Mother's Day: 5/9/10

Mother's Day Sermon,
Holy Trinity Richmond/La Santisima Trinidad


Well, I always like to preach on Mother’s day, because I have never met a mother who did not remind me, at least a little bit, of Jesus. Because we are the ones who wash your feet! We are the ones who heal the owies, and we are the ones most likely to be called upon to feed the five thousand.

If you are a mother, you know what I am talking about. And if you are a mother, there's nothing I can tell you about being a mother that you don't already know. But if you are not a mother, then maybe you will do what I am going to do today. Maybe you will reminisce about your own mother. Maybe you will recall her in all her short-comings and all her glory.

When I think about how the Holy Spirit worked through my mother to bring me into the Episcopal Church, I picture it like this. In the beginning, the Spirit of God moved over the face of the deep and chlorinated waters of the Indian Springs swimming pool in rural Maryland. She then glided over the shallow end and kept moving until she rested on the sun-tanned face of Babs Warren, who immediately removed her sunglasses and sat bolt upright. She turned to the sunbathing figure of my mother lying next to her and proclaimed, "Joan! I've been meaning to tell you about this neat little church I've started going to! St. Michael and All Angels Church over in Adelphi!"

The next Sunday my mother took me there. She didn't say I had to go. She never said I had to go. She would just put on some great-looking little suit and say, "I'm going to church. Wanta go?" I did want to go. I always wanted to go. I had never set foot in a church until I was 8 years old so it was strange, fascinating and exotic to me. Since I was a girl I could not, of course, be an acolyte like my brother, but I did everything I could do. I joined the choir, I went to Sunday school, I played Jesus in the Easter pageant. I performed in the variety shows. I went to the pot lucks. After a while my mother got confirmed and I asked her if I could do that. She told me that I had to be baptized first, and I was all for that. And so I was baptized on Easter Even in April of 1962, wide-eyed and blasted with the Holy Spirit. A week later I was confirmed by Bishop William Creighton.

I remember standing a the communion rail, watching the Bishop move towards me. I didn’t notice that everyone else was kneeling, and my best friend, Laura Libby, kneeling to my right, desperately pulled on my dress to get me to kneel, which, mortified, I immediately did. The Bishop loomed over me, placed his enormous hands on my head and said,

Defend, O Lord, this child with thy heavenly grace: that she may continue thine for ever; and daily increase in they Holy Spirit more and more, until she come into thy everlasting kingdom. Amen.

Because my mother saved it for me, I still have the bulletin from that day.

My mother had purchased a beautiful white lacy dress for me for the confirmation. This purchase caused a screaming fight between my mother and father, so the dress must have been really expensive. My father boycotted the confirmation event, probably because of the dress. But I had the satisfaction of watching my priest, Don Seaton, storm into our apartment without knocking on the afternoon of my confirmation. He shouted at my father, who had been reclining on an easy chair, "Where the hell were you this morning, Dave Gardner?" I was thrilled.

My mother had extraordinarily high boundaries when it came to church work. She never joined the choir. I never saw her enter the church kitchen. She was never on the altar guild. Never even taught Sunday school. And for years she never joined a committee. I later realized that as the daughter of a preacher she felt she had done her time as far as church work was concerned all through her childhood and youth. But she was in those pews every Sunday, and finally, there came a time when she did join a committee.

My mother not only introduced me to the Episcopal church, she also introduced me to social justice. In the sixties the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (or ESCRU) was very active in the civil rights movement, and St. Michael and All Angels became involved too. This was the committee that my mother finally joined. Groups from the church would go out and participate in civil rights demonstrations which my Mother, however, felt were too dangerous for me to go to. But I remember joining my mother and a group from St. Michael's to picket a housing development in rural Maryland called the "Belle Aire Estates." They cluelessly advertised the fact that they would admit no black families to their housing developments. At twelve years old I walked proudly behind my mother in the picket line, carrying a placard and miming her obliviousness to the rude comments that were hurled in our direction.

