by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Come into this circle of love and justice;

Come into this community of mercy, holiness and health;

Come and you shall know peace and joy.

Today is Mother’s Day—there will be brunches, presents, flowers—and that is as it should be.

But I want to go deeper today with this mothering experience, for it is one that we all have in common—we are all torn from that same heart-root, we all enter the world trailing that same red valentine—

We come into this world reluctantly, always, for we leave a place where all is one complete circle of unity—where our every need is met—where there is a singular unity.  There is no separation in the womb, the two are one—and we become forever after painfully separate.

We forever more search for this lost sense of wholeness, of completeness—in various ways—for the cellular memory remains, the limbic memory that is beneath consciousness, but that is stronger than consciousness in directing our emotional life.

We search for it as we make love.  We lie there in the arms of our lover, naked and trusting and vulnerable, and in that union lose the self in a sweet oneness, an ecstatic unity—

We search for it perhaps even as we give ourselves to a cause larger than ourselves—the passion of the true believer, whether political or religious or whatever, may be a desire for this lost unity.

We search for it in mystical experience, which takes us out of chronos time and into eternal time, takes us into a place of blessed connectedness, where there is no space between ourselves and another.  I have been there in that place, though very infrequently, and it is a place where my anger and grief give way, and all seems as it should be—where all seems reconciled in a larger Unity that is Love.

In that first 22 months of life of the baby, some very basic developmental steps must be taken, or they can never be taken at all, or so our scientists say—this is the period when the child learns to trust, to know that that world is a safe place, or not.  Consider this.  Suppose you are a tiny helpless child, and you feel pain in your stomach because you are hungry, and you cry out.  What happens if no one comes?  Or if someone comes and roughly pushes a bottle in your mouth and it falls out and you cry again and that same act is repeated?  What happens if the cloth around your middle becomes wet and then grows cold, and you lie there growing cold and uncomfortable, and no one comes for hours on end?  What messages does your developing brain store if these things happen day after day, 4 or 5 times each day?  What is the difference if you’re a little squalling baby, and a mother comes quickly and holds you to her soft body and comforts you and gives you milk from her breast?  What if when the cloth around you becomes wet, it magically becomes dry and soft once again? 

Let me tell you about Rachel.  At age 11 she is a beautiful and intelligent child, but she steals money from her adoptive mother’s purse, her brother’s wallet, her teacher’s pockets.  She destroys her brother’s favorite things, his prized autographed baseball card and his new mitt.  At school she fights with other kids, and even when she does her homework, she won’t hand it in.  When little things upset her, she yells obscenities and pushes, shoves, or hits whoever happens to be near.

Consider this child’s history.  When Rachel was barely a year old and still living with her biological mother, a neighbor who was babysitting one afternoon found cigarette burns on Rachel’s bottom and reported it to the authorities.  Almost a year later, Rachel was reported to have multiple bruises and even more serious burns.  She was removed from her mother and after two years of foster care was adopted, at about age four—the parents were told that Rachel “lacked loving parenting,” which was something of an understatement.

Her adoptive parents tried their best to offer her love, but she would rarely accept or give affection.  When she didn’t get what she wanted, she would scream and hold her breath until she turned blue and passed out.  She was constantly aggressive with other children.  Her parents have no idea how to cope with her, and they fear that they may be forced by her behavior to confirm what Rachel already believes and screams at them—that they will “dump her.”

Rachel is an extreme example, you may say, but there are thousands of Rachels in Oregon right now.  Think about it.  Make her a boy with lots of testosterone running through her veins, make her older, give her a gun, and easy access to street drugs.  A scary thought. 

I want to tell you about an interesting study presented just this week at the Northwest Early Childhood Institute.  Robin Karr Morse and Vincent Felitti gave talks on the impact of early childhood experience on the development of brains, predicting future health problems and our propensity to criminal violence.  They spoke of ACE, or Adverse Childhood Experiences—and these had to be extreme—like abandonment by a biological parent, chronic harsh humiliation, beatings, sexual abuse or incest.  Felitti found that in a middle-class Kaiser sample of 13,000 people who seemed to represent America pretty well, 52% had suffered one ACE and 25% had suffered two.  He believes this explains about 60% of the obesity, legal and illegal substance abuse, depression, suicide, and anxiety that are epidemic.

