May 13, 2007
Mothers' Day
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Call Your Mother
Ancient Testimony: Haggai 2: 1-9
When I title this brief meditation "Call Your Mother," I mean figure out your source. From whence do you come? And not in the cocktail party genre of the question. You know that genre: "So," looking at you with a starry vague sort of interest, "where do you come from?" If you say Martinsburg, West Virginia, and the person knows someone from Wheeling, West Virginia, you can act interested in each other for a while. This normal exchange parallels the other favorite human non-subject, which is "how did you get here?" People don't ask out of metaphysical interest; they mean which road. The Palisades? The Taconic? The Thruway?
When I think of mothers, I think of the question of source. The question of, really, how did we get here? Turns out most of us used the highway called womb. We came from inside a her. I mean a she. I mean a woman. Yes, this is embarrassing.
Having mentioned these embarrassing facts, I want to take one further step. Most of us don't really think we have a source. We consider ourselves sui generis. We come from yesterday or maybe the day before. Politicians tell us they remember the old neighborhood, but it is often an opportunistic memory, at best.
Isn't it interesting that these clichéd conversations about source and sediment cover up as much as they reveal? In other words, isn't it embarrassing to have a mother? And a source? A place from which you have come, from which you cannot not have come, which you cannot deny or not be from? I so wanted Katherine Hepburn as a mother. Or at least Mother Jones. Perhaps Molly Ivins. Or Sojourner Truth. Instead, I have Eleanor Osterhoudt, a secretary from Kingston, New York, whose father carried the mail and whose mother had a nervous breakdown every couple of weeks.
When we call our mother, we call up our smallness. We call up our fromness. We call out our sediment: the thing at the bottom that lasts.
Haggai understood. Listen to the way he starts his story: "In the second year of King Darius, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the Lord came to the prophet…" Listen to that sacred specificity of time and place. When we call our mother, we dial our sacred specificity. Haggai speaks to Zerubbabel, the governor, about what remains of the start-up. "Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory?" And by the way, "My spirit abides in you." Any of us who have therapeutically untangled the knots of the umbilical cord know all about these ways that the former glory abides in us, both positively and negatively.
When we call our mother, we go to our source. We get specific. We admit we come from some place and we are going to some place and that our original spirit abides in us, for good or for ill. How does Haggai end his sacred specificity? By saying that we will be restored to the best of what we were. One definition of a good mother is here: we want our children to best us.
How does the restoration occur? It occurs by a great shaking of the heaven and earth; the kind of rock and roll that comes at birth, through the birth canal. Sediment, seed, and shaking: these are our source and our destination. And "the latter splendor of the house shall be greater than the former." Amen.
