“Loving and Letting Go”
Gathering Music
Welcome and Announcements
Prelude
Call to Worship
Welcome and come in to this place of worship. Come into this community of hope where we bring our longing and despair, the tenderness of our loving hearts, and our commitment to create justice. Come into this reflection, this celebration, this moment to let go. Come in and release your worry, just for now, so that you can be nourished knowing that we are together in the struggle of living.
Chalice Lighting
We light this chalice as a symbol of the living tradition of Unitarian Universalism.
We light this chalice also as a beacon of welcome,
to hearten all who enter this place from various faith traditions,
seeking illumination in their search.
We light this chalice knowing that each one of us arrives here
Yearning for warmth as well as insight
For renewal as well as inspiration
For comfort as well as challenge.
We come here to be reminded of the radiance in our selves and in others
And to be encouraged to magnify that radiance in our world.
Hymn
Please rise in body and/or spirit and join in singing hymn # 1051
And remain standing if you are as we share the words of our covenant
Covenant
We unite to strengthen the bonds of kinship among all persons; to promote human dignity; and increase reverence for life's creating, sustaining, and transforming power through worship, study, and service.
Message for All Ages
This story is adapted from a story by Malba Tahan (pen name for Julio Cesar de Mello e Souza, 1895-1975), a mathematician from Brazil, which was first published in Brazil in 1949.
This story was acted out with two puppets.
Once, two friends named Mussa [donkey] and Nagib [camel] made a journey through the mountains of Persia.
(Camel and Donkey puppets walking side by side up the mountains)
They came after a time to a place where a stream flowed by a sandy bank and trees gave shade.
(roll out the blue paper with brown paper on top and top half folded over)
There they had a discussion, which turned into an argument. Nagib grew angry, and for the first time ever, he shouted at Mussa something hurtful and mean. (Nagib – the camel – pantomimes yelling at Mussa)
Mussa was stunned. He felt angry. He wanted to shout back at Nagib. But then he thought, "I cannot be too mad at my friend because I could have done the same thing.” And then he thought he would just keep his anger and hurt inside and try to forget about it. “We are alike, and I care about him,” thought Mussa, “I don't want to fight with him anymore." But as they walked along he felt the hurt and anger boiling inside him and he knew he needed to get it out to let it go. So he walked over to the trees and picked up a stick.
(Leader — attach the stick to the donkey’s hand and mime writing while the other leader turns over the brown paper with the words written)
With the stick he wrote in the sand, "Today my best friend shouted at me and I felt hurt and angry."
Then he and his friend stood in silence and watched as the desert wind blew the words in the sand away.
(Pull the torn tissue paper from the pouch behind Mussa and blow the bits of paper away and fold the brown paper over again.)
By the time the writing had disappeared Nagib had said that he was sorry. They continued walking to their destination in a distant city. On their trip back through the mountain pass they stopped again at the same river. (The two walk to the back and turn around and come back to the river)
This time the two friends decided to take a swim. Since their first visit, the rains had made the current stronger and river much deeper. Mussa, the friend who had been yelled at, stepped into the water first. Right away, he slipped on a rock, was dragged under by the current, and began to drown. Nagib jumped in without a second thought and pulled his friend to safety. (act this out with the puppets)
The two friends again sat in silence for some time until Mussa had regained his breath. Then he rose and went to his saddlebags. There he found a carving knife. This time he went to a rock near the river. (put the stick back in Mussa’s hand and hold a rock in the other hand and carve into the rock)
Into the rock he carved these words, "Today my best friend saved me."
Again the two friends sat in silence. Finally Nagib spoke, "My friend, after I hurt you, you wrote the words in sand. Now after I saved you, you wrote the words in stone, why?" (Demonstrate this dialogue, using the characters.)
Mussa replied, "When someone hurts us, we should write it down in sand where the winds of forgiveness can erase it away. This way we can release our hurt, our hearts are free from bitterness, and we can renew our friendships. But, when someone does something kind for us, we must engrave it in stone and in our hearts so that we will never forget. This way our hearts can always remain open to the good in one another."
“Thank you my friend” said Nagib. “I am very grateful for our friendship. I don’t ever want to hurt you again.”
The two friends embraced and continued on their journey together.
(Leader – Have the two characters embrace. You can have them continue their journey.)
