Mother’s Day is one of those rare chances we get to lift up the work and wonder of women. Yet, even on this day of celebration, there are many women who are overlooked and unheard in worship that honors women solely for their parenting. We are challenged to find ways to celebrate women who are mothers, women who cannot be mothers, and women who choose not to be mothers.
LECTIONARY TEXT for May 11, 2008 - Pentecost (Red)
Acts 2:1-21 – Pentecost story
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b – “O Lord, how manifold are your works!”
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 – “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit”
John 7:37-39 – “‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
HYMNS
Lord Bless the Hands, Brethren Hymnal 93 - because mothering is done by many people. Mothering God, Brethren Hymnal 482 How Shall I Sing to God? Brethren Hymnal Supplement 1019 Bring Many Names, Hymnal Supplement 1088 Loving Spirit, Hymnal Supplement 1064 - We invite you to change the words of the third verse to reflect gender-inclusive language.
TAKE ACTION FOR MOTHERS
Church World Services (CWS) supports midwives working in refugee camps in Darfur, southern Sudan. Support their work to support mothers facing some of the toughest living conditions a woman can face, by visiting www.churchworldservice.org. The CWS website also offers ‘alternative’ Mother’s Day gifts of donations made in the name of your mother, sister, aunt, grandmother, wife, or friend, complete with cards to download to accompany your gifts.
PRAYERS
When you were pregnant with Israel, God
–did your ankles swell?
–did your fingers tingle and droop?
Did you spend your time waiting, marking time,
and doing infinite chores?
After you announced the birth of the nation,
knowing it would be long, three generations long,
till the birth of the people on its land–
After you announced this birth, God–
did you sit counting the days and the years?
Did you plan how you would raise Ephraim,
your darling child?
how you would call him from Egypt,
draw him with cords of love?
Did you count the days
till you could teach her to walk?
till you could bend down and feed her each morsel?
When you carried Israel in your womb, O God,
did you think how you would nurture forever,
how you would carry him till old-age?
Did you plan every moment of her upbringing,
dreaming of the perfect child?
Or were you very busy with all the other tasks of creation, God,
planning universes,
setting up laws,
organizing history?
(from Motherprayer, by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, adapted by Anna Lisa Gross, drawing on Gen 15:13-15, Jer. 31:20, Hos. 11:1, 13, 14, Isa. 46:3-4)
Narrow, narrow is the path!
You deliver us from narrowness.
From Egypt you brought us forth,
In straits we call upon you.
You answer us expansively.
Narrow was the path between the waters of the Red Sea
A canyon between two high walls.
Then out into the light and bright and wide
of the world beyond Egypt.
My way is narrow
In the straits I call upon you:
Widen my path,
deliver me to the light
of life.
(from Motherprayer, by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, adapted by Anna Lisa Gross, drawing on Ps. 118:3)
In my womb you formed the child,
in my womb I nourished it.
You formed and numbered the baby’s limbs,
I contained and protected them.
You who could see the child in my depths,
I who felt the kicks and the turns,
together we counted the months.
Together we planned the future.
Flesh of my flesh,
form of your form.
Another human being upon the earth,
a home for God in this, our world.
(from Motherprayer, by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, drawing on Ps. 139:13, 15, 16, Jer. 1:5, Isa. 49:5, Gen 1:26)
We come together today in praise and thanksgiving
for the gift of life itself.
Someone gave birth to us and some of us have given birth.
All of us have been mothered in our time,
All of us have mothered.
Let our time today be one of recognition–
That we arrive from so many places,
Joy and delight,
Wistfulness and longing and worry,
Unmet needs and unfulfilled dreams,
Loss and sorrow, loss and emptiness,
loss and regret.
All that life is made of, mothers are made of too.
Today we sing the songs of so many:
Mothers who are single parents, foster parents,
Mothers who relinquished their young out of necessity,
Mothers who found their heart in adoption,
Mothers who left their children in a thousand ways,
Mothers who rejoice and mothers who mourn.
There is a kind of love we cannot live without.
It is never too late, no matter our age or situation.
We sing a song of gratitude for all the moments
of being known, being cherished, being found.
Amen.
(Mother’s Day Prayer, by Mary J. Harrington)
TALK BACK
Mother’s Day isn’t always the best day for lots of women. It reminds us of not being mothers by choice or by necessity, of things we don’t like about being mothers, of things we don’t like about our mothers, of all the ways society doesn’t respect the real work of mothering…..
