Dear Friends,

In the United States, we celebrate Mothers’ Day this coming Sunday, May 10. Perhaps florists and card shops will receive a stimulus bump as families honor the moms in their lives. So many mothers are struggling through their role differently—bread-winning and homeschooling in the same space, at the same time, with laptops and cellphones on overdrive. All of that can seem far from the tender and nurturing role, the embracing and cuddling behavior we might prefer for defining our roles as “mother.” We are all forced to embrace a new reality in these pandemic times. Mothers are no exception.

The current Vermont News Guide (thanks to Kay Van Buskirk for forwarding me the story), describes two meanings for the word “embrace” appropriate to our changed reality. The first is “to hold someone closely in our arms as a sign of affection,” and I know so many mothers remain grateful that they can hug their children in these days.

The other meaning attaches to the reality for mothers whose role has changed: “embrace—to accept or support (a belief, theory, or idea) willingly and enthusiastically.” Some mothers cannot hold their children—because they are too far away. Because children have become estranged. Because children have died. What can we embrace with enthusiasm, when we cannot embrace our children physically?

Mothers’ Day as we celebrate it, emerged from the 1870 “Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace” written by American poet and Unitarian Julia Ward Howe. Howe urges us to resist the war and the violence that would take children away from their families. Her call to mothers reminds us to resist all forms of violence—be they war with other countries, bloodshed in school shootings, domestic assault, or the hate crimes driven by fear of racial, religious, and other diversity of human beingness.

As you embrace, or long to embrace, a beloved child, embrace justice made manifest for all the children of this country and of this earth. May love of justice and love for your children remain side-by-side as you remember, today and every day, that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.

 

Blessings, Rev. Rita