Now our young people will go with Jules to their classes, taking the light and love of this community with them.
Children’s Recessional
As you go on your way, may you be filled with gladness, Go in joy, go in joy!
May fortune bless your day with peace and loving kindness, Go in love, go in love.
Offertory
Half of the cash collected in the offering will be donated to WINGS (Women In Need Growing Stronger).
The mission of WINGS is to provide housing, integrated services, education and advocacy to end domestic violence. WINGS began in 1985 as a grassroots organization by members of a local church and is now one of the largest domestic violence service and housing providers in the state of Illinois. For nearly three decades, WINGS has provided nearly 500,000 nights of shelter and service to thousands of women and children who needed a fresh start. Please read more about this life-saving organization and give as generously as you are able. If this is your first time at Countryside, please let the offering plate pass you by, as your presence with us is your first great offering.
Prayer and Meditation
Source of Life, Spirit of Love, Creative Mother of all,
We offer thanks for the gift of being alive.
We offer thanks to those who have cared for us,
nourished and nurtured our bodies and spirits.
We strive to forgive the failings of ourselves and of each other in our efforts to love.
We grieve knowing our capacity to harm.
We honor our imperfect mothers who were raised by imperfect mothers and we honor the imperfect mother inside all of us – the flawed and broken caregiver, nurturer, and creator in us all.
May we generate freedom.
May we bring forth laughter.
May we cultivate mutual, empowering and loving obligation to one another.
Please join in singing Meditation Hymn #8 Mother Spirit Father Spirit
Readings:
From Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace written by Sara Ruddick, an important feminist philosopher, who taught at the New School of Social Research for forty years.
“…[C]hildren “demand” that their lives be preserved and their growth fostered. In addition, the primary social groups with which a mother is identified, whether by force, kinship, or choice, demand that she raise her children in a manner acceptable to them. These three demands – for preservation, growth, and social acceptability – constitute maternal work; to be a mother is to be committed to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training…
To protect, nurture, and train – however abstract the schema, the story is simple. A child leans out of a high-rise window to drop a balloon full of water on a passerby. She must be hauled in from the window (preservation) and taught not to endanger innocent people (training), and the method used must not endanger her self-respect or confidence (nurturance). In any mother’s day, the demands of preservation, growth, and acceptability are intertwined. Yet a reflective mother can separately identify each demand, partly because they are often in conflict. If a child wants to walk to the store alone, do you worry about her safety or applaud her developing capacity to take care of herself? If you overhear your son hurling insults at a neighbor’s child, do you rush to instill decency and compassion in him, or do you let him act on his own impulses in his need to overcome shyness? If your older child, in her competitive zeal, pushes ahead of your younger, smaller child while climbing a high slide, do you inhibit her competitive pleasure or allow an aggressiveness you cannot appreciate? Should her younger brother learn to fight back? And if he doesn’t, is he bowing too easily to greater strength? Most urgently, whatever you do, is somebody going to get hurt? Love may make these questions painful; it does not provide the answers. Mothers must think.”
…
and by Rev. Robert T. Weston
I planted a ripe seed, and it split, and where it had been
a green sprout appeared; but the seed disintegrated.
The green sprout grew, a thing of beauty, sent down roots, sent out leaves, budded, flowered, bore fruit, decayed and was itself a withered thing. I could not even keep the ripe seed.
Each in its time had its own peculiar beauty. All things change; nothing remains the same.
So, each in its time, each life in its every moment – the baby, the child, the youth, the lover, the parent, the aged – is at its ultimate state in each moment and passes on.
Pluck this moment as you would a precious flower; share it as if it were love, and let it go. Beauty and wonder lie all about you even now; they too, even as you, are never final, but always in process of being and becoming. Take, then, each moment as the perfect gift of life, knowing that you shall no more be able to hold it as it is than what is already past.
Even as you let go, another and yet different moment comes…
Anthem Children Will Listen
Sermon
Being a mother is, without a doubt, the best and most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Parenting a child is an awesome and life-affirming responsibility. Nothing has shown me myself more fully and with more brutal honesty than this job of bringing children into the world and showing them how to be alive in it. The cruel irony of parenthood is that, along with the deep love for our children that grips us the moment they enter our lives, we must, almost immediately, reckon with the fact that we hold them for only a little while. Each day we are parenting, we are preparing to let them go. As children grow and learn, God willing, to be independent, functioning and responsible people, we are learning how to give them back to the universe to which they truly belong. It is a painful and beautiful ordeal.
In her book, Maternal Thinking, philosopher Sara Ruddick shares her theory that the practice of motherhood involves three primary, and often competing, demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptability. Each moment of maternal practice, of being a “good enough mother,” involves some combination of, “meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training.” The most fundamental aspect of motherhood is protection or preservation. The basic minimum of mothering is keeping our children safe. Next, and less universal is the need to nurture the emotional, mental and spiritual growth of our children, though cultures and individuals may disagree about the best way to do that and to what degree it is necessary. Finally, all social groups have an expectation of correct behavior to which parents (and particularly mothers) are expected to train their children to adhere. The daily, internal struggle caused by trying to meet these, often conflicting, demands can tie a mother in knots. We feel the need to protect our child, to nurture their growth and to help them function within societal expectations, and on top of it, from the moment they are born the clock is ticking and the subject is constantly changing. What is acceptable, safe, and nurturing to the child one day will change in the next.[1]
Mothering is not the exclusive role of women who give birth. Mothering happens wherever these demands for protection, nurturance, and training take place and mothers exhibit different abilities to meet these demands depending on their circumstances and capacities. My friend, retired history professor Jerry Adler, reminded me that some of the most powerful ‘mother’ figures in history including Jane Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Dorothy Day were not biological mothers but no less protected, nurtured and trained many.
To Mother is to create, to bring to life, to nurture and to love. And Mothering is also the ultimate practice of letting go. Each of us is part of the co-creation of life and in living we each experience the challenge of letting go in one way or another. We let go of the past. We let go of our expectations of others and ourselves. We let go of loved ones as we grieve. We let go of what we hope and wish for to make room for what is and what might be. In the words of Mary Oliver, “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
For as long as I can remember I wanted to be a mother. I played with and cared for my dolls constantly and with tireless devotion. I was an experienced babysitter and I put myself through college working as a nanny for a family with two little girls. What I didn’t know is that no amount of experience can really prepare you for the unending demands of motherhood. But there was never a question in my mind that I wanted to be a mother. And, of course, I was not going to make any of the mistakes my parents made. I was going to read to my children every day, and they were going to eat well and sleep well and grow into self-actualized, creative and compassionate people.
And I have been very lucky. I have the privilege of raising two wonderful, smart, kind and healthy children but that is definitely not because I made no mistakes or because I met my own expectations of being a perfect mom. I have fallen short of my impossibly high expectations of myself many times. There have been many times when I’ve looked to my Unitarian Universalist community to help me know how to parent. There have been times when I’ve turned to a higher power, I’m not even sure I believe in, to beg for guidance and I have been led toward a way or the words that felt right. So, I am no parenting expert but I know that things have become a bit easier and I think I’ve become a better parent by learning how to let go a little of expectations.
As our children grow, the process of letting them come into their own person is not, in my experience, a slow and gradual handing off of responsibility. It has felt to me more like a tug of war, with both sides regularly landing in the mud. There is no way of knowing for sure how much independence to give your child as they are becoming an adult because each child is different, with different needs and capacities at each moment. Again, a mother’s job is to protect, nurture and train, but doing that for your two year old is different than it is for your 5, 8 and 17 year old. And there is no script or plan to follow. It is all done by feel.
Not too long ago, I was, with some measure of pride, telling one of my friends that I had discovered how to let go of my teenage son as he struggled with the long, anxiety producing college application process. I was feeling overwhelmed, not knowing how to help my son navigate this huge life transition, and because I have a wonderful partner in parenting who was staying engaged, I was able to manage my anxiety by turning away. The fear and heartbreak of watching my son make more and more of his own choices led me to pretend that I could simply throw up my hands, walk away and let him figure it out. However, my gentle and thoughtful friend showed me another way to let go. He has found that, in the midst of letting go, it’s been important to stay connected to his son, who is now living hundreds of miles away. So he sends him a text each night to let him know he loves him.
I was embarrassed by the quickness with which I was ready to wash my hands of my child, telling myself he’d almost reached adulthood so I had no choice but to let go. My friend reminded me that letting go doesn’t mean turning away. Letting go and remaining in loving relationship is an act of faith. For those who mother, the urge to protect, nurture and guide remain with us no matter the age of our charges. We inevitable remain in love with those we are trying to relinquish. Though we don’t stop loving as our children grow, when we let go, genuine and more liberated love can come pouring into our open hearts. Letting go, without turning away can be excruciating but we can learn to do it, to become non-attached and still be attentive to the needs of our children and the world beyond them.
It can be tempting to turn away, to disengage from the suffering of the world, the madness of politics and climate destruction, or from the challenges that everyday life and relationships present. The suffering and oppression we see in the world can make us want to bury our heads in the sand. But to be alive means we are a part of all that the world has to offer – it’s beauty and ugliness. We may want to turn away but there is nowhere for us to go. We can try to avoid the realities of loving and letting go by numbing or burying our pain but it simply doesn’t work. The only true choice we have is to keep our hearts open to be broken again and again, to keep loving, and holding what we love as if our lives depend on it, and then to let go even as we remain in love. If we could only disengage ourselves from the pain in the world, throwing our hands up in surrender, it would be so much easier. If only we didn’t love life so much.
There is no recipe or instruction book for letting go that I know of. I wish it were simply a matter of deciding to let go. Like when someone tells you to relax when you’re upset. Has anyone ever told you to relax when you’re upset? It doesn’t really work. In fact, I find it to be an incredibly infuriating and unhelpful instruction. Telling someone to let go, when they are holding tight with fear, worry, grief, sadness or anger is similarly unhelpful. Letting go is the practice that love requires especially in the moments when our impulse is to cling.
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron speaks of a meditation technique of loving and letting go in her book, The Wisdom of No Escape, where we can approach our experiences with “softness,” and learn to “make friends with” our fear, anger, or depression rather than, trying “to get rid of it.” I’m new to meditation, but through practice, I have felt a difference in my ability to be present and yet less attached. I’m trying her specific technique of focusing on the out breath only and gently naming whatever thoughts that come as “thinking, thinking” before softly letting them go. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.
I also wonder if letting go happens in the moment we realize that we have no choice. That there’s really not much we are actually holding onto. In the words of poet, philosopher, Khalil Gibran in his book The Prophet, ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.’ Sometimes letting go can happen when we remember and name the truth of transience.
I experienced something like this when I stood at the open door of an airplane at 10,000 feet, strapped to a much more experienced skydiver. I found letting go was easy in that moment because I had no choice. I WAS going out of that airplane in tandem with this other, larger person, and because I had no choice, fear drained out of me. Letting go happens when we stop kidding ourselves into thinking we have control when we don’t. The responsibility of parenthood can fool us into thinking that we are in charge or that we are supposed to be. Of course we have a responsibility to protect, nurture and guide our children but we need to remember the limits of our control over others and life itself. The serenity prayer spoken often in twelve step meetings is a good reminder: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The difference is pretty simple: I can change some aspects of myself. Everything else is pretty well beyond my control.
We are, in every moment shaped by each other and concurrently shaping one another through relationship. However, we never own or possess one another. Humans oppress, marginalize, and destroy other human bodies but we cannot own the mind or spirit of another being. Letting go is an illusion because we never really hold anything. We are mutually co-creating every moment, everyone and everything, but never truly possessing. It is the mind’s trick on us that leads us to think that one person can own another and yet, paradoxically, we do belong to one another – in our infinite, intimate interconnection.
Does letting go mean abandoning our responsibilities? If we let go of expectations, are we expecting too little of ourselves and others? When we have high expectations of our children, it is said, they rise to meet them. And the same is true of low expectations. But can we be gentle and honest with our expectations? Can we write our hopes in the sand and let the wind take them where it will? Can what we want from one another be separated from our worthiness and our love? Can I love you even when you disappoint me? Can I love myself when I let myself down? In my experience this process of letting go of my son, who is now almost an adult, about to leave home for college, has been like watching him leap off a ledge into the dark and I have wanted so many times to turn away, to not look. I have wanted to absolve myself of my parental responsibilities because it is so hard. And I acknowledge and mourn the fact that there are parents who do that, who resign from parenting in all kinds of ways, and I have shirked my responsibility in moments of despair. But I know I can’t really turn away. I can’t quit my job as a mother because I love my children and part of who I am is the person who has walked with them through total dependence into a gradual interdependence. I’ve protected, nurtured and trained them to be independent and happy people. I must keep loving them, holding them against my bones knowing my own life depends on them, and when the time comes to let them go, to let them go. I must share with them my hopes and expectations for them but let my expectations be blown away by the wind of their own visions for themselves.
