Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

April 19, 1998

. . . I have peeled away your anger

down to its core of love

and look mother

I am

a dark temple where your true spirit rises

beautiful and tough as a chestnut

stanchion against your nightmares of weakness

and if my eyes conceal

a squadron of conflicting rebellions

I learned from you

to define myself

through your denials.

--Audre Lorde
Excerpt from "Black Mother Woman"

I believe we were born for a purpose. I refer to that purpose as a "calling," and for me there is no higher authority than this spiritual thread that runs through my life, that ties me fast to my maker, that magically draws me to teachers and mentors when I need them, that allows me to fling out the thread of my own life to others in affection and in a communal effort for the good. This is the "slender thread" that Jungian Robert Johnson speaks of in his new memoir Balancing Heaven and Earth. This thread, I am convinced, is the thread that brought me to you.

So I say "calling." I say "thread." Other people in other cultures have different words, perhaps. The Buddhist might talk about destiny, the Hindu about karma, the born-again Christian about "doing the will of God," the humanist about fulfilling one’s potential. Yes, we come into this world for a purpose. And yet there are those lives that never reach fruition. Sometimes they are cut short by death—and yet number of years lived does not necessarily determine whether a life is complete. A short life can be an exquisite diamond of a life, and a long life can be dreadful in its emptiness. No, when I think of fulfillment, I think of the life that is in accord with its nature and with Divine purpose.

Happiness, I believe, is nothing more than living out one’s call, nothing more than developing and giving one’s gifts--as Thoreau said, "to affect the quality of the day: that is the highest art." Not just getting through the day, but affecting the quality of the day. Exercising your power. On the other hand, failing to exercise your inherent power can lead to terrible consequences, both for the individual and for others. A few years ago I drove to Seattle for two days of aptitude tests. For two days, I put pins in holes, I listened to musical tones, I put together wiggly blocks. Or perhaps I should say I failed to put together wiggly blocks. The director of the agency told me I should never, never go anywhere without a map. It appears that I am spacially challenged—something I had suspected long before the testing.

I took these tests because I wanted to be sure I was using myself well as your senior minister, and I wanted to be sure that Tom Disrud’s skills and inclinations would be complementary to mine, so I asked him to do the testing, too. This process helped us clarify our roles, and helped us become what I believe is a very effective team. The philosophy of the testing company, which has been refined since the 1920’s, was that people all have aptitudes, that those aptitudes do not change—they are hard-wired in—and that people who follow their true leanings are likely to be successful and fulfilled. On the other hand, they gave multiple examples of people who tried to be what they were not. These folks made not only themselves but everybody around them miserable, including their spouses and children and co-workers. The engineer in the body of an artist, the lawyer in the body of a minister—such people are doomed to frustration. They become irritable and even ill. We might say that their own true nature is silenced. These silences rob individuals of their joy and rob the rest of us of their gifts.

I have a small number of books in my library that I consider classics—they have spoken so directly to me that they are like friends that I trust to guide me as I try to make my way through this world with some degree of integrity and purpose. One of those books is Silences, by Tillie Olsen. She speaks in particular of writers and how writers are silenced. So many of our major writers struggled heroically to get a few words down on paper. So much has been lost, has simply never come into being. Silences that have deprived us all of voices that could have helped us along the way, that could have made us feel less alone.

From Herman Melville, in a letter to Hawthorne, as Melville hurried to finish what is possibly the greatest American novel ever written, Moby Dick: "I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. . . . . Dollars damn me . . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot."

Kafka worked as an official in a state insurance agency and wrote when he could. He contracted tuberculosis, which killed him at 41. From his journal: "Outwardly I fulfill my office duties satisfactorily, not my inner duties however, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a misfortune that never leaves. What strength it will necessarily drain me of. . . . . I feel shaken to the core of my being."

