Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "Now we carry this map of ourselves around. Even as we stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny. It brings onto our faces the same wrinkles and age spots our parents had. It makes us sniff in idiosyncratic, recognizable family ways. Genes embedded so deep they control our eye muscles, so that two sisters have the same way of blinking, and boy twins dribble in unison. I feel myself sometimes, in anxious moods, playing with the cartilage of my nose exactly as my brother does. Our throats and throat boxes, formed from the same instructions, press air out in similar tones and decibels. And this can be extrapolated back in time, so that when I speak, my Mother speaks , too. She's writing these words now. "
Mother's Day reminds us now not only of the nurture and care we received from our Mothers and Fathers, but what of their genetic material has surfaced in us. Looking at physical and mental illnesses we ask when in the past this gene appeared, to give us, or me, this particular trait or affliction. A couple of years ago I remember giving a sermon after I had made the startling discovery of looking in the mirror and seeing my father. Age has brought this awareness; I now can see that the brother who was here last Sunday resembles me. We liberals who once believed most things could be explained and resolved by nurture now must admit that much of our constitution is hard wired. My mother appears whenever I do the cooking and find myself measuring every precise teaspoon. She is there when my historical dictionary of fact upon fact recalls her detailed memory for oil company customers and where they lived or how much they owed. If anyone named a person in town, she could always say who they were married to, and where their parents lived. As a child, no wonder I could name every Civil War general and battle, every dinosaur's name. No wonder I liked spending time with her. I was her in so many ways. She not only took me places, and bought me stuff, more recently it was her who was writing the entries in the dictionary - births, marriages and deaths. She was the one spontaneously twisting my hair, as I once did for hours. Was it because I saw her do it so many times, or was it something deeper?
A few weeks ago I traveled out to Orange, Massachusetts area , where I grew up. I was asked to conduct a funeral for my Aunt Pearl, my father's oldest sister, who had died at the age of 100. Of ten children in my father's family, only the youngest now remains. We laughed that a Harris had reached 100 when most would have said it was impossible. Was it the genes or was it the behavioral choices we had made? Then we examined the photographs. There you are, they said to me, as we looked at a photo of my grandfather. All families have looked at photos and noted the resemblance, but now we know it runs so much deeper. My son Joel does indeed sound like me. He has my vocal chords. And Dana has that dimple. Adopted children must wonder what of this person who I have become is my parent's nurture and what is my nature, and from whence does it come? Of course many of those small and large traits we see in ourselves are lost in the merging of nature and nurture. Sharon Olds tells us in her poem that she learned to love the small things about her father, because she could not love the big things. Those things that are often so much of us and them, we learn to love. We bind ourselves to the world she says, by finding things to love. With all we receive from nature and nurture we still have the power of choice. Find those things to love. Name those things we love, and bestow their power and affection on all who follow.
My mother was not an affectionate person. I once told my parents that one thing I would try to do differently with my son Joel would be to show my love for him in more outwardly affectionate ways. I grew up in a time when it was commonly assumed that a mother would be a housewife, and not work outside the home. Last fall, Caitlin Flanagan in an article in the Atlantic called, "Housewife Confidential," which was a tribute to Erma Bombeck, talked about her own mother, and the significance of her life. Flanagan writes, "To me, she never seemed diminished or unimportant because of those endless domestic errands; on the contrary, the work she did was wholly connected to the life we were living." This was true of my mother; she took care of us, and everything connected to the family, and moreover was the backbone of the family business, managing all the financial operations. In her quiet unassuming way, she managed to hold everything together - physically, emotionally, materially. She made it possible for us to live.
Perhaps this sense of being in control is largely lost on us. Flanagan writes that "housewives then didn't trot after their children the way I trot after mine. Their children trotted after them." She says that earlier mothers had a clear and compelling awareness of human vulnerability and a sense of having somehow been charged with the care of others. I can easily say, she always took care of me. Flanagan says motherhood in modern times has changed us. First it has introduced in our lives an almost unbearably powerful form of love. This is the primal connection each of us has felt, if not as parents, then as children. Through birth or adoption, nature or nurture, we are connected in care and devotion, in expectation and fulfillment of one generation to another. But modern life has also changed motherhood with a ceaseless grinding anxiety, one that often propels us to absurd activities. Then she cites the example of the mother who was on a business trip and tried to Fed ex some breast milk home. She says there is a helpless sense of repeated failures, both large and small. This is an acknowledgement that this is so difficult. The tremendous power of love and the overwhelming task of caring for others, and how you attempt to accomplish that at all working inside and outside the home. This is why we trot after our children these days. We want them to feel that love and care, and so we chase them with it. We say please feel it, know its presence.