How do you feel about this holiday? Have a Mother’s Day sermon of your own to share? To discuss any of these topics further or to share your own resources, please post a comment below.
National media coverage of the recent raid at the Texas compound has revealed as much about “ourselves” as about the FLDS polygamist sect.
Child abuse, domestic violence, and rape are wrong: they are some of the greatest evils a society ever knows. Yet, too often, the coverage of the raid has focused not on the abuse but on the “peculiar” culture of the people. The clothing (“long pastel dresses,” according to an April 7 Chicago Tribune article) is not the point; child abuse and misogyny are the point, and distractions confuse that important moral lesson. Both the sect members and our voyeuristic culture need to understand that. People should not be humiliated for what clothing they wear; they should be tried and punished for what harm they cause.
It is well worth questioning whether a government that does not protect its children from poverty, toxic toys, and manipulative commercial advertising, has learned any lesson from this raid. Will we recommit ourselves to helping all children escape the evils of child abuse? Is this raid to help the children or is it to soothe the smug consciences of mainstream citizens who fear “deviants?” It is also worth questioning whether a national spotlight on this sect discourages such violence, or pushes similar instances of abuse further underground.
Also illuminating is that commentary on the raid has emphasized the “Latter-Day Saints” half of the church’s name, and not the “Fundamentalist” half. While some of the community’s beliefs may come from the LDS tradition, it is the fundamentalist style of the faith that encourages a closed community structure and intolerance to other perspectives. Fundamentalism is not unique to LDS communities, and facing the dangers of this belief system in the wider Christian community may be harder than further marginalizing LDS and Mormon believers.
(May we all keep praying for those children and their families, and for the redemption of the gospel from those who would pervert it to serve their abusive purposes.)
Unitarian Universalist Reverend Debra Haffner’s Religious Institute is leading national advocacy for comprehensive sex education (i.e. not just teaching abstinence until marriage and plugging our ears when we hear that young people aren’t following our advice). She is circulating the following petition to be presented to the US Congress hearing about domestic sex education, held on April 23 . If you wish to sign on, email your name, clergy title, and affiliation/organization, city/state by April 21 to haffner at religiousinstitute.org.
Even if this doesn’t catch your interest otherwise, we’re excited that the Church of the Brethren warrants specific mention as one of the leading denominations in the move for reality-based education for our youth - see the second to last paragraph.
Statement on the Public Health and Ethical Concerns with Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs and the Need for Comprehensive Sexuality Education
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Submitted for the Record
April 23, 2008
The Committee will hear from many organizations the strong public health arguments that support sexuality education and oppose abstinence-only-until marriage programs. As religious leaders, we ask you to also consider the moral and ethical foundations for supporting comprehensive sexuality education for the nation’s youth.
As religious leaders, we believe young people should learn about their sexuality from their parents, faith communities, and school-based programs, not primarily from their peers or the entertainment media. We believe that programs must be age-appropriate, medically accurate, and truthful.
Young people need help in order to develop their capacity for moral discernment and a freely informed conscience. Education that respects and empowers young people has more integrity than many of the currently funded abstinence-only programs that are based on incomplete information, fear, and shame. Programs that teach abstinence exclusively and withhold information about pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention fail too many of our young people.
Our sacred texts and theological commitments call us to truth telling. Young people need to know that “there is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing” but they also require the skills to make moral and healthy decisions about relationships for themselves now and in the future. We call on you to support comprehensive sexuality education programs that honor the diversity of religious and moral values in the community. Such education teaches that decisions about sexual behaviors should be based on moral and ethical values, as well as considerations of physical and emotional health. It affirms the goodness of sexuality while acknowledging its risk, consequences and dangers, and it introduces with respect the differing sides of controversial issues. It includes information about abstinence, contraception, and STD prevention. There is an urgent need for a federal sexuality education program that reaches all young people, regardless of income, class, ethnicity, or sexual experience or orientation.
For more than 40 years, mainstream faith based traditions have called for federal and local support for sexuality education. In 1968, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Synagogue Council of America, and the United States Catholic Conference issued a joint call for churches and synagogues to become actively involved in sexuality education within their congregations and their communities. Today, more than 13 denominations have policies supporting sexuality education in their schools, including the Union for Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Church of the Brethren.