In August 1963 the March on Washington was being organized and I begged to go. But in many quarters it was feared that the march would be a bloodbath, as so many marches had been in the South, and so my mother forbade me to go. Not many people in our church had the courage to go to that march, but my mother was one of them. She got to hear the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr., and all I got was her lousy bulletin from the march. It was clear from the remarks on the bulletin that the organizers expected the march might be violent as well. It read in part, "We call upon all marchers, black and white to resist all provocations to disorder and violence." The march, of course was a peaceful and history-making event.

My mother was also before her time in her support of what we now call gay rights, although she wouldn't have called it that. When I was five years old, she worked as an Arthur Murray's Dance Studio instructor. I loved watching my mother dance in rhinestones and her gauzy formal gowns. I noticed right away that most of her co-workers were good-looking young men who dressed extremely well. And they all seemed to pair off socially. When I asked her about this she told me that the reason they liked each other so much and were not married was because they were gay. And that's also why they are so much fun, she added.

The advent of the sixties seemed to suit my mother really well. In one of St. Michael's infamous floor shows, she organized a group of women to do a modern dance as beatniks. Dressed in black tights, long black turtlenecks and berets, they did a slow and Jules Feiffer-like modern Dance while they intoned the nursery rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old" My mother looked great in tights, and she was aware of this.

My mother, through St. Michael's church, also introduced me to pastoral care. We would frequently drive out with the church group to orphanages or half-way houses for youth to play with the children there. I clearly remember my mother sitting on the sidewalk with a few of the girls from the half way house, playing jacks and laughing.

After I left home my parents separated and my mother moved out of our little apartment in the suburbs, and into a breathtakingly dangerous neighborhood in South East Washington DC. She immediately made friends with her neighbors and allowed the children of the neighborhood to have the run of her small apartment, often feeding them or giving them small gifts. She was not tempted to move out of the neighborhood even when her apartment was, predictably enough, burglarized. Finally, one of her neighbors was murdered and our family insisted that she move into a safer area. So she moved to am apartment directly across the street from Christ's Church in a slightly safer part of town, as if to say that this was all the protection she needed.

Like many great women in history, my mother's courage and virtues did not always extend to her duties as a mother. But she had no patience for my complaints. She seems to lack the guilt gene that I inherited so strikingly. In answer to my protests about her neglect or her dishonesty, she would exclaim with great incredulity, "Oh, give me a break!" When pushed she might finally say, "Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! All right?"

By the time I was 24, which was the year she died, I had decided that her manifold sins and wickedness were beyond my powers of forgiveness. We were barely on speaking terms. I was in art school at the time, painting large silver cubes or something. When she ventured that she couldn't see that there would be any money in that, I took it as proof of her great, sabotaging lack of faith in me. Then, a week before she died, she heard me being interviewed on the radio for a show I was in. The next time I saw her, which was the last time I ever saw her, she embraced me and told me how proud she was of me – that she was glad I was doing what I really wanted to do, and was sure I would succeed. This exchange was so utterly uncharacteristic of her, that I don't think I uttered a word in response. Luckily I did return her embrace.

My mother brought me back to the Episcopal church again, twenty-some years later, when my long suppressed mourning for her reached a fever pitch, and going to church was the only thing I could think of doing. Over the years, especially when I was on the rocky path to holy orders, I have thought about her a lot. Sometimes, when I look out and notice that the front right pew is empty, I suddenly realize that is not really empty at all. I can feel her presence very palpably at those times, sitting right there in that front pew, in one of those great little suits.

As I wait with all of you for the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus in our passage today, I strive to experience forgiveness, to feel the breath of God on my life. And to realize, that like Jesus, my mother left only so she could come back again, in a way that leaves my heart untroubled, in a way that gives me in deep peace.

Peace she left me, peace she gave me. My heart is not troubled, and I am, now, finally, not afraid.

Amen.