From Your Minister
Podcast: Download (Duration: 7:18 — 6.7MB)
Subscribe: More
When it comes to justice-makers on the front lines, one group of people often shows up—mothers. And when mothers truly know that, as the saying goes, “there’s no such thing as other people’s children,” I believe we have the power to accomplish anything.
Consider Harry Potter, that young wizard. It was his mother’s love that saved him—only him—from the wrath of the evil Voldemort. As the wise wizard Dumbledore noted, “Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark.”
Frederick Douglass’ mother walked twelve miles in the night to simply lie beside his young body after he was sold away from her. Love that powerful leaves its own mark.
The power of Mamie Till’s love for her murdered son Emmett led her to courageously insist that his tortured body be viewed in an open casket. This caused thousands of people, especially Black people, to see (with one another, in community) the obscene physical result of racism in 1955. It was a foundational moment in the Civil Rights Movement, just as social media images are waking up many people today. Though many people tried to talk Mamie Till out of doing this, no future threat of violence was worse to her than the suffering she was already undergoing. Love that powerful leaves its own mark.
There are, of course, iconic moments when mothers directly influenced history. Phoebe Ensminger Burn, the mom of a young Tennessee legislator, pressured that son, Harry Burn, to “be a good boy” and cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of women’s suffrage. Tennessee’s vote for suffrage created enough states’ affirmative votes to add the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Good boy, Harry!
In my lifetime, the raging grief of Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey died in the Iraq war in 2004, finally broke the impenetrable bubble of silencing protection around criticism of that war. Millions and millions of people around the globe had protested the US invasion of Iraq, but the media barely acknowledged resistance (and social media was just emerging). Sheehan’s bottomless grief, embodied as she camped out for weeks outside of President Bush’s compound in Texas, put a human face on the resistance to war that mainstream media finally championed. No force can stop the voice of a grieving mother. Love that powerful leaves its mark.
Mothers’ grief and courage has been a large part of resistance movements globally. The Mothers of the Missing dared speak out about those being disappeared daily by the Junta in Argentina. Mothers have engaged in campaigns in opposition to handguns, GMOs, global climate change, mass incarceration (and specifically the war on drugs in the U.S.), drunk driving, and dozens of other problems that create lack of safety for children.
For many, motherhood brings a ferocity, an animal strength. We would much rather suffer ourselves than watch our children suffer, whether from health issues, oppression, or even the ordinary miseries of childhood. And, of course, I am not speaking only of biological mothers here. Anyone who deeply loves and cares for a child feels that bond, that willingness to sacrifice self without a second thought if it’s necessary to protect the child.
“There’s no such thing as other people’s children.” If we believed that, how could we allow so many children to work in sweatshops, live in poverty, die of starvation? If we believe that, how then can we harness our love for all of humanity?
In 1870 Unitarian Julia Ward Howe publically called for a Mother’s Day for Peace. The words of her Mother’s Day Proclamation are found in the UU hymnal and are often read during Mother’s Day services. The proclamation begins, “Arise, then, women of this day!”
It continues: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies…. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” It advises a time for women to gather to strategize, to “solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace.”
Media and policy makers do all they can to trivialize and dismiss the power of women, but it can’t be killed. I think of my own mother, who instilled in me my own passion for justice. Had she been born twenty years later, I am confident she would have run for office rather than serve as a high school teacher. She gave me the drive to be an activist and celebrated the opportunities I had which she did not.
And now, as I watch my own child come into young adulthood with a ferocious commitment to justice, I know that of any legacy I could leave, this is the one that means the most to me.
This justice-making is an intergenerational activity. It includes people of all ages, races, genders, abilities and methodologies. It includes people in prison and people in the outside world. But for this month, let’s just take a moment and honor the mothers!
- From Your Minister - July 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - June 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - May 1, 2020
Comments are closed.