Despite being my mother's favored child, and knowing I was appreciated and adored by her, I have often lived my life feeling unappreciated. I am not sure why I often fail to trust that others care about me. Is it in the genes, or is it something I learned through experience. Why do any one of us feel that no one appreciates what we do. While you the First Parish congregation are not my mother, you certainly gave me a massive dose of appreciation last Sunday. Sometimes we find it hard to accept that we are loved or cared for by others. If I am always waiting for someone to thank me or acknowledge what I have done, I will be stuck in a tit-for-tat response to others, and not engaged in true acts of love. How do we get beyond the need for appreciation? I suspect Mother's Day was developed to appreciate someone who was not receiving much appreciation in the normal course of events. It's often true that mom's don't get the appreciation they deserve. We tend to devalue or trivialize the hardest work in the world, falsely convincing ourselves that the other things we do are more important.
I was struck when Caitlin Flanagan said , the work she did was wholly connected to the life we were living. I am not sure how often I expressed my appreciation to my mother. Sure I got her cards and gifts for Mother's Day and her birthday, and even told her I loved her, but I am not sure I ever fully appreciated what Flanagan is saying. She was responsible for my life in so many ways. She was connected to all of it. Perhaps this is why modern living is so hard for moms and other parents. We feel incredible anxiety if we are not connected to all of it. What's love got to do with it? I have sometimes foolishly said my mother never showed her love in words or actions of affection, but her love was all that love is or ever will be. She took care of my life. She was my life. Susan Griffin says in the reading that her mother was the center of the earth. She was the ear of the universe. Her job was and our job continues to be the care of others. Why do we think spending time with children is unimportant when there is nothing more important. Mothers feel anxiety today because they know this. You are charged with nurturing life. The level of care you demonstrate, your presence focused on others means everything.
In Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "I haven't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards. It's always the gray-haired tourists on Italian buses who can tell you something about the Etruscans." Our being here together lets us time travel - back to the bodies of our mothers, the bodies of our fathers, and further back, to the beginning. Where we realize what we celebrate today is what is most important - Mother's Day asks exactly what the Masai warriors ask each other in greeting as they come from their families, and how are the children? May we time travel back to embrace the small or great things in our lives that we can choose to say taught us how to care for one another, and then choose in the few days we have to do the caring work that wholly connects us to the life we are living.
But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
"What's Love Got to Do With It?" - May 9, 2004
Mark W. Harris
Opening Words - from Joy Harjo - "Eagle Poem"
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed, because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
Sermon
Last Sunday was an amazing day for me. I am grateful for all that you did to celebrate my twenty-five years in the ministry. Among the events was a story about my life that Roberta told to the children. In that context she said that I was the youngest of four, but then she asked who was my mother's favorite. The whole church school seemed to respond, Mark. That was a predictable answer, but it is also an accurate answer. I was the last to be born into my family, my Mom's baby with the big dimples and her jet black hair. It often felt like I could do no wrong in her eyes. This was also slightly embarrassing last week to recall this, as my oldest brother was present. There were the usual expectations for the oldest with him, and his relationship with my mother was not always smooth. Yet it still felt like one of those old Smothers brothers shows, where Tom invariably said to Dick, "Mom always liked you best."
