May 8, 2005

Rev. Henry Ticknor
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

Mother's Day Proclomation

I'm always surprised and pleased when something I see or hear provokes a very strong memory. I might be in a store and the smell of fresh baked bread reminds me of a favorite bakery I used to go to on Sunday mornings when I lived in Arlington and before I found religion.

Perhaps you are strolling in the woods when a particular scene takes you back to other adventures in the wild. Perhaps you are listening to a particular piece of music and your are transported to another time and place where you heard the piece for the very first time or you associate the melody with people who you remember but who are long gone. I know that we have all had these kinds of experiences.

One of my favorite radio programs is A Writer's Almanac. This five-minute respite from the cares and woes of the work-a-day world can be heard around noon on West Virginia Public Radio. It is a daily program of poetry and history hosted by Garrison Keillor. On Tuesday, Keillor read a poem that brought back many, many memories. The poem, An Observation, by May Sarton, reads like this:

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world. May Sarton

Sarton's poem instantly brought back to my mind some very strong memories of my own mother. By Sarton's definition, my mother was also a true gardener. She would work for hours in her garden, barehanded, weeding and pruning; mulching and edging.

She would care equally for the smallest of her plants and the showiest. She demonstrated that sometimes we have to be tough as we separate plants so that they will thrive and that sometimes we have to be sensitive and treat our plants with tender, loving care as when we protect them from a late frost.

She knew the Latin names for most of her plants and once received an award in horticulture from her local garden club. An award she proudly displayed in the powder room of her home. But that's another story for another day.

As I sat in my study reflecting on the poem I had just heard Keillor read, I suddenly realized that in many ways gardening was her spiritual practice. The garden was her sanctuary from the turmoil in her life.

As she aged I watched her hands grow scarred and knotted with arthritis, and yet each spring she would go into her garden to heal the wounded plants with her rigorous love. I remembered the time she put her hand in a hole she had just dug for a spring bulb, and she took out what she thought was a small rock. Well, the rock was actually a toad and it so startled my mother that she gave out a small shriek and I think poor Mr. Toad may still be in orbit.

But she found respite in getting her hands and knees dirty and she found peace from the cares of a large and busy family. I think she would have embraced these words from another work by Sarton: "When I am gardening I do not think of anything at all; I am wholly involved in the physical work and when I go in(side), I feel whole again, centered."

So it is that today we observe this year's celebration of Mother's Day. For the Ticknors, the second Sunday in May was spent as most Sundays in the early spring were spent—in the garden. My father would be outside working on his vegetable garden and my mother would be tending to her flower garden.

You see, I grew up in a family that largely ignored Mother's Day and as long as I lived at home I thought this was just fine. It was not until I moved away from home that I had the very rude awakening that in most families the importance of Mother's Day is second only to the highest holy days of the year.

There was a reason we didn't celebrate Mother's day and my great-great grandmother, Julia Ward Howe was to blame.

She is most famous as the author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Julia Ward Howe was a militant abolitionist, and her "Battle Hymn" poem was inspirational to the cause of the Union Army in the Civil War, the troops sang "God's truth is marching on," as they headed into battle, and "As [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."

But as the war dragged on and she saw the terrible price of conflict, Julia Ward Howe turned away from the militant attitude expressed so powerfully in her famous hymn. When the Civil War was over, she focused her attention on two other causes: voting rights for women, and world peace.

The year was 1870 and in Europe the Franco-Prussian war broke out. Writing in her Autobiography, Reminiscences, Julia wrote, "As I was revolving these matters in my mind, while the war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue being one that might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?'

She continues, "I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way to expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world.'

The document she drafted became known as the Mother's Day Peace Proclamation.

She wrote that, "The little document which I drew up in the heat of my enthusiasm implored women, all the world over, to awake to the knowledge of the sacred right vested in them as mothers to protect the human life that causes them so many pangs." Her basic conviction was that though the world may be divided by war and conflict, there is something in the experience of childbirth binding the mothers of the world together into one family.

She began organizing what she called "Mothers' Peace Day" festivals which were celebrated annually on June 2nd. The struggle to gain voting rights for women, the cause of peace among the nations of the world, the fight against poverty and the abuse of children, these were the central concerns of those who established Mother's Day.

From the beginning this was a day not simply to remember one's own mother, but to find in the experience of such active, courageous mothers as Anna Reeves Jarvis, the woman popularly credited with the institutionalization of Mother's Day, and Julia Ward Howe, lessons that apply to all. These women were not celebrating the mere fact of bearing children, but lifting up ideals that the entire human family could support.

Let me now invite you to open your hymnals to page 573 and read in unison Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation:

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered 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."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –

Howe concluded her proclamation with these words:

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient. And the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Unfortunately, the end of the nineteenth century was not a great time for her to start this campaign. Americans, it seems, were tired of crusades in general and war in particular. In Europe her ideas received little attention either.

Nevertheless, late in 1873 she decided to sponsor annual observances of Mothers' Peace Day. But even these events were sparsely held and poorly attended. The most obvious reason, the women's suffrage movement was beginning to take hold and the energies of most of the prominent women of the day were directed toward the goal of voting rights for women.

The memory of her festivals, held in late May or early June were probably the basis for our contemporary Mother's Day. However, our contemporary feast for florists, greeting card sellers and candy makers bears little resemblance to Julia Howe's original idea.

When one looks at my great-great grandmother in her long Victorian dresses and her little white bonnets, I somehow can't picture her joining Women Baring Witness to make a giant peace sign by lying on the ground.

But I can certainly see her standing tall with other women to cry out against the daily carnage in Palestine and Israel. I can see her marching arm-in-arm with the 40,000 women who gathered in Colombia a couple of years ago to call for an end to the terrifying violence that has engulfed that nation.

I can see her speaking out against the violence in Iraq, standing in the cold with Code Pink: Women for Peace in the 4-month vigil in front of the White House. I can see Julia Howe, mother of six walking down the streets of New York with Military Families Speak Out, holding a sign saying, "I did not raise my son to kill your son."

In honor of an idea that never took hold of the popular imagination, the maternal side of my family never chose to celebrate the contemporary version of Mother's Day.

Instead it was a day set aside for gardening, reading and family activities. It was a day set aside to honor the contributions made by all women to create a better world. But most of all it was a day set aside to think of peace. Peace in our families, peace in our communities, peace in our nation and peace in the world.

Let us remember that the original call for honoring mothers was not to give them trinkets or breakfast in bed. In the name of womanhood and humanity, Julia Howe called for a day when women would come together to "promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Celebrate Mother's Day as you will this year, any year. But if there comes a year when breakfast in bed, a card, a call, flowers, even a whole day of Mom-picked favorite activities lose their meaning or no longer seem adequate, choose something else. Plant a garden, read to a child, volunteer, sing, paint, write a letter of protest, fix a wrong, cook, create beauty. Anything, as long as it grows from your reverence for life and longing to celebrate the source of life.

And so, today, we honor all mothers - whether biological or spiritual - all nurturing women, all people everywhere who cherish the gift of peace as basic to all others - in their homes and in the world.

Amen and Blessed Be