Mothering
May 8, 2005
2 Kings 4:8-37
We spoke last week about making Space within ourselves, our lives, our communities for the Holy Spirit, this presence of Jesus, this wind of God to guide and live within us, without fences or boundaries. Today, we meet that holy, sacred space in the Shumammite Woman and in Ellen Anthony’s beautiful poem, The Extra Room.
What’s so beautiful to me about the poem, is the notion that all sorts of things can help us to create that space…Extra time, unused or potential space, intentional practice, unanswered questions, life, death, hope, grief, anger, pain, pleasure…That in our living, no matter where it is we can find that extra room. And, we don’t have to wait to create it, it’s possible to create with what we have and wherever we are. This sort of space, this sacred, creative space defining what it means to mother.
Mothering and Mother’s Day have often been tied to being a birth mother. This concept of bringing another human being into this world, it is a sacred and important job in and of itself. And anyone who has been to that laboring room knows it’s some of the hardest and most frightening work out there. But, mothering, mothering is much different than biology and birth.
I love sharing the story of the Shunammite woman on Mother’s Day. One, I think it’s a story that not many people know. It drives Cathy crazy because the prophet’s slave’s name is remembered, Ghezi but the Shunammite woman is only known by her address. I love the story because I hear a lot of the ideals for mothering within it. She is excellent, this woman at hospitality. Worried about the holy one and allowing him respite. She makes room and gives to him knowing the exchange will be enough in and of itself to invite the holy into our homes. She mothers the holy. She creates safe space for his respite and wants nothing in return. She must work and create space for the holy to arrive and dwell within. And she’s doing all of this, before she becomes a birth mother.
I think the best mothers are those people that allow us this kind of extra room. Sometimes they are birth mothers but most of the time I think they are other people who come into our lives. Mothers are those people that allow us to hold death in our hearts or fear in our souls but whisper into our souls of new life and hope. Mothers are those people that allow us to preserve the windows and doors when all we want to do is block them up and shut the world out. Mothers are those people who when we disgrace ourselves and are filled with shame and guilt gather us up and lie us on the stone bed, breathing forgiveness into us.
As the paper has been filled with rhetoric about marriage and what makes a family unit these last two weeks, I find I am way beyond caring about gender or sex. I am more interested in supporting all of those women and men, people who have been called to do the mothering. People who have created that safe space that we might come into our full potential, not just flesh and bone, not just water or stone, but whole children of God. I am very interested in those who are doing the hard work of becoming mothers: Cindy, Lizbet, Becca and Keith, Amanda and Pam, Dacia and the youth group, Carol and the Sunday school, this community and these children and youth. These lives that pass through birth mothers and are called to be people of their own making they are looking for our safe space, our sanctuary, our extra room. For, it is clear to me that there are many voices out there calling people to fear, to hide, to deny, to blame. And, it is clear to me, that this world could use a lot more mothers, holding the sacred space. That whenever we need an extra room to stay, a place where we can say what we really believe in our hearts, that each one of us, would make the time to be present, to have a vacancy and to begin to mother. Let us pray.