Marriage and Mother's Day: Witness for Peace

It isn't common knowledge (but it should be) that Mother's Day came from the women's anti-war movement. After the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe called on mothers to organize a World Peace Day, a  feminist clarion call to teach every mother's son the ways of peace, not prepare them for the carnage of war.

Anna Jarvis' mother worked to promote Howe's vision, and when she died in 1905, Jarvis honored her mother's work by promoting Mother's Day, leading to Woodrow Wilson's declaration of it as a national holiday in 1914. It morphed quickly into something other than her founding vision. She so opposed the commercialization of the holiday she created that she was arrested in 1948 protesting it.

We do well to remember the holiday's origins: mothers working for peace. Daughters honoring their work. All of us, born from the womb, to witness to peace..

I am deeply moved each time I read Julie Ward Howe's words:

Arise, then, women of this day! 

Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears! 

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will 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, the 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 devastated 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 plough 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 solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace, Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God. 

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient And at the earliest period consistent with its objects, To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions, The great and general interests of peace.

It is peace that I pray for on Mother's Day, recognizing that each of us who was carried in our mother's womb has within us more innate capacity for love than for violence, more inner craving for relationship than for isolation.

As the Minnesota legislature sandwiches its votes on marriage equality around Mother's Day, I am especially moved to think of the mothers who soon will be able to marry their partners and model for their children even more fully and with public and cultural support the ideals of love and relationship. Maybe someone will even design Mothers' Day cards (note the position of the apostrophe)! Peace modeled in families of every configuration has the potential for even greater witness to world peace.

How much greater our capacity for peace when we proclaim a justice rooted not in violence or exclusion but in love! How much deeper our reservoirs of compassion when children raised in same-sex couple's homes can, without fear of reproach, talk with friends about "my moms"! The personal becomes political. Peace privatized is not really peace.

The vision of peace we see today is not the same as the vision of Julia Ward Howe. It is deeper, richer, broader, greater, certainly more diverse. Yes, our capacity for violence has grown. But so has our awareness of our responsibility for the world's divisions and our commitment, I hope, to reconciliation. 

Howe may not have been able to imagine a day when a mother would be the chief diplomatic officer of the United States, but surely she would be pleased to see how Hillary Clinton helped negotiate an end to several overseas wars. She might not have imagined a world where same-sex parents could raise children together, but surely she would be pleased to see children raised by families of any stripe as long as they were grounded in love.

I am grateful to God for my mother, Jeanne, for Katy, the mother of Jackson, and for the ongoing witness of all those who stand up to violence in ways that give birth to peace. May each of us live to see the day when our families—yes, gay and straight, mothers and fathers, mothers and mothers, father and fathers—will all be models of an inclusive and powerful love that shows the world the ways of peace.

 
Blessings and, yes, Peace to you this Mother's Day.
David

The Names on My Heart

When Katy and I first married, we lived in a parsonage. Our bedroom window looked out at the church's stained glass. The living room was brightly lit by a picture window. Anyone walking down Center Street could tell if we were watching TV, two-stepping, or having a guest for dinner. It was a classic fishbowl, and we couldn't afford curtains. You could say we were exposed.

It was one afternoon in that bright, open living room that a clergy colleague in our cluster of churches came out to me. He wasn't out at his church. But he could talk, and I could listen and learn about the hurts and hazards of serving God while hiding an essential part of yourself from  God's people.

His name is the first one I wrote on my cut-out heart at the marriage equality vigil last night at the Minnesota State Capitol. Other names quickly followed.

• a gay college friend who married straight but couldn't keep up the facade
• a classmate from divinity school who never went into ministry
• Michael Kinnamon, who showed me at the beginning of my ministry the risks and courage of publicly being an ally
• Roger Weddell, who hosted the first local chapter meeting of GLAD I ever attended
• Mel White, who let me be his pastor for a time, but who, in that relationship, taught me more about the power of public witness than anyone I've known
• Audrey Connor, with whom I was honored to serve on staff in Lynchburg, and who helped me be honest about my convictions out loud
• Dan Adolphson, with whom I'm walking as he journeys toward ordination
• The names of every same-sex couple I've married in church but whose licenses I couldn't sign

In the rain, their names washed off my paper heart, but they are indelible on mine, even as they are eternally on the heart of God. 

They and others are on my heart today as I head up to the Minnesota State Capitol for what looks like a historic vote for marriage equality.

My prayers are rising up today with the names and faces not only of friends and allies in ministry but of those whose only fear of exposure, as their relationships begin, should be a few curtainless windows, not the baring of their identity or the stripping of their soul.

Blessings and Peace,
David