My Mom was easy to be with, especially for me. She was quiet and introverted, and ready to respond to my every need it seemed. Trained as a nurse, I knew if I was ill or uncomfortable in any way, she would do whatever she could to care for my every need. This was so unlike my father who was extroverted and opinionated, and also had a lifelong addiction to alcohol. For a child who was quiet and introverted as well, my mother was a gentle respite from the frequent loud, boisterous, activity in our household. I felt safe, cared for, and nurtured. Those were wonderful gifts my Mother gave me. I thought of those qualities the other day when I picked up my boys at school. Two little girls, recent immigrants from Russia, were playing in the playground. For some reason their mother left the playground, and they realized she was no longer there. Frightened they somehow connected with an adult, even though they didn't speak much English, and she brought them over to Dana's teacher who I was speaking with. She scoured the area and found the mother, who then proceeded to scream at the girls for leaving the playground, even though she had initiated the problem by leaving herself, making them feel deserted. Of course the mother became frightened , too, because she thought the girls were missing. Both girls burst into tears, sobbing as the mother berated them. Here they were deserted and frightened, and had actually done the right thing by seeking out an adult, only to find themselves reprimanded and verbally assaulted by their own mother. I said to another parent, "Hug them first, tell them its ok, and that everybody is safe, and then tell them not to leave the playground if she has to be called away." Surely their trusting sense of being watched and cared for took a blow that day.
I thought of my mother because I am like her when it comes to watching my kids. I have always had high anxiety about losing them. In that rural place where I grew up, where as Roberta also said last week, I had no friends, my mother was constantly yelling into the woods to make sure I was near by when I played my Civil War games. I too, try to keep a watchful eye on my sons, although much of that energy now focuses on our baby, who is five. This is more than your average parent's protective eye, I am aware of extra anxiety and protectiveness that seems to be in those genes I inherited from my mother. In the novel Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "Now we carry this map of ourselves around. Even as we stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny. It brings onto our faces the same wrinkles and age spots our parents had. It makes us sniff in idiosyncratic, recognizable family ways. Genes embedded so deep they control our eye muscles, so that two sisters have the same way of blinking, and boy twins dribble in unison. I feel myself sometimes, in anxious moods, playing with the cartilage of my nose exactly as my brother does. Our throats and throat boxes, formed from the same instructions, press air out in similar tones and decibels. And this can be extrapolated back in time, so that when I speak, my Mother speaks , too. She's writing these words now. "
Mother's Day reminds us now not only of the nurture and care we received from our Mothers and Fathers, but what of their genetic material has surfaced in us. Looking at physical and mental illnesses we ask when in the past this gene appeared, to give us, or me, this particular trait or affliction. A couple of years ago I remember giving a sermon after I had made the startling discovery of looking in the mirror and seeing my father. Age has brought this awareness; I now can see that the brother who was here last Sunday resembles me. We liberals who once believed most things could be explained and resolved by nurture now must admit that much of our constitution is hard wired. My mother appears whenever I do the cooking and find myself measuring every precise teaspoon. She is there when my historical dictionary of fact upon fact recalls her detailed memory for oil company customers and where they lived or how much they owed. If anyone named a person in town, she could always say who they were married to, and where their parents lived. As a child, no wonder I could name every Civil War general and battle, every dinosaur's name. No wonder I liked spending time with her. I was her in so many ways. She not only took me places, and bought me stuff, more recently it was her who was writing the entries in the dictionary - births, marriages and deaths. She was the one spontaneously twisting my hair, as I once did for hours. Was it because I saw her do it so many times, or was it something deeper?
A few weeks ago I traveled out to Orange, Massachusetts area , where I grew up. I was asked to conduct a funeral for my Aunt Pearl, my father's oldest sister, who had died at the age of 100. Of ten children in my father's family, only the youngest now remains. We laughed that a Harris had reached 100 when most would have said it was impossible. Was it the genes or was it the behavioral choices we had made? Then we examined the photographs. There you are, they said to me, as we looked at a photo of my grandfather. All families have looked at photos and noted the resemblance, but now we know it runs so much deeper. My son Joel does indeed sound like me. He has my vocal chords. And Dana has that dimple. Adopted children must wonder what of this person who I have become is my parent's nurture and what is my nature, and from whence does it come? Of course many of those small and large traits we see in ourselves are lost in the merging of nature and nurture. Sharon Olds tells us in her poem that she learned to love the small things about her father, because she could not love the big things. Those things that are often so much of us and them, we learn to love. We bind ourselves to the world she says, by finding things to love. With all we receive from nature and nurture we still have the power of choice. Find those things to love. Name those things we love, and bestow their power and affection on all who follow.