The struggle to love and let go is alive in all being and becoming. The struggle happens whenever we create something and have to let that creation become its own thing. As differentiated beings we long for the connection that is always there but too easily forgotten. We become enmeshed. We lose ourselves in the loving of another or lose ourselves in the creation of something. It is so natural to over identify with those we care for and lose our sense of value beyond our relationship to that person or thing.
Losing ourselves can be wonderful sometimes. To be out of our own heads, out of our own way, in the zone. But this flow only happens when we really are letting go and allowing ourselves to be a channel for something higher, for love to move through us.
Letting go need not mean turning away from the world or each other with cynicism and despair. As Krista Tippet said this morning on the NPR show, On Being, “Love crosses the chasms between us and it brings them into relief.” We are called to stay engaged, to stay connected to one another and to the pain in the world. We are asked to write our hurt and pain in the sand and let the wind blow it away. And we are called to carve the transformative, life-saving love we experience in relationship into stone so that it can break our hearts open and let more love, more hope, more creative possibility to flow in. May we continue, in each moment, to let go and let creating, sustaining and transforming love pour into the openings in our hearts.
Please rise in body or spirit and join in singing
Closing Hymn #21 For the Beauty of the Earth
Sharing the Light - “we extinguish the flame of this chalice, but we recognize that the real light is to be found within each of you, to be seen in one another’s faces. Therefore, let us take a moment to recognize that light in one another. You may turn to the people near you and share the peace or your light with them. And then turn back for the words of the benediction.”
Closing Benediction
Let It Go
by Danna Faulds
Let go of the ways you thought life would unfold, the holding of plans or dreams or expectations – Let it all go.
Save your strength to swim with the tide.
The choice to fight what is here before you now will only result in struggle, fear, and desperate attempts to flee from the very energy you long for
Let go. Let it all go and flow with the grace that washes through your days whether you received it gently or with all your quills raised to defend against invaders.
Take this on faith; the mind may never find the explanations that it seeks, but you will move forward nonetheless.
Let go, and the wave’s crest will carry you to unknown shores, beyond your wildest dreams or destinations.
Let it all go and find the place of rest and peace, and certain transformation.
Postlude
[1] Ruddick, Sara, Maternal Thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Beacon Press, Boston, 1995
Gathering Music
Welcome and Announcements
Prelude
Call to Worship
Welcome and come in to this place of worship. Come into this community of hope where we bring our longing and despair, the tenderness of our loving hearts, and our commitment to create justice. Come into this reflection, this celebration, this moment to let go. Come in and release your worry, just for now, so that you can be nourished knowing that we are together in the struggle of living.
Chalice Lighting
We light this chalice as a symbol of the living tradition of Unitarian Universalism.
We light this chalice also as a beacon of welcome,
to hearten all who enter this place from various faith traditions,
seeking illumination in their search.
We light this chalice knowing that each one of us arrives here
Yearning for warmth as well as insight
For renewal as well as inspiration
For comfort as well as challenge.
We come here to be reminded of the radiance in our selves and in others
And to be encouraged to magnify that radiance in our world.
Hymn
Please rise in body and/or spirit and join in singing hymn # 1051
And remain standing if you are as we share the words of our covenant
Covenant
We unite to strengthen the bonds of kinship among all persons; to promote human dignity; and increase reverence for life's creating, sustaining, and transforming power through worship, study, and service.
Message for All Ages
This story is adapted from a story by Malba Tahan (pen name for Julio Cesar de Mello e Souza, 1895-1975), a mathematician from Brazil, which was first published in Brazil in 1949.
This story was acted out with two puppets.
Once, two friends named Mussa [donkey] and Nagib [camel] made a journey through the mountains of Persia.
(Camel and Donkey puppets walking side by side up the mountains)
They came after a time to a place where a stream flowed by a sandy bank and trees gave shade.
(roll out the blue paper with brown paper on top and top half folded over)
There they had a discussion, which turned into an argument. Nagib grew angry, and for the first time ever, he shouted at Mussa something hurtful and mean. (Nagib – the camel – pantomimes yelling at Mussa)
Mussa was stunned. He felt angry. He wanted to shout back at Nagib. But then he thought, "I cannot be too mad at my friend because I could have done the same thing.” And then he thought he would just keep his anger and hurt inside and try to forget about it. “We are alike, and I care about him,” thought Mussa, “I don't want to fight with him anymore." But as they walked along he felt the hurt and anger boiling inside him and he knew he needed to get it out to let it go. So he walked over to the trees and picked up a stick.
(Leader — attach the stick to the donkey’s hand and mime writing while the other leader turns over the brown paper with the words written)
With the stick he wrote in the sand, "Today my best friend shouted at me and I felt hurt and angry."
Then he and his friend stood in silence and watched as the desert wind blew the words in the sand away.
(Pull the torn tissue paper from the pouch behind Mussa and blow the bits of paper away and fold the brown paper over again.)
By the time the writing had disappeared Nagib had said that he was sorry. They continued walking to their destination in a distant city. On their trip back through the mountain pass they stopped again at the same river. (The two walk to the back and turn around and come back to the river)
This time the two friends decided to take a swim. Since their first visit, the rains had made the current stronger and river much deeper. Mussa, the friend who had been yelled at, stepped into the water first. Right away, he slipped on a rock, was dragged under by the current, and began to drown. Nagib jumped in without a second thought and pulled his friend to safety. (act this out with the puppets)
The two friends again sat in silence for some time until Mussa had regained his breath. Then he rose and went to his saddlebags. There he found a carving knife. This time he went to a rock near the river. (put the stick back in Mussa’s hand and hold a rock in the other hand and carve into the rock)
Into the rock he carved these words, "Today my best friend saved me."
Again the two friends sat in silence. Finally Nagib spoke, "My friend, after I hurt you, you wrote the words in sand. Now after I saved you, you wrote the words in stone, why?" (Demonstrate this dialogue, using the characters.)
Mussa replied, "When someone hurts us, we should write it down in sand where the winds of forgiveness can erase it away. This way we can release our hurt, our hearts are free from bitterness, and we can renew our friendships. But, when someone does something kind for us, we must engrave it in stone and in our hearts so that we will never forget. This way our hearts can always remain open to the good in one another."
“Thank you my friend” said Nagib. “I am very grateful for our friendship. I don’t ever want to hurt you again.”
The two friends embraced and continued on their journey together.
(Leader – Have the two characters embrace. You can have them continue their journey.)
Now our young people will go with Jules to their classes, taking the light and love of this community with them.
Children’s Recessional
As you go on your way, may you be filled with gladness, Go in joy, go in joy!
May fortune bless your day with peace and loving kindness, Go in love, go in love.
Offertory
Half of the cash collected in the offering will be donated to WINGS (Women In Need Growing Stronger).
The mission of WINGS is to provide housing, integrated services, education and advocacy to end domestic violence. WINGS began in 1985 as a grassroots organization by members of a local church and is now one of the largest domestic violence service and housing providers in the state of Illinois. For nearly three decades, WINGS has provided nearly 500,000 nights of shelter and service to thousands of women and children who needed a fresh start. Please read more about this life-saving organization and give as generously as you are able. If this is your first time at Countryside, please let the offering plate pass you by, as your presence with us is your first great offering.
Prayer and Meditation
Source of Life, Spirit of Love, Creative Mother of all,
We offer thanks for the gift of being alive.
We offer thanks to those who have cared for us,
nourished and nurtured our bodies and spirits.
We strive to forgive the failings of ourselves and of each other in our efforts to love.
We grieve knowing our capacity to harm.
We honor our imperfect mothers who were raised by imperfect mothers and we honor the imperfect mother inside all of us – the flawed and broken caregiver, nurturer, and creator in us all.
May we generate freedom.
May we bring forth laughter.
May we cultivate mutual, empowering and loving obligation to one another.
Please join in singing Meditation Hymn #8 Mother Spirit Father Spirit
Readings:
From Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace written by Sara Ruddick, an important feminist philosopher, who taught at the New School of Social Research for forty years.
“…[C]hildren “demand” that their lives be preserved and their growth fostered. In addition, the primary social groups with which a mother is identified, whether by force, kinship, or choice, demand that she raise her children in a manner acceptable to them. These three demands – for preservation, growth, and social acceptability – constitute maternal work; to be a mother is to be committed to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training…
To protect, nurture, and train – however abstract the schema, the story is simple. A child leans out of a high-rise window to drop a balloon full of water on a passerby. She must be hauled in from the window (preservation) and taught not to endanger innocent people (training), and the method used must not endanger her self-respect or confidence (nurturance). In any mother’s day, the demands of preservation, growth, and acceptability are intertwined. Yet a reflective mother can separately identify each demand, partly because they are often in conflict. If a child wants to walk to the store alone, do you worry about her safety or applaud her developing capacity to take care of herself? If you overhear your son hurling insults at a neighbor’s child, do you rush to instill decency and compassion in him, or do you let him act on his own impulses in his need to overcome shyness? If your older child, in her competitive zeal, pushes ahead of your younger, smaller child while climbing a high slide, do you inhibit her competitive pleasure or allow an aggressiveness you cannot appreciate? Should her younger brother learn to fight back? And if he doesn’t, is he bowing too easily to greater strength? Most urgently, whatever you do, is somebody going to get hurt? Love may make these questions painful; it does not provide the answers. Mothers must think.”
…
and by Rev. Robert T. Weston
I planted a ripe seed, and it split, and where it had been
a green sprout appeared; but the seed disintegrated.
The green sprout grew, a thing of beauty, sent down roots, sent out leaves, budded, flowered, bore fruit, decayed and was itself a withered thing. I could not even keep the ripe seed.
Each in its time had its own peculiar beauty. All things change; nothing remains the same.
So, each in its time, each life in its every moment – the baby, the child, the youth, the lover, the parent, the aged – is at its ultimate state in each moment and passes on.
Pluck this moment as you would a precious flower; share it as if it were love, and let it go. Beauty and wonder lie all about you even now; they too, even as you, are never final, but always in process of being and becoming. Take, then, each moment as the perfect gift of life, knowing that you shall no more be able to hold it as it is than what is already past.
Even as you let go, another and yet different moment comes…
Anthem Children Will Listen
Sermon
Being a mother is, without a doubt, the best and most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Parenting a child is an awesome and life-affirming responsibility. Nothing has shown me myself more fully and with more brutal honesty than this job of bringing children into the world and showing them how to be alive in it. The cruel irony of parenthood is that, along with the deep love for our children that grips us the moment they enter our lives, we must, almost immediately, reckon with the fact that we hold them for only a little while. Each day we are parenting, we are preparing to let them go. As children grow and learn, God willing, to be independent, functioning and responsible people, we are learning how to give them back to the universe to which they truly belong. It is a painful and beautiful ordeal.
In her book, Maternal Thinking, philosopher Sara Ruddick shares her theory that the practice of motherhood involves three primary, and often competing, demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptability. Each moment of maternal practice, of being a “good enough mother,” involves some combination of, “meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training.” The most fundamental aspect of motherhood is protection or preservation. The basic minimum of mothering is keeping our children safe. Next, and less universal is the need to nurture the emotional, mental and spiritual growth of our children, though cultures and individuals may disagree about the best way to do that and to what degree it is necessary. Finally, all social groups have an expectation of correct behavior to which parents (and particularly mothers) are expected to train their children to adhere. The daily, internal struggle caused by trying to meet these, often conflicting, demands can tie a mother in knots. We feel the need to protect our child, to nurture their growth and to help them function within societal expectations, and on top of it, from the moment they are born the clock is ticking and the subject is constantly changing. What is acceptable, safe, and nurturing to the child one day will change in the next.[1]
Mothering is not the exclusive role of women who give birth. Mothering happens wherever these demands for protection, nurturance, and training take place and mothers exhibit different abilities to meet these demands depending on their circumstances and capacities. My friend, retired history professor Jerry Adler, reminded me that some of the most powerful ‘mother’ figures in history including Jane Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Dorothy Day were not biological mothers but no less protected, nurtured and trained many.
To Mother is to create, to bring to life, to nurture and to love. And Mothering is also the ultimate practice of letting go. Each of us is part of the co-creation of life and in living we each experience the challenge of letting go in one way or another. We let go of the past. We let go of our expectations of others and ourselves. We let go of loved ones as we grieve. We let go of what we hope and wish for to make room for what is and what might be. In the words of Mary Oliver, “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
For as long as I can remember I wanted to be a mother. I played with and cared for my dolls constantly and with tireless devotion. I was an experienced babysitter and I put myself through college working as a nanny for a family with two little girls. What I didn’t know is that no amount of experience can really prepare you for the unending demands of motherhood. But there was never a question in my mind that I wanted to be a mother. And, of course, I was not going to make any of the mistakes my parents made. I was going to read to my children every day, and they were going to eat well and sleep well and grow into self-actualized, creative and compassionate people.
And I have been very lucky. I have the privilege of raising two wonderful, smart, kind and healthy children but that is definitely not because I made no mistakes or because I met my own expectations of being a perfect mom. I have fallen short of my impossibly high expectations of myself many times. There have been many times when I’ve looked to my Unitarian Universalist community to help me know how to parent. There have been times when I’ve turned to a higher power, I’m not even sure I believe in, to beg for guidance and I have been led toward a way or the words that felt right. So, I am no parenting expert but I know that things have become a bit easier and I think I’ve become a better parent by learning how to let go a little of expectations.
As our children grow, the process of letting them come into their own person is not, in my experience, a slow and gradual handing off of responsibility. It has felt to me more like a tug of war, with both sides regularly landing in the mud. There is no way of knowing for sure how much independence to give your child as they are becoming an adult because each child is different, with different needs and capacities at each moment. Again, a mother’s job is to protect, nurture and train, but doing that for your two year old is different than it is for your 5, 8 and 17 year old. And there is no script or plan to follow. It is all done by feel.
Not too long ago, I was, with some measure of pride, telling one of my friends that I had discovered how to let go of my teenage son as he struggled with the long, anxiety producing college application process. I was feeling overwhelmed, not knowing how to help my son navigate this huge life transition, and because I have a wonderful partner in parenting who was staying engaged, I was able to manage my anxiety by turning away. The fear and heartbreak of watching my son make more and more of his own choices led me to pretend that I could simply throw up my hands, walk away and let him figure it out. However, my gentle and thoughtful friend showed me another way to let go. He has found that, in the midst of letting go, it’s been important to stay connected to his son, who is now living hundreds of miles away. So he sends him a text each night to let him know he loves him.
I was embarrassed by the quickness with which I was ready to wash my hands of my child, telling myself he’d almost reached adulthood so I had no choice but to let go. My friend reminded me that letting go doesn’t mean turning away. Letting go and remaining in loving relationship is an act of faith. For those who mother, the urge to protect, nurture and guide remain with us no matter the age of our charges. We inevitable remain in love with those we are trying to relinquish. Though we don’t stop loving as our children grow, when we let go, genuine and more liberated love can come pouring into our open hearts. Letting go, without turning away can be excruciating but we can learn to do it, to become non-attached and still be attentive to the needs of our children and the world beyond them.
It can be tempting to turn away, to disengage from the suffering of the world, the madness of politics and climate destruction, or from the challenges that everyday life and relationships present. The suffering and oppression we see in the world can make us want to bury our heads in the sand. But to be alive means we are a part of all that the world has to offer – it’s beauty and ugliness. We may want to turn away but there is nowhere for us to go. We can try to avoid the realities of loving and letting go by numbing or burying our pain but it simply doesn’t work. The only true choice we have is to keep our hearts open to be broken again and again, to keep loving, and holding what we love as if our lives depend on it, and then to let go even as we remain in love. If we could only disengage ourselves from the pain in the world, throwing our hands up in surrender, it would be so much easier. If only we didn’t love life so much.
There is no recipe or instruction book for letting go that I know of. I wish it were simply a matter of deciding to let go. Like when someone tells you to relax when you’re upset. Has anyone ever told you to relax when you’re upset? It doesn’t really work. In fact, I find it to be an incredibly infuriating and unhelpful instruction. Telling someone to let go, when they are holding tight with fear, worry, grief, sadness or anger is similarly unhelpful. