"What Have You Nurtured Today?"

Bruce Beisner
May 10, 2009- Mother's Day

READING: "A Collaborative Effort" by Barbara Rohde

I have always lacked enthusiasm for Mother’s Day when I am the mother involved. Birthdays are different. Birthdays are about who I am inside, and what my history walking this earth has been- what someone has called “the majesty of particular existence.” I’m pleased when people tell me they’re glad they have shared some of that life with me and would like to share more. But I tend to think of a Mother’s Day celebration as a generic birthday party.

I suppose my lukewarm feeling toward the day began when my children were very young and each year served me lukewarm eggs for a “surprise” breakfast in bed. Sitting in solitary splendor with my glass of skim milk rather than my usual steaming coffee, I would much rather have been downstairs with the rest of the family, giggling around the dining room table.

But the older I get, the stronger understanding grows of how many people have helped to create and to nourish my children’s bodies and spirits. I feel silly being singled out for praise when I remember the gifted teachers who inspired them, the adult friends who comforted them, their comrades throughout the years who have loved them and challenged them and kept them singing.

If we’re going to observe the day, let’s recognize that as parents we did not raise our children by ourselves. Let us remember, as children, how many people it took to bring our being into existence.Let us praise those who have created us and bequeathed to us the gifts of life. Let us praise all the mothers and the fathers among us and the care they have given us. But let us also praise those who have preserved and passed on our great cultural heritage. Let us praise those who have nourished us physically, but also those who have stimulated our minds and fed our spirits; those who have created a home for us, and also those who labor so long to make the world more homelike. As we praise these people, let us vow to hand down this legacy, not merely to our own children but to all the children of the earth.  

SERMON: "What Have You Nurtured Today?" by Bruce Beisner

At the end of each episode of her recent VHI reality show “The Drag Race”, drag queen superstar Ru Paul offered the remaining contestants on the program these words of wisdom, “Remember if you don’t love yourself how the hell are you going to love anyone else.”
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Maya Angelou echoes this sentiment, though with slightly different language. Angelou wrote in her memoirs, “God loves me. Each time I allow myself to say the words I am suffused with tears of gratitude and wonder. And I am reestablished as a giving, living, full human being with every right to everything here on this earth. “

On this second Sunday in May, this Mother’s Day, I invite you to join me in exploring some very basic human questions:  Who am I?  How did I become me?  Do I love myself?  Am I my own creation or the result of being nurtured and nurturing others?

When my husband Jim and I were going through the process of becoming certified to be adoptive parents, we met with a social worker named Brittany on several occasions. We’d talk about all kinds of issues surrounding parenting. I remember in one conversation I made the statement that I really felt my mother and father had been amazing parents.  I recounted how my mom had taught my older brother and me about the evils of racism by sharing stories around the kitchen table of when she was a child growing up in the segregated South.  And how my family would gather around the TV on Sunday nights to watch “M*A*S*H*” and every week after the show would end my dad would pull us aside and tell us “You have to remember that this was just a TV show and in real life war is not funny, it’s tragic.”
When I was 6 years old, my mom read me a science fiction novel called The Ark of Venus. In the book, a young boy had to decide how to react to violent protestors trying to stop his mission to outer space. Right before his father was killed by the angry mob, his dad told him, “Remember violence begets violence.”  You know, last week when I watching MSNBC and heard a spirited debate about the use of torture at Guantanimo Bay, I thought about that book. “Remember violence begets violence.” That simple, meaningful message was ingrained into my consciousness by my parents.

During our adolescence, both my older brother and I somehow avoided all those pitfalls which can devastate and complicate life. Both of us have become adults without struggling with drug addiction or doing time in jail.  I told Brittany, our social worker, that I gave all the credit for this to my parents and openly wondered how when I had a child of my own if I could follow their model. Brittany replied by saying that from her experience kids have with their own identities, whether they come to us from biology or through adoption. Thoughtful parenting goes a long way, but ultimately as a dad needed to know that I wouldn’t really be in control. This means that if my daughter gets straight As, I can’t take all the credit but if she encounters significant struggles, it’s not all my fault. 

In The Prophet, Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran reminds us “Your children are not your children, They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow.”

So how do we become ourselves? How do we learn to fall in love with the face in the mirror?

A couple of years ago I heard a UU minister tell a group of potential new members of his congregation that if they wanted to understand the faith perspective of Unitarian Universalism they should go and read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self Reliance.” So I went and read it.
In the first part of his landmark essay from 1836, Emerson instructs his listeners, “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.”  He’s holding up the power of individualism, saying you have to be yourself and trust your inner voice.  A very UU value to say the least. But my question is how does that inner voice, that sense of self, learn how to speak?

During my freshmen year in college, I was walking through a local bookstore when I came across a little white book with a rainbow on the cover. In bold purple letters it’s titled announced “You Can Heal Your Life.” I picked it up, bought it and took it home. I read it and re-read it. In those well worn pages, author Louise Hay told me that I was the one who was responsible for my life. I had the power to decide how I would think about myself and how I would think about the things that happened to me. On those long first nights of living in Cincinnati on my own, Louise (alone in my dorm room, we came to be on a first name basis, she kind of was my best friend), assured me that I could do it!
The central message of that little book was that I was the one responsible for nurturing myself. It was good stuff at a time when I found my life not so affirmed by my surroundings. But over the years, I have come to understand that Louise and her books had nurturing me. 

