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In Defense of Mother's Day

5/9/2018

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by Paula M. Fitzgibbons
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Every year at this time, blog posts and news reports appear begging mothers to consider all the people for whom Mother’s Day might not be a pleasant holiday. The growing trend is to request that mothers yield the day to those who have experienced loss.

I wonder if it’s because Mother’s Day holds its roots in feminism. Early incarnations included ancient Greco-Roman celebrations of the mother Goddesses and a day for mothers of opposing sides during the Civil War to reconcile. The more formal holiday grew out of feminist calls to action, the most renowned being Julia Ward Howe’s late 19th century request for mothers to unite for world peace.

It is indeed a helpful reminder that compassion and empathy for those who have experienced loss are two callings we should strive to fulfill. Must we do so, though, at the expense of celebrating the important values and lessons we learn from the women who came before us?


This especially presents a challenge for communities of faith, who traditionally celebrate Mother's Day with gusto.

I have been a motherless child. I spent over two decades estranged from my mother, who passed away just a few years after we re-united. I have also been a childless woman, desperate to enter motherhood. I spent years struggling with infertility and awaiting adoption. I understand how painful it can be around Mother’s Day to have images that evoke personal loss punctuate one’s time and space.

I also know, though, how affirming it can feel to have our families, friends, and faith communities celebrate motherhood each year. Perhaps  faith communities should think twice before eliminating a liturgical nod to Mother's Day.

Consider the following:

1. Mothers in the U.S. are a marginalized population. It might not seem this way to people without children, who are tired of our double-strollers crowding sidewalks and our whining children disturbing their nights out (or to at least one woman who thinks that maternity leave should be available to women without children). However, U.S. mothers are regularly mommy-tracked in our careers. Unlike much of the world’s mothers and despite many of us requiring, at minimum, physical recovery time, we are not guaranteed pay for maternity leave. Child care is often prohibitively expensive for U.S. families, typically leading to one parent staying home. Since, on average, women are paid less than our male counterparts for the same jobs, it usually falls on women to sacrifice our careers if necessary to care for our children.

2. Father’s Day, the male equivalent to Mother’s Day, does not receive the same level of scrutiny and criticism. My Facebook feed isn’t filled each Father’s Day with calls to be more considerate of fatherless children and men who struggle with the loss of fatherhood. Father’s Day even holds the distinction of having been created largely so that fathers would feel included in celebrations of parenthood.

3. A day meant to celebrate women is the one secular holiday that U.S. Americans seem to want to micro-manage. There are various annual, secular holidays besides Father’s Day that celebrate a particular faction of people to the exclusion of others without the scrutiny held over Mother’s Day. When Veterans Day rolls around, those of us who are neither veterans nor closely connected with veterans step aside to allow the beneficiaries of the day to hold their spotlight. We even line up to participate in parades where we cheer on people we might not even know. Likewise, Valentine’s Day is typically considered for lovers, the crux of Halloween for children. Though we should never force pointed holidays onto those who don’t celebrate them, we can and do allow specific groups of people their special days.

4. The U.S. American calendar is filled with non-holiday events and experiences that provide opportunities for some to the exclusion of others. As long as exclusivity is not born out of bigotry, hatred, or support for inequality, this can be okay, even necessary. Non-runners, including those of us unable to run due to disabilities, typically do not begrudge runners their races, even though they close our roads and clog our neighborhood coffee shops several times a year. Adults don’t ask children to enjoy their school breaks less because we don’t receive the same amount of time off. We don’t request that college students avoid expressing their pride on social media about scholarships or other accolades they receive as academics, even though non-students don’t receive scholarships for general living. Everybody can’t be a part of everything, nor should we expect total inclusion.

5. More than any other group of people, it seems, mothers are constantly told how we are supposed to carry out our roles. We are given conflicting advice, backed by convincing, but also conflicting, science regularly. We are pandered to by corporations that want our money, criticized and prosecuted by legislators who want to control us, simultaneously demonized and deified by the media. Now we are being told to be careful about how we celebrate Mother’s Day because people who are not mothers, or who don’t have healthy relationships with their mothers or motherhood, might feel excluded. To be tossed into yet one more battle that divides and belittles us, a battle that few else are asked to enter with regards to other secular holidays, feels like another way to control women in general, mothers specifically.

Within a contemporary feminist context, Mother’s Day affords us one day a year when we can hope for a neutral zone, when mothers can support and celebrate one another, despite our culture’s insistence upon dividing us. It also offers families who choose to celebrate the day together a formal pause in family chaos to reflect upon mother/child relationships.

The concept of motherhood can be an emotionally loaded challenge for many people. I understand and have been there. I also believe that we can honor the losses surrounding mothers and motherhood within our culture while creating space on Mother’s Day for mothers and families of every incarnation to choose to celebrate motherhood as desired—inside and outside of faith communities—without fear of repercussion, guilt, and division.

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​A version of this post was originally published at mommymeansit.com.