Difficult stats to hear.  But two people in the Q & A asked what these 20-year-plus veteran researchers had found that did help adults with these brutalized histories.  Their resiliency depended on this:  (and I want you to remember this)  If one person, for even a brief time span, in a struggling child’s life, maintains a steady, caring, praising relationship and sends an unmistakable message that they think the child is wonderful and important, that child can get through a lot.  And adults can be helped as well.  For example, Kaiser general practitioner changed their office visits to ask, at one visit, each patient about whether they had suffered any ACE and then, without either shock or judgment, asked—how to you think this has affected your later life?  After listening, they scheduled just one follow up visit to talk more about any ideas they could find to help.  From just that much caring and listening, apparently those 100,000 plus patients went to the doctor a full 35% fewer times the next year and made 12% fewer visits to the ER.

What are the implications here for us as a religious people, and as citizens?  There are implications for child-friendly and family-friendly policies, such as maternity leave, and good affordable child care.  Implications for our education system, and for health care.  Implications for a living wage for working families.  If the parents are hurting and angry and feel trapped in a cycle of poverty, or near poverty, you can be sure the children’s needs will not be met.

As I heard about this study, I thought about all the volunteers in our Sunday school program and all of our lay minister—and all of the ways you folks support one another here.  We’ve had lots of visitors this fall and winter—you know, people don’t get up on Sunday morning and get dressed and drive downtown and search for a parking place to be entertained for an hour—no, they come to address the most serious questions of their minds and hearts, and they come to a place where they can be safe in revealing who they really are, and they come to a place where there is a loving, enfolding community—where they experience the kind of nurturing that we all need, grown-ups and children alike—

I think there are other implications in this study I cited, as well—implications other than public policy.  I think we need to rethink this idea of the nuclear family—this is really just a blip in the history of family life, after all—it came in the 1860s with the Industrial Revolution, and only in the Western world, for the convenience of business and industry—and so we are supposed to move away, leaving family and friends and church, to find better opportunities, now, for both parents, so that we can get ahead, and consume more of the things that we’re giving our life’s blood for.  Children were never meant to be raised by one parent staying at home—or even two loving parents—mothers in the West have too heavy a burden placed on them to be the main and sometimes the only source of attachment and trust for their children.  We need a constellation of loving and involved parent figures for children—and to get that, a different sense of how we might structure our family life. 

I am convinced that just as we all need mothering, no matter what age we are, and I am convinced that we are all capable of loving, nurturing behavior—men as well as women, young people as well as wise elders.  I want to tell you a story that moved me deeply.  It’s about a young man from Portland—and it takes us back 60 years ago, in WWII.  The man’s name was 2^nd Lt. David R. Kingsley.  He was a bombardier on a B-17 that was shot up over Romania.  After he dropped the bombs on the target, oil-storage tanks, he rushed to help two wounded gunners.  By then the battered bomber had lost an engine and a fuel tank.  The pilot gave the order to abandon the plane.  Kingsley helped one injured man jump, but he couldn’t find a working parachute harness for the second man.  And so Kingsley took off his own parachute and wrestled the wounded man into it and eased him out of the plane, not knowing whether that man would live or die.  But he knew he had sealed his own fate.  The man did live to tell the story.  He reported it like this:  “Before I jumped, I looked up at him and the look he had on his face was firm and solemn.  He must have known what was coming because there was no fear in his eyes at all.”

I see Kingsley take this wounded man in his arms like a mother holds her child, protecting that child, and pulling that parachute harness over than man’s shoulders and back, the way a mother would dress a child.  Kingsley was 25 years old. 

We are not all called to be heroes.  But we are called to notice the pain and distress of our neighbors.  We are called upon to be that special person who says to another, “I value you, I think you are wonderful,” that person who makes the difference to another.  We are called upon to act politically and to make public policy that supports families.  And we are called as a church to be open and welcoming and trustworthy, to create here that extended family that can offer to at least some extent what is missing in so many lives.

On this Mother’s Day, we remember the one who birthed us, and who birthed us in some pain, and we remember all those who came into our lives as nurturing persons, who cared enough to listen, who stood by us when we were in trouble, who gave something of themselves that we might grow strong and whole.  May we in turn become the listeners, the nurturers, the ones who in their love remind others of the Unity from which we all came and to which we all return.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

We come thankful this morning for those who mothered us, and those who mother us yet.  Forgive us when we become so involved in ourselves that we fail to notice that a word, a touch, might give another courage to go on.  Help us to give ourselves to ways of tenderness and care, that healing may take place in broken lives.  May it be so.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you leave this place, go with gentle hearts, for there are those all around you who need more kindness than you dream of.  Go in love and go in peace.