That inner voice that Emerson calls us to head, developed in me, and I suspect in you, because it was nurtured. It has to be held, loved, cared for.

For many people, a powerful nurturing source throughout their lives is their concept of God. That unconditionally loving spirit that resides in us and among us, offers assurance that we are worthy and whole.  In the book of Isaiah, the God of Abraham tells his people “I promise to be with you. I promise to comfort you, to sigh deeply with you over all your pain. “ For others, it is Mother Earth that offers the affirmation that spurs development of the inner voice. Standing in wonder and witness to the awesome grandeur of that which surrounds us, reminds us that we are each essential strands in the web of life. In the Bantu tribes of Southern Africa, there is a saying called “Ubuntu” which means “I am because we are.” As Desmund Tutu explains it “Ubuntu means that you can’t be human by yourself.”  Thus we are defined and nurtured by our relationships with others from the day we’re born until the day we die. There are many sources of nurturing and ways we can be nurtured.

In looking at America’s current political climate, author and professor of cognitive science George Lakoff, says that those of us that identify as progressives or liberals all share some common ideas about nurturing. We see society arranged around what he calls a “Nurturant Parent Model.” In his book, Moral Politics, Lakoff says this model is based on empathy and responsibility. We act not from fear of punishment but out of love and respect for ourselves and others. We learn to take responsibility for our own lives and naturally feel an obligation to the world. There is no dichotomy between self interest and altruism, for in standing for human dignity, equality and cooperation, we are all nurtured. Lakoff explains that the cultural conflict between conservatives and liberals comes from holding different ideas about nurturing. Conservatives favor a model based on absolutes, obedience and tough love while progressives work from a model based on freedom, diversity, and a focus on the common good. 

Mother’s Day is a great holiday, but it is also a complicated one. In preparing to speak today, I felt it was important to remember that for all of us in this room, our relationships with those that birthed us are not simple. They are complicated and complex. Some who are mothers, like Barbara Rohde in our reading this morning, feel uneasy about being singled out for a task they know they were only a part of. She reminds us “It takes a village.” For some of us, that ideal of a nurturing mother is far away from our personal experience. One of my best friends from college was adopted by a woman who suffered from severe mental illness. Her illness resulted in her being unable to care for him and he ended up living in foster home after foster home for much of his childhood. The pain of this time in his life has definitely shaped who he is today.  Another close friend’s mother committed suicide when she was four and her father raised her as a single parent. Mother’s Day is not big on their lists of holidays to celebrate, especially when it’s seen only as the cheerful, endearing words on the inside of a Hallmark card.

Whatever our early family life was like, whatever pain formed us, whatever songs spoke to our souls, we were each nurtured by something. And we are all called to be nurturers to this world.

Nurturing others comes naturally when we treat ourselves with compassion, kindness and openness. When we recognize and honor the forces that have cared for and formed us. Our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to live with empathy. To seek out true connection to others based on feeling with them. In an essay from the Protestant meditation magazine Sojourners, Jim Wallis wrote: “At times I think the truest image of God today is a black inner city grandmother in the US or a mother of the disappeared in Argentina or the women who wake up early to make tortillas in refugee camps. They all weep for their children and in their compassionate tears arises the political action that changes the world. The mothers show us that it is the experience of touching the pain of others that is the key to change.”

When I read that passage, I thought of Judy Shepard, the mother of Matthew Shepard. Judy spoke this past Tuesday night at the University of Cincinnati. She talked about her son who was brutally murdered in 1998 because he was gay.  Since Matthew’s death, Judy and her husband have traveled the country speaking out against anti-gay violence and offering support for parents struggling with the sexual orientation of their daughters and sons. Their activism played a major part in the passage two weeks ago by the U.S. House of Representatives of the Matthew Shepard Act, a bill which expands the definition of federal hate crime statues to include crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

In hearing her story, perhaps the part that struck me most was her account of the trial of the two young men who were convicted of murdering her son.  During the sentencing phase of the trial, Mrs. Shepard publicly requested that the prosecutor, judge and jury not seek the death penalty.  As a mother who had lost her only son, she reached out to offer compassion and empathy to his killers. Her actions spared their lives. This prophetic defense of the inherent worth and dignity of every person touched me deeply. It nurtured the spirit of forgiveness in me.

In the way we walk in the world, we are nurturing others.  When we acknowledge the humanity of the man outside the coffee shop asking for change rather than just ignoring his presence, we are agents of love. When we change a diaper, pet our dog, or recycle our garbage, we are transforming the world.

So this Mother’s Day I ask you to think about: What have you nurtured today? What have you given birth to, in yourself, in those around you?

Psychotherpist Molly Young Brown says “Nurturing comes naturally to us when we love and accept ourselves on a deep level. Our love bubbles up and overflows to those around us. We find our greatest satisfaction and fulfillment in making contributions to the world in ways that are uniquely our own.”

May we all leave this time together thankful for that which formed us, affirmed in who we are, filled with expectation of who we will become, and empowered and inspired to nurture that inner voice within.  May we all be mothers, nurturers, to ourselves and to the world.