Recipe for Grief
I didn’t have grieving on my agenda this morning. Does this happen to you? Isn’t it often a surprise, when you turn the corner and run into grief, like an old friend you had almost forgotten you knew, didn’t expect to see here of all places?
I was just thinking that making a blueberry cake would work better than blueberry pancakes to feed people who wake up and walk through in stages, over many hours, on a Saturday. Almost randomly, I picked up the closest cookbook I could find, to see if my hunches about measurements were more or less correct—I’m not a big recipe person.
That cookbook turned out to be one of those made by a church. In this case my childhood church. In this case, they made it after I was away at college and could not have cared less.I had never used this cookbook; I had no emotion invested in it; it was just the closest one that I grabbed. (I brought several cookbooks to my house when my father died last year and the old family house was shut down. No more pretense that these cookbooks would ever be used, as they hadn’t really, since my mother died in 2002.)
But it wasn’t my mother’s name or some special family recipe in the book that had my forehead suddenly mashed on the butcher block counter, overcome with loss. It was that parade of mothers—if there were men who contributed to this cookbook, I didn’t get that far—who I knew and loved and trusted throughout my growing up years. It was those familiar names, some for women I knew well, many just the last names of kids I went to Sunday School with. So many of them are dead now. Almost all the names I recognized belong to dead women.
When I think of the legacy of “The Greatest Generation,” I tend to think of the men, going stolidly into war against the Nazis, working long hours without complaint, mowing the lawn, participating in voluntary organizations. This cookbook walked me squarely into the legacy of that same generation of women. Women like my mother, the generation who parented ungrateful kids like me through “The Generation Gap” and the feminist movement and all kinds of other liberation movements. Women, so often bewildered, watching everything they assumed they would hand to their daughters and sons change before their eyes and under their feet.
My mother studied to be a teacher, but she, and the other women lucky enough to go to college, also took Home Economics classes. They learned to balance not only nutrition but color on the plate. They assumed without question that their inevitable husbands and eventual children would be the center of their lives. My mother taught me how to iron a shirt, sew, cook, can and preserve, set a beautiful table, host a party, chat with anyone. She taught me early on that motherhood would be the greatest endeavor I might possibly undertake. She taught me about Susan B. Anthony’s time in jail, too, and memorized Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman” speech with me. But all with an apron on.
This morning, head down on the soft wood of the kitchen counter, I felt the absence of that place she and the other women of her generation held. I felt the grief of the loss of those souls for whom making things right for the family was always the highest goal.
I was not sobbing with regret. I don’t wish a single thing were different. My mother and I ended her time on earth together with pure sweetness—me caring for her as tenderly as she had for me in my earliest days. My life choices have been mine, and even if made clumsily sometimes, they have been true. No, this was a stream of grief, running down from melted snow high in the mountains, pure and simple. People die, whether you know them and love them or not. No matter how lovely. Generations relinquish their truths to the new ones that rise. But, every now and then, seeing a long forgotten name over “Grandma Ruth’s lemon bars,” you remember.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, I am grateful to have been born and raised in a religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism, that has stood strong through the history of the struggle for reproductive justice. Today, I lift my voice to thank some of those Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists who have gone before, and who labor currently, for women’s equality, health and moral agency.
It’s always risky to call out folks simply because we share an identity, especially a religious identity. It can seem as if we are separating ourselves, or declaring ourselves to be part of a club. For me, this is an act taken to ground myself. As my own congregation prepares to hold an online service honoring the complexity and dignity of all families engaged in making moral choices around reproductive issues, I have been asked, “How dare you speak out about this, as if we all agree?”
I would never believe that a few thousand Unitarian Universalists would agree about anything whatsoever! All the studies show that people of other religions don’t begin to agree either, however, and yet their leaders have no trouble declaring that they speak the absolute truth, God’s truth. They claim that God is pro-life, anti-abortion, against women’s equality. So I, who have spent my life laboring in interfaith coalitions lifting up this other point of view, feel it is incumbent upon me to speak clearly as well.
Here come my thanks, to those who have gone before me and labor still, who ground me in this work, who dared before me and handed their daring to me.
I thank Margaret Sanger, who opened the first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, violating obscenity laws for telling women how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. While we certainly challenge her beliefs on eugenics, she had nothing if not bold courage!
I thank all of those who labored for women’s suffrage, women and men, Universalists and Unitarians, allowing politicians to be elected who would support women’s equality. Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Rev. Olympia Brown, Julia Ward Howe, Rev. Lydia Jenkins, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and so many others. I lift up your names with gratitude. Amendment 19, 1919. 19 is our lucky number.
I thank all of the Unitarian and Universalist women who worked to make birth control legal and available in the US. I think of the church women, whose names I do not know, who looked through birth notices in Connecticut papers and mailed information to new mothers, illegally offering them birth control access. They weren’t just being kind; they were spoiling for a fight. Eventually they got one, and in 1965, in Griswald v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that criminalization of birth control violated the right to marital privacy.
I thank all of the Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalists who worked to make abortion safe and legal. The women, and leadership, of First Dallas UU congregation moved this case forward. UUs passed statements at our General Assemblies beginning in 1963. Clergy, especially men, were part of founding and leading the Clergy Consultation service. Hundreds of people were involved with this; many of whose names I don’t know. Please share your own knowledge in the comments section!
I thank the religious educators who, in 1967, agreed that comprehensive sexuality education is part of religious education, and began the groundbreaking sexuality education programs that have been part of religious education programs ever since. There are thousands to name here—deryk Calderwood, Rev. Eugene Navias, Judith Frediani, Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, and dozens of other writers and curriculum editors. Hundreds of teachers and youth advisors who have led young people through it.
I thank those who continue to focus their ministries on reproductive justice and sexual morality. I think of Rev. Deborah Haffner, Rev. Robert Keithan, Rev. Kelli Clement, to name only a few. I thank the congregations who are actively engaged with supporting reproductive justice. There are so many folks to thank here! Please add their names in the comments section.
Finally, I thank the Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Univeralists who have laid your bodies on the line supporting women as they struggle through these difficult choices. People in medical clinics, providing escort services, literally standing by women. I think especially of my late friend, June Barrett, who was shot in Pensacola Florida, while providing escort service to women as part of her service to the Pensacola UU congregation. June’s husband, Colonel James Barrett, and the doctor they were escorting, Dr. John Britton, were killed. As she lay still in the truck, wounded, but not dead, with these bodies beside her, she told herself that she survived for one reason: To continue to help women have access to legal and safe reproductive choice. This she did until her death.
How dare I speak out about reproductive justice? I can honestly say that I have been given this daring by thousands of others upon whose shoulders I stand. Please join us on Tuesday, January 22, at 3 PM and 7 PM Eastern time, for our online service at www.livestream.com/questformeaning. We’ll be gathering as part of a long tradition.