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Maundy Thursday Made Me Love My Feet

3/26/2018

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by Carol Gritzkey
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While attending Maundy Thursday services in the past, I had never participated in the foot washing ceremony. The reason? Pure vanity! I’ve never liked my feet. They are big, I have a bunion, and, at least to me, my toes are funny looking. My mom would always answer my complaints with, “But you’re tall, your feet are proportionate, and they support you so well.” This didn’t make me feel much better as I longingly gazed at her size 6’s.

One of the perks of aging is that you stop caring so much about what others think, thereby squelching some of that vanity. Last Maundy Thursday, during a most solemn and inspiring service at St. Andrew's, I didn’t think twice as I removed my shoes and stepped forward to have my feet tenderly washed, then kneeled and washed the feet of the next person. They were small, perfect feet, with perfectly graduated, artistically painted, tiny toes!

On the drive home, I found myself crying tears of humility, happiness, and of a feeling of Christ within me, and I made a promise to God that I will never again complain about the perfect feet God gave me.

This year, on Maundy Thursday, perhaps you, too, will feel compelled to come bare your feet and your soul and feel the love of Christ in the hands and the water that caress your beautiful feet.

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Ash Wednesday: A Proclamation of Love

2/8/2018

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by The Rev. Brenda Sol, Rector
PictureThese hearts were made at a St. Andrew's women's retreat.
Strangely enough, Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day this year (maybe even wilder is that Easter will be on April Fool’s Day!). Not so strangely, on both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, a proclamation of our dependence on the beloved is made.

Although most of us wouldn’t identify our emotions as “dependence” on Valentine’s Day, and the “beloved” is focused on our most treasured humans instead of God, we are claiming we’d rather not be without that person. Conversely, we probably don’t think of our confessions on Ash Wednesday as a proclamation of love. And, yet, a confession and an oath of love are very much related.

The point I’m trying to make is simplified in the over-used phrase embedded in many Country Western lyrics: “Your love makes me want to be a better man.” So on Valentine’s Day we say to our beloved, “I like who I am when I’m with you.” And on Ash Wednesday, we say to God, “Because of your love, I want to be a better person.” The inextricable link between the two ideas is highlighted in scripture: “We love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).”

Lent is referred to as “the season of penitence,” but if we focus only on the part of confession that lists our “manifold sins and wickedness,” as described in Holy Eucharist Rite I, we don’t overlook the opportunity for repentance. God’s intention is for metanoia, which is the in Greek word for repentance.

While penance is a very necessary acknowledgement of the ways we have fallen short of our plan to live a holy life, repentance is about a transformative change of heart. At the most basic level, metanoia is about turning back to God, so that we are once again open to, and aware of, the depth and breadth of God’s love — despite our brokenness; despite our pain; despite our close-mindedness.

May you experience this Lenten season as practice of self- awareness—instead of self-flagellation—and may your discoveries open you to more hope, more love, and more joy in the knowledge that God is at work in your words, in your actions, AND in your loving. Lenten blessings to you!


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Gift upon Gift

1/14/2018

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PictureArtist Jim Temples hold Station 11, "Jesus is Nailed to the Cross"
​In his Washington State Cougars baseball cap and jeans, Jim Temples doesn’t look like an artist. He looks more like a track coach, which is what he was for many years, first at San Dieguito High School and later at Torrey Pines. He grew up in a household that encouraged creativity, but it wasn’t until after he and his late wife Carol visited Rome in the mid-eighties that he started seriously pursuing the craft of wood carving. He lights up when he describes the experience he had there, as he touched the hem of Michelangelo’s Pieta. “My eyes said fabric, my fingers said cold stone. And Jesus said, “Start carving, Jimmy!”
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And start carving he did, finding that he had a talent for making the wood come to life. Still, when he was approached by a group led by parishioner Nancy Aldridge to consider creating a series of carvings to mark the Stations of the Cross, he wasn’t sure he was up to the task. There were trained artists in the congregation who he thought would be better choices. Amazed that he was allowed to try to create them, he accepted the challenge and began to study.

Learning about the tradition of the Stations of the Cross was the first step. He read extensively, visited other churches, and looked at examples of the art that was used in churches in Europe. He began to form a plan: there would be 14 stations, and each one would focus clearly on the central action of that scene from the day of Jesus’s crucifixion. “A lot of the images I looked at were so complex and had so many things going on that you couldn’t tell what was really happening.”

PictureThe back of Station 9 which shows it as sponsored by the Wright family and dedicated at Harold Wright's memorial service in 2008.
While Jim was busy planning, the parish was getting excited about the project. Parishioners were able to sponsor a station, and many jumped at the chance. The stations were carved in the order they were sponsored, rather than in numerical order. The back of each station has information about the sponsor, sometimes with a photo of the person who sponsored it or to whom it was dedicated.

Jim’s gift to St. Andrew’s makes participating in the Stations of the Cross service a deeper and more soul-stirring experience. Beyond the emotion of entering into the story of Jesus’ final hours through the prayerful words and physical journey from station to station, the carvings allow you to see the passion of each scene. Jim says he still feels awe each time he looks at them, “I look at them and say ‘Thank you, God.’”

PictureDetail from Station 6, "Consoled"

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