It is time for the federal government to support comprehensive sexuality education programs for youth and to cease funding programs that are not only ineffective but may put our children and teenagers at risk - for disease, for short changed futures, for denial of the gift of their sexuality. It is time to provide all our young people with accurate education that respects the diversity of values in a community. It is indeed a time to speak and a time to act. May our religious voices help you understand that it is also the only moral response.
This past weekend, the Steering Committee of your Womaen’s Caucus met in Richmond, Indiana, to strategize for future projects and events, everything from a project to get girls more involved in feminism in the Church to new resource pages for our website to plans for our booth at Annual Conference in the other Richmond, Virginia. We spent a great evening with Caucus supporters, held at Bethany Theological Seminary. On Sunday morning, we worshiped with the lively crowd at Richmond CoB, where they even let us highjill the children’s story.
One thing we talked about in committee was our desire to get more and more Caucus supporters involved in the regular work of Caucus. If you are reading this post and just wishing you could be involved, drop us a line at womaen <at> gmail.com, and we’ll sign you up to help out. Here are some tasks we always need help with:
volunteers at our events
regular correspondents on this blog
graphic designers and artists
Another way you can plug into the work of Caucus is to attend the Progressive Brethren Summit in Indianapolis this November 7-9. Keep tuned for more details, but mark your calendars now - this will be a historic gathering and we want you to be there!
To mark the day, some creative activists in Saudi Arabia have posted on youtube.com a protest video of a woman driving (which is illegal in Saudi Arabia). She narrates her drive with her reasons for opposing the ban. More information on the video protest can be found by clicking here to go to the BBC News article on it.
Very exciting news: Womaen’s Caucus has a new website up and excellent. Stop by in your next internet exploration: www.womaenscaucus.org.
Then you can stay warm and cozy with the wise, womaenly words of your favorite faithful feminists! The new edition of Femailings, our seasonal newsletter, is posted over at the Femailings section of this blog site. The theme of this issue is Women’s Ministries.
Curl up with some hot tea and a toasty laptop, read away, and pop back over here to post your comments about what you think. We always want to hear from you!
On January 30th on All Things Considered, Democratic Strategist Dan Payne said, “There isn’t really a place for the white male to find a candidate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. All you have to do is look at them and see they’re not like white men.” Hear this commentary at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18549097
This comment is blatently racist and sexist, in that it assumes white men have no good option now that there are no white men in the race. Since the sufferage movement won the right of women to vote, women have voted for white men. Since the drives to register black voters in the 1960’s and before, black men and women have voted for white men. The idea that white men don’t have a candidate to vote for now in the democratic party is patently absurd! The second sentence of this comment gets even worse, in its assertion that women and black men and women are completely different types of human beings than white men, and by implication, are substandard. You don’t often hear such blatant discrimination stated on NPR, and I would urge them and anyone else considering hiring Dan Payne to reconsider.
Carla
Lately I’ve received several messages from people in the Church of the Brethren encouraging us to put relationship with others above our disagreement on issues. And, I agree. We shouldn’t shun anyone because they don’t agree with our doctrine. Love above the law, I say! But, I also disagree. What about the folks trying to shun people and put the way they see the law above love. Do we go along so that we can continue our good relationship? Do we say, yes, we want to be inclusive and we think Jesus calls us to love and accept this person, but you don’t agree, so in the interest of us being able to continue as church, we’ll accept that we have to exclude that other person? No! I say it loud and proud. But, then I hang my head when I realize that my own church has rejected people before, and I am still there. I’m trying to change it, but I am still there. It is that ever-present dilemma of when to stay and try to create new possibilities and when to give the whole thing over to the dark side. I guess I’m staying and bringing up my concerns as boldly as I can.
Now, of course I am glad about Obama’s win in South Carolina today. But that’s not what I’m here to write about.
What strikes me about the media analysis (spin?) of the election results is how completely they want to erase African-American female voters. On CNN, their break-downs of different categories of voters have been saying, “Women vote for Clinton for the same reason Blacks vote for Obama,” i.e. for pride in their identity. But where does that leave Black women? It seems that the title of the Black Women’s studies reader edited by Gloria Hull is still all too apt: when it comes to the simplistic binaries of many media commentators, “All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men.” And who of us are brave enough to make a politics for all of us?
It occurs to me that emphasizing the identity politics at play in this primary season is another way to divide this election (and its voters) by generation more than by race or gender: identity politics have been the staple of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s; third wave feminism and queer rights movements have tried to transcend the identities of gender and sexuality in becoming fully human. Continuing to contextualize the divisions in this election by racial and gender identities is a way of continuing to spin the election in the terms expected by the middle-aged generation Clinton is counting on for her support.
Obama, meanwhile, is trying to appeal to voters across race, gender, class, age, and education, by talking about change and the future, even as he is boxed into the tired categories his opponents wish to relegate him to. Some media commentators’ insistence on comparing him to Jesse Jackson - who didn’t win and was not as strong a candidate as Obama is now - instead of comparing him to white candidates/presidents like John F. Kennedy, sends a pretty clear message about what limited frameworks they will use to consider candidates who are not straight, white males. One would think that Obama’s wins in Iowa and South Carolina, which represent very different racial diversities, would liberate election analysts from boxing the candidates into racial categories, but perhaps that’s too much hope for me to have in mainstream media? (For a funny spoof of this media tendency, check out the Daily Show’s “Daily Show-Down” with Samantha Bee on January 18, 2008.)
Caution 1: This may be outdated by the time you read this, once the Iowa Caucus results are revealed, but I’m writing anyway. I will presume that you, dear readers, can consider these musings in both th context they were written in as well as the context you are reading them in.
Caution 2: This may seem risky, to write about electoral politics on a religious-oriented blog site, but I’m writing anyway. I will presume that you, dear readers, know that I am representing only my own views here.
So: the 2008 presidential election primaries.
I have become a big fan of Barack Obama. I always liked him, ever since he ran for Senator in my home state of Illinois, but I wasn’t sure right away that I supported him for prez. But the more I studied up on the campaigns of the various candidates, the more I realized how good Obama would be for this nation. He is dignified, experienced, articulate, and so clever. I’ve got more of my thoughts on the matter of Obama’s greatness over on my own blog.
But what kind of a sticky situation does this leave me in as a feminist?
My octogenarian grandmother has been supporting Hillary Clinton, specifically because she sees that as part of her duty as a feminist. And I agree that I want to see a woman in office, just as much as I want to see a president of color run our country. But the difference for me seems to be one of perspective - particularly because of my age. I know that my grandma might not be around to see as many future presidents take office, so her chances of living under a female president might be slimmer than mine. 2008 might be her best chance to have that happen, while I am hoping (God willing) to live for several more generations of presidents in the future.
So I can afford to wait. I can afford to hold out for someone better. My grandma is entitled to her own choice and vote, out of her perspective, but I cannot operate out of the same logic, because my commitment to the state of the nation is different than hers.
I want a woman in office who will make women in office look good. I don’t want someone in office who will make people, on the right or the left, question her credentials, her authenticity, her competence, her independence, or her corporate connections. And I’m afraid that Clinton falls into the same mold some other pioneering female heads of state have come out of, one that I wish we would learn from. We’ve had the Margaret Thatchers who are even more conservative than most men. We’ve also had the Indira Gandhis and Benazir Bhuttos whose positions have been due largely to their connections to prominent male politicians (Gandhi’s father Jawalaharlal Nehru and Bhutto’s father and husband, respectively). Not only is Clinton the most conservative Democrat running, but she also owes much of her position to her prominent husband. Wouldn’t it be nicer to elect a woman who people love for her own sake, and not because of the men in her life?
I will agree with critics of this view, that we can’t just keep electing straight white men until the perfect woman or person of color or queer person comes along to run, that is, we can’t use the idea of perfection as an excuse to not settle for someone at least better than the hegemonic norm.
But I also see that we have a chance this year to elect someone who is both ground-breaking and is much closer to perfect than we have seen in a long time. And that’s why I’m praying for a spirit of hope to flood Iowa tomorrow night.
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Any other thoughts about the elections this spring and this year? What is a Brethren feminist to make of all this primary mess? Post a comment and share your own insights.
...is a network of feminist women and men who identify with the Church of the Brethren. Emboldened by our awareness of the violence and pain related to the denial of gender inequality, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we engage in the prophetic task of creating church which is free from attitudes and practices of injustice.