My mother was not an affectionate person. I once told my parents that one thing I would try to do differently with my son Joel would be to show my love for him in more outwardly affectionate ways. I grew up in a time when it was commonly assumed that a mother would be a housewife, and not work outside the home. Last fall, Caitlin Flanagan in an article in the Atlantic called, "Housewife Confidential," which was a tribute to Erma Bombeck, talked about her own mother, and the significance of her life. Flanagan writes, "To me, she never seemed diminished or unimportant because of those endless domestic errands; on the contrary, the work she did was wholly connected to the life we were living." This was true of my mother; she took care of us, and everything connected to the family, and moreover was the backbone of the family business, managing all the financial operations. In her quiet unassuming way, she managed to hold everything together - physically, emotionally, materially. She made it possible for us to live.
Perhaps this sense of being in control is largely lost on us. Flanagan writes that "housewives then didn't trot after their children the way I trot after mine. Their children trotted after them." She says that earlier mothers had a clear and compelling awareness of human vulnerability and a sense of having somehow been charged with the care of others. I can easily say, she always took care of me. Flanagan says motherhood in modern times has changed us. First it has introduced in our lives an almost unbearably powerful form of love. This is the primal connection each of us has felt, if not as parents, then as children. Through birth or adoption, nature or nurture, we are connected in care and devotion, in expectation and fulfillment of one generation to another. But modern life has also changed motherhood with a ceaseless grinding anxiety, one that often propels us to absurd activities. Then she cites the example of the mother who was on a business trip and tried to Fed ex some breast milk home. She says there is a helpless sense of repeated failures, both large and small. This is an acknowledgement that this is so difficult. The tremendous power of love and the overwhelming task of caring for others, and how you attempt to accomplish that at all working inside and outside the home. This is why we trot after our children these days. We want them to feel that love and care, and so we chase them with it. We say please feel it, know its presence.
Despite being my mother's favored child, and knowing I was appreciated and adored by her, I have often lived my life feeling unappreciated. I am not sure why I often fail to trust that others care about me. Is it in the genes, or is it something I learned through experience. Why do any one of us feel that no one appreciates what we do. While you the First Parish congregation are not my mother, you certainly gave me a massive dose of appreciation last Sunday. Sometimes we find it hard to accept that we are loved or cared for by others. If I am always waiting for someone to thank me or acknowledge what I have done, I will be stuck in a tit-for-tat response to others, and not engaged in true acts of love. How do we get beyond the need for appreciation? I suspect Mother's Day was developed to appreciate someone who was not receiving much appreciation in the normal course of events. It's often true that mom's don't get the appreciation they deserve. We tend to devalue or trivialize the hardest work in the world, falsely convincing ourselves that the other things we do are more important.
I was struck when Caitlin Flanagan said , the work she did was wholly connected to the life we were living. I am not sure how often I expressed my appreciation to my mother. Sure I got her cards and gifts for Mother's Day and her birthday, and even told her I loved her, but I am not sure I ever fully appreciated what Flanagan is saying. She was responsible for my life in so many ways. She was connected to all of it. Perhaps this is why modern living is so hard for moms and other parents. We feel incredible anxiety if we are not connected to all of it. What's love got to do with it? I have sometimes foolishly said my mother never showed her love in words or actions of affection, but her love was all that love is or ever will be. She took care of my life. She was my life. Susan Griffin says in the reading that her mother was the center of the earth. She was the ear of the universe. Her job was and our job continues to be the care of others. Why do we think spending time with children is unimportant when there is nothing more important. Mothers feel anxiety today because they know this. You are charged with nurturing life. The level of care you demonstrate, your presence focused on others means everything.
In Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "I haven't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards. It's always the gray-haired tourists on Italian buses who can tell you something about the Etruscans." Our being here together lets us time travel - back to the bodies of our mothers, the bodies of our fathers, and further back, to the beginning. Where we realize what we celebrate today is what is most important - Mother's Day asks exactly what the Masai warriors ask each other in greeting as they come from their families, and how are the children? May we time travel back to embrace the small or great things in our lives that we can choose to say taught us how to care for one another, and then choose in the few days we have to do the caring work that wholly connects us to the life we are living.
Closing Words - from The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.