Lack of money, illness, a needless perfection, debauchery, duties to others, a need to be loved—all of these are ways that we are silenced. Our lives may be reduced to necessity. Or perhaps controlled by compulsive needs. Or societal constraints. Or prejudice. Women and minorities are particular vulnerable to these latter realities. Katherine Anne Porter writes: "I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can’t suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted and completely crippled. . . . We don’t really direct our lives unaided and unobstructed. Our being is subject to all the chances of life." In the hundred years from 1850 to 1950, only eleven Black writers published novels more than twice. Things are changing now. We have Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Geoff Canada, Walter Mosley, Lucille Clifton. But think of the voices that have been silenced. Chicano voices, Native American voices. Think how we could have grown, could have expanded our sensibilities, had we had those voices as part of the cannon.

Our own Beacon Press is committed to recovering lost voices. They published my two books of women’s poetry, Geoff Canada’s books about young Black men, and in fact a whole series by near-forgotten African American women writers. One of these is Gayle Jones. As a very young woman, Jones wrote a powerful novel, Corregidora, which I read in the ‘70’s. That was followed with another novel and a short-story collection, and then her voice stopped—for more than 20 years. It seems that her husband was arrested for threatening others with a gun, and they fled the country, she leaving a tenured professorship. They returned to the U.S. in 1988, and when police attempted to serve an arrest warrant just a few months ago, they barricaded themselves in their home in Lexington, Kentucky. After three hours, the police rushed the house, and Jones’ husband slit his throat. He died later that night. All this occurred as Beacon was finishing publication of Jones’ new novel The Healing. In that book, Jones wrote, "But still they can kill you over love . . . . They can kill you over love as well as politics." Those years of silence. Where did they go?

Women writers. In the last century, of the women whose writing has endured, nearly all never married or married late: Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The very few who married and had children as young women—George Sand and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example—had servants. Are things that different now? Tillie Olsen writes of her own life: "In the twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. Nevertheless writing, the hope of it, was ‘the air I breathed, so long as I shall breathe at all.’ I was somehow able to carry around <the writing> within me through work, through home. Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began: ‘I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.’

Well, some might say, if she wanted to write so much, she should never have had children. That is a cruel judgment pronounced on women alone. It assumes that the mother is responsible for the rearing of children and not the father. It assumes an economy in which one salary is enough to pay the bills. No one would ever say of a man, "Well, if he wanted to be a doctor, then he shouldn’t have had children." But it is a question asked of women all the time. Of writers and artists. Of professionals. Of poor women who must work at two jobs, perhaps, to survive. "Why did you have children if you couldn’t take care of them?" we ask. And yet, who can do this task alone? Yes, it does take a village. And it takes work structures that respect the needs of parents and children. Flexible work hours. Excellent child care. Maternity leave. Paid leave for family emergencies. And it takes a revision of traditional roles.

Have you been following "Doonesbury" recently? With his biting humor, Gary Trudeau takes no prisoners. Mike is at the 15^th reunion of his high school graduating class, and he is talking with a classmate when the classmate’s wife walks up. The guy says, "Honey, you remember Mike Doonesbury, don’t you? We were just talking abut the joys of hands-on fatherhood!" The wife says, "O, gimme a break, Taylor! You do 20% of the work, tops! It just seems like a lot to you because your father didn’t help raise you at all." He answers, "So? It’s a step in the right direction! Our son will be able to build on my performance as a father!" "Great!" she says. "So in five generations you’ll start picking up socks?" By 1996 77% of all married women with school-age children were working out of the home or looking for work. And in these dual career families mom is carrying about 80% of the responsibility for the house and the children.

The good news is that I do see evidence of change, at least with the couples who come in for pre-marital counseling. They are thinking about these issues. They are seeing each other in a much more egalitarian way than even a few years back. Sometimes they are taking on a complete role reversal. Once I officiated at the wedding of a man who was an olympic hammerthrower and a woman who was a financial whiz. Both were graduates of Yale. They said they had decided that he was going to be a stay-at-home spouse, supporting her career and being the main caretaker of the children. I questioned them about this decision. I said to the young man, "What will you say when people become judgmental, when they ask you, ‘Why aren’t you working?’" He just looked at me from from atop that massive frame, that massive neck, and he said, "Well, if they say that, I’ll just beat them up." Being a homemaker is an honorable choice. I’m glad this strong man can make that choice. Others will follow.

