Call to Worship: Mother's Day Proclamation 1870
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears!
Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
"Our husbands shall 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 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 devasted 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 out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow 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 then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace,
And each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
Julia Ward Howe

Reading: 1000 Grandmothers Holly Near
Send in a thousand grandmothers
They will surely volunteer
With their ancient wisdom flowing
They will lend a loving ear
First they'll form a loving circle
Around the wounded wing
Then contain the brutal beasts of war
Sweet freedom songs they'll sing
A lullaby much stronger
than bombs and threats to kill
A force unlike we've ever known
will break the murderer's will
To the prisons we'll invite them
The most violent men will weep
when a thousand women hold them strong
and pray their souls to keep
Let them rock the few who steal the most and rule with youthful charm
so they'll see the damage that they do
and will fall into grandma's arms
two thousand loving arms
If you think these women are too soft
to face the world at hand
then you've never known the power of love
and you fail to understand
An old woman holds a powerful force
when she no longer needs to please
She can cut your shallow lie to bits
and bring you to your knees
We best get down on our knees
and pray for a thousand grandmothers
Will you please come volunteer
No longer tucked deep out of sight
will you bring your power here
will you bring your power here

"I have a friend who is an artist. Before he left Vietnam forty years ago, his mother held his hand and told him, "Whenever you miss me, look into your hand, and you will see me immediately." Over the years, my friend looked intohis hand many times. The presence of his mother is not just genetic. Her spirit, her hopes, and her life are also in him. When he looks into his hand, he can see thousands of generations before him and thousands of generations after him... He told me he never feels lonely." Thich Nhat Hahn

Mother's Day is can be an emotional minefield for many of us, something that isn't acknowledged in any commercials.

Mother's day celebrations can so easily exclude and hurt. We have mothers who have died, children who have died, or those who have painful memories of your mother or of your children. We are single parents, we are adopted, we have adopted children, we have put children up for adoption, we want a baby, we are gay, we share custody or we have no custodial rights to children that we miss.

On Friday, I went to pick up my daughter from her pre-kindergarten class, they were just finishing the creation of their mother's day gifts. One of the girls needed help with her glue and as we were working on it, she looked up at me and said, "I'm going to give this present to my daddy because my mother passed away."

After school was out, we went to the playground. "What are you doing for mother's day?" I heard one woman in the playground ask another. "Oh, I don't know," she said, "How about you?" "I can't wait for mother's day. I've been planning it for weeks. I'm going to sleep in and go out with a friend for lunch and then go for a long bike ride by myself." "What a great idea!" the other woman said. "Yeah, the best mother's day present for me is one where I can get a little break from mothering."

I loved listening to that conversation, first of all, because I think it is so true. Family life, especially with young children, is so rewarding and yet so relentless. I heard this mother in the park echoing my own feelings that we can only do motherhood justice when we have time away to take care of our own needs. And we need to do this a whole lot more than one day each year. We need time away from family to have the energy it takes to do family well - or at least as well as we can anyway.

What I also appreciate about the playground dialogue, and about the poignant words from the motherless child, was musing over how we have come to a cultural understanding that mother's day is emotionally clear cut and that all mothers really need on mother's day is to be thanked with tulips and cards.

Don't get me wrong - tulips and cards and especially home-made mother's day gifts are so fabulous. But there is one big thing that makes it obvious to me that this holiday is driven by marketing executives, not mothers.

What the executives have missed is that what I really want for mother's day is something that cannot be sold at the local market or fit into a 20 second commercial. The mother at the playground's vision of mother's day is close but that is not it either.

What I really want for mother's day to be thanked not by a gift but by a peaceful world that will allow my children to grow in the ways of love, a world that will affirm, not contradict, what I have devoted my life to teaching my children.

With the overpopulating of the world, we cannot afford to raise another generation of hungry and obedient consumers. If we are going to have children then we need to raise a generation who can be critical of our consuming culture, walking gently on the earth and sharing with others.

So let's see if we can get that into a pithy campaign.

Indeed that is exactly what Julia Ward Howe was attempting to do with her Mother's Day Proclamation. To celebrate and commit to what mothers want - what we really, really want. The Mother's Day for Peace, as it was originally called, had momentum for nearly a decade. It only took that long before capitalism got its hands on it and made it into a day to glorify motherhood instead of glorifying the peace that all mother's want for their children. I think most mothers would choose peace for their children over standing on a motherhood pedestal any day.

Julia Ward Howe was passionate about women's rights and passionate about abolishing slavery. What she loved most about the Mother's Day for Peace was getting women away from their domestic life to give voice to their hopes and dreams for the world, especially when it came to protecting world's children from the devastations of war.

She saw first hand the devastations of the American Civil War. She wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is a pro-war song. However, remember that she was an abolitionist and she wrote The Battle Hymn as testament to Union's ability to end slavery once and for all. When she saw war break out in Spain soon after the American Civil War, she knew that the need for peace was an international concern.

She had a bit of marketing savvy in her. She didn't call this day the International day of Peace but rather Mother's Day of Peace, knowing that no political group could argue for peace with more integrity of purpose than mothers.

She once wrote "The little document which I drew up in the heat of my enthusiasm implored woman, all the world over, to awake to the knowledge of the sacred right vested in them as mothers to protect the human life which costs them so many pangs. My first act was to have my appeal translated into various languages, to wit: French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and to distribute copies of it as widely as possible. I devoted the next two years almost entirely to correspondence with leading women in various countries. I also had two important meetings in New York, at which the cause of peace and the ability of women to promote it were earnestly presented. In the spring of the year 1872, I visited England, hoping by my personal presence to affect the holding of a Woman's Peace Congress in the great metropolis of the civilized world."

I think Julia would be heart broken to see how commercial this holiday has become. She would celebrate women's ability to vote and have financial independence but she would mourn how mothers still send their husbands and children and to war and now even send themselves to war, leaving their children behind sometimes forever. I think she would be working side by side with Cindy Sheehan and others like her. There is a Unitarian Universalist Church in Overland Park, Kansas that is reviving Julia Ward Howe's mission and created an organization called Julia's Voice. They have a website if you are interested in seeing all that they are up to.

Invisible Work ~ Alison Luterman ~
Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.
There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart. There is no other art.