Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-9-11

The Bible never intended that Mothers Day be so close to Easter, there having been no Hallmark Cards or ProFlowers 2000 years ago. But as long as Easter is not diminished, anything that reminds us all of the special role of mothers cannot be bad.

Easter even provides special connections for us to think about. So does Christmas, the birth of Jesus, the Son of Mary. But at Easter His closest friends denied Him… but His mother did not. The foot of the cross was mostly empty except for scoffers and Roman guards… and His mother. Even (in theology whose reasoning we hear but whose blinding love we cannot quite comprehend), for a few hours even God in Heaven forsook Jesus so that the wrath for sin could be transferred from us to Him… but His mother did not forsake him.

As a man I can only guess about the love and emotions that are present in the bonds that a mother feels toward the child she bears. I know how great “second best” is – the bond that exists between child beholding mother.

No such relationship is typical, and no mother is ordinary, so if I share a couple of things for a moment here, I do not claim to speak for anybody. In fact, I invite anybody to think upon how their relationships with their Moms were different, not similar. They have to be different, because every mom is special; and all moms are exceptional.

We hear about Soccer Moms. Mine I call a Fifties Mom. She grew up in the Depression, in a family that struggled. She married after the War. In the ‘50s our family moved to the suburbs. Cookie cutter? Sort of. Many times I have gotten together with people my age, and before long we talk like we are sociologists: “Dysfunctional.” Family tensions. Parents who smoked and drank and partied, sometimes too much. Couples who fell into the required stereotypes of the era.

All that was true in our house. Regrets, I’ve had a few… and caused a few. In other words, life happens. Did the moms who survived the Depression and never knew whether their fiancés would return home from war… did they indulge their children too much? The question is, for me, whether I would have done so too. But shame on me for the years I ragged on Mom for drinking and smoking (even, yes, shame on her for no longer being the Mom I knew when my kids were young, because of the drinking) – but shame on me for not sufficiently remembering so much else. We can all dig deep and come up with similar:

I was reared in church. Every “life question” I had, my father would generally say, “you’ll figure it out,” but my mother would generally try to explain it in terms of Jesus. Not always logical, but I got the point. When I get emotional singing hymns, I think it’s because my mother did. If I choke up when the flag passes by, it’s because she did. I remember, when we didn’t have enough dinner for seconds all around, she never took another helping for herself. When it snowed and I had a paper route, she drove me around house to house. She never failed to ask, when I was away at college, what church I was going to, and if we could read from the same devotional every night, even when she knew I had put the Bible aside for awhile.

These are not clichés, or empty Hallmark sentiments. They are a fraction of the woven emotional fabric between a Christian mother and son.

I’ll tell you how empty these memories are not. At the end of her life, Mom was placed in a Hospice program. Hospice is meant to make dying easier, not to heal you. She was in a hospital bed at home, insensible, about 60 pounds, displaying several of the “signs of impending death” that the brochure told us to watch for. A couple chips of ice is all she ingested for several days. Then one night – I was sleeping at the other end of the living room – she stirred and mumbled. Eventually, more. In the next few days she was praying, reciting Bible verses, and signing hymn choruses.

… all in her sleep, or coma state, or whatever it was. She grew strong. She lived another year. We had a great Thanksgiving dinner, where she ate solid food, talked and joked. She walked around the house, with a walker, but all for the Hospice workers to say, “This is one of those stories we can’t explain…” Best of all, my kids met their clean, sober, “real” grandmother after all.

Strangest (?) of all, by the way, for all the Sunday School lessons and church choirs and youth groups in her life… after she “recovered,” as I just recounted, she could not recite a fraction of the things she did when she was reaching out for that bonus year from a coma. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t know how she did.

The Bible talks about “hiding things in our heart.” We do that, or we allow the Holy Spirit to. If you are a mother and do so, there is no way that you are not planting things in your children’s hearts too at the same time.

“Fifties Moms.” Like in the old TV sitcoms. Well… we all kind of liked those old TV sitcoms, didn’t we? And we miss those days. Maybe the black-and-white culture wasn’t so bad.

All that “stuff,” those stereotypes about Dysfunctional Families? Maybe that was the “fruit” (not speaking biblically in this sense) that some family trees bore. But fruit drops from trees, and shrivels, and dies. Maybe we should look, on Mothers Day, not so much at the fruit, but at the seeds our Moms were so determined to plant.

+

Here is a song about my Mom, whom I miss every day. When Cynthia Clawson sang it, she didn’t know she was singing about my mom, and maybe yours too, but she was:

Click: My Mother’s Faith