It’s Mother’s Day, and as a mother and as a writer, I think back to the conflicts I experienced when I was raising my children. I have never known moments of greater bliss than at the birthing of my two sons, who came 16 months apart. I would have gone on being pregnant forever, if I could have. The only problem was the 18-year commitment after the birth. Or maybe it has now become the 25-year commitment. Or longer. Different parents are better at one stage of child-rearing than another. I was fine with infants and great with adolescents. It was the years in between that were hard—ages one through twelve. I just wasn’t cut out to be the mother of small children, but I didn’t know this until I had them. I thought that all women would just naturally be good at mothering. I found out, though, that children like to play; having never been a child, I was terrible uncomfortable with this propensity. The truth is that I am an introvert: I can’t stand noise—and children are very noisy little critters. I can remember on more than one occasion screaming at the kids, "I hate noise!"

And then there was the time when the boys got into my manuscripts. I composed on the same old portable Remington that I had gotten for Christmas during my senior year of high school. I remember my father said, "You can have a typewriter or a mutton jacket." Remember those? I took the typewriter, and it became my constant friend and companion—all through college and graduate school, into my teaching, and then into my marriage, where it seemed not to fit so well. I kept it next to the coat rack in the back hall, and I kept my writing in its secret hiding place in a lower kitchen cabinet, next to the avocado green fridge. One day my sons, Kash and Madison, discovered this stash of loose paper, pulled it out on the linoleum floor, and went at it with their crayons. I remember distinctly how I felt when I happened into the kitchen and discovered them—I felt violated. I was reduced to a kind of visceral, animal state, and I yelled, "Mine! Mine!" as I gathered the papers together. The boys looked up in confusion and fear. "Mine, mine!" At least it was an expression they understood.

Where was I living? Lexington, Kentucky. Where I had read Corregidora and felt the passion in Gayle Jones’ words. Where I had given up my own passion. I had bought into the role of the physician’s wife, without thinking that I could counter conventional thinking. Without the imagination to go a different way. Without the role models. With a surgeon husband who cut people open and took out all manner of vile things, but who never failed to gag at a dirty diaper. With a husband who loved me dearly and would have changed if he had known how.

This is Mother’s Day. Let us on reflect on what our mothers have given to us, sacrifices that may have silenced their voices, their talents. The women who might have been professors or doctors or teachers or concert pianists. Let us remember the meals cooked, the dishes washed, the clothes mended, the birthday parties planned, the letters sent, the bedtime stories read—all of the everyday tasks that make up the fabric of our lives, the warp and woof, of our living. And let us not forget the fathers. Let us remember the men who felt pressured by economic need to do work they never really wanted to do, that they could never give their hearts to. Who perhaps wanted to spend more time at home. There are vast silences there, too, and lost gifts beyond measure.

What is the answer? Can we have healthy families and yet find the expression of our individual promise? We can’t have all we want all the time we want it. Life just isn’t that way. But we can do better than we have done. I believe that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is a genuine sense that life is good. And to do that we as parents must experience the joy of fulfillment in our own lives. Only then can we let go of our children and let them become who they were meant to be. Martyrs do not good parents make. We have to continue to redefine gender roles so that men and women have choices that fit. We have to act politically so that the needs of the family won’t always take a back seat to the needs of the company.

I believe you are in this world for a reason. Each of you is a unique individual with callings peculiar to you. Pay attention to your body when it rejects the job and makes you ill. Pay attention when your spirit droops and you begin to withdraw from the beauty all around. Know that you are made for joy. To pursue joy doesn’t make you selfish—it makes you responsible, for it places you in the center of your longing, and that is where the Spirit resides. Don’t fear that you’ll be torn from goodness, torn from love. You will, you see, reside then in the very heart of love, and that is where all goodness begins and ends.

So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.