Blooming As We Age, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, April 9, 2010

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Blooming As We Age

        We are each other's

        harvest:

        we are each other's

        business:

        we are each other's

        magnitude and bond.

                                ~ poet Gwendolyn Brooks

        I love the way we celebrate Flower Communion here at UUCA. It’s a little messy, a little confusing, kind of like life is. And maybe the flower you were handed was not exactly the one you were hoping for, but it was a gift, and you accepted it with grace. We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. We give of one another freely, and sometimes the gifts we receive are not exactly the ones we thought we wanted.

        We are each other’s business, too, the poem says. Today is also the day we celebrate mothers, and I am remembering the first time I experienced Mothers’ Day in a Unitarian Church. It was located in a red state, in a geodesic dome planted out in the woods, not yet a church with a minister but a tiny fellowship full of refugees from the 1970s. I was excited to celebrate my first Mothers’ Day at my new church, and I invited my mother-in-law to come with me; it was her first time ever in a Unitarian Universalist worship service.

        And, that mothers’ day, person after person rose to talk about their difficult relationships with their mothers; how they struggled with a legacy of hurt or disappointment or emotional blackmail or failure to mind one’s own business. That Sunday’s program was less a worship celebration than a support group. I was pretty newly a mother myself then, and already aware how the love I felt for my toddler son was fierce but far from perfect. It was altogether too easy to imagine him, 30 years later, rising in such a service to complain about ME.

        Our relationships are complicated, and the Hallmark version of Mothers’ Day doesn’t begin to express the complexity of our lives and of our loves.

        Those 30 years have passed now, and a few more, and as some of you know this past February I held my infant grandson in my arms when he was not yet 24 hours old. Here was this new being, and I loved him instantly, fiercely, and without a jot of expectation for who he might become; I was simply excited to have the chance to witness his unfolding. It felt simple, anyway – much simpler than my relationships with my own children. The memory of my more anxious love for my own two children has come flooding back as I have watched my son and daughter-in-law negotiate this earthquake in a nine-pound package; watched my son struggle with his son’s inevitable evening fussiness, just as he would be getting home from a hard day at the office.

        Our relationships are complicated, but they are simple too – as simple as a flower changing hands, and a moment looking into one another’s eyes. Okay, you can say that’s a Hallmark moment too, but one of the epiphanies of my new grandmother state is that where there is kitsch, there are feelings that run very deep – so deep we don’t have words for them, or so radical we run from them in fear. The sentiment is a cover for something we don’t know what to do with.

        Take Mothers’ Day. It was proclaimed for the first time in 1870 by a Unitarian, feminist, abolitionist, radical woman named Julia Ward Howe. Listen to the words of her proclamation, still radical today as women and men continue to struggle with the issues of peace and conflict she graphically raises:

        These words are from the Mothers’ Day Proclamation of 1870:

Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."

        Put that on your Hallmark card. Is it any wonder that the meaning of this day has been co-opted by sentiment? Mothers’ Day, like motherhood itself, was born in blood and tears, in the aftermath of the unimaginable destruction of the U.S. Civil War, and do any of us have the courage to celebrate it honestly, year after year?

        Julia Ward Howe is not the only great and radical woman whose words have been papered over by sentiment. One of my personal sheroes is Lydia Maria Child, another Unitarian woman of the 1800s. I first encountered her when I discovered the powerful narrative of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman whose story, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” touched the hearts of women in the North and won scores of them to the abolitionist cause. Child, I discovered, had introduced Jacobs to her publisher, and had helped make sure this story was widely distributed. Further, Child had personally interceded with the powerful Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, carrying him a copy of her pamphlet, titled “On Behalf of That Class of Americans Called Africans,” nudging the conservative Channing toward the cause of Abolition. I saw in Lydia Maria Child a role model for how to be a white ally.

        So, how many of you have ever heard of Lydia Maria Child? She is remembered much less for these accomplishments on behalf of radical Abolition than for her day job writing “Better Homes and Gardens” type homemaker manuals for women. And for writing a poem that I bet all of you do know: “Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go ….” Etc etc etc, gag me with a spoon, as my kids used to say.

        Women are formidable beings. There is power in Motherhood, and in Grandmotherhood, that we would rather not acknowledge, apparently, as a culture. And therefore, as a culture, we cover it with sentiment.

        This year, in addition to making the passage into grandmotherhood, I turned 60, so I’ve been thinking a lot about becoming an elder. Of course 60 is the new 50, or is it the new 45? In any case, middle age is now thought to extend till 65, so I have a few years left. But elderhood is way more a state of mind – or maybe soul, as in the phrase, “old soul” – than it is a matter of years; I know 10-year-olds who seem wiser than I’ll ever be. And I know 90-year-olds who are younger at heart than I ever was. The New York Times ran a story last January about the bump in extreme sports among folks in their 80s and 90s. “My kids think I’m crazy,” said an 89-year-old whose thrill of choice is venturing out for a walk on the wings of airplanes, but the story quotes an economic analyst who says the market for extreme experience is booming among what used to be called the geriatric set.

        In his book, “Age-ing to Sage-ing,” Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi writes that people of any age become sages when they have done the inner work that leads them to an expanded consciousness. Self-reflection, being a non-anxious presence to my own inner struggles, is what will get me to wise elderhood, I believe.

        Role models help too, and this congregation is blessed with many, many luminous elders from whom those of you who are younger can learn. This is a very great gift of this religious home, and I implore you younger folk to look this gift straight in the eyes; don’t let it go by. If you don’t remember anything else I say this morning, I hope you will remember this. Many in this community have embraced the elder role as a time of wisdomkeeping, living out a sense of responsibility to the ongoing wellbeing of society and the health of the planet.

        “Older people are not just card-carrying members of Leisure World and midafternoon nap takers,” said Maggie Kuhn, who lived to be 89 and, you may remember, was the founder of the Grey Panthers. “We are tribal elders, with an ongoing responsibility for safeguarding the tribe’s survival and safeguarding the health of the planet. To do this, we must become society’s futurists, testing out new instruments, technologies, ideas, and styles of living. We have the freedom to do so, and we have nothing to lose.”

        I don’t think extreme sports will be a hallmark of my own elderhood, but I’d like to think that extreme loving will be – extreme, ever more non-anxious and uncomplicated, ever less sentimental, loving. Extreme thinking too -- a willingness to go to the edge, to act and speak from the wisdom I’ve nurtured, to speak and act for the world as it can be, a world where my grandchildren, and my grandchildren’s grandchildren, can live their lives in love and in justice. So may it be.

BENEDICTION

        We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. Whether you are celebrating a mother this day, a mother being celebrated herself, or whether you are remembering a mother with joy or with grief, may your love and your life grow ever fiercer, ever fresher, ever more extreme.

Photos of The Service

Sources and Inspirations

• James Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, Age-ing to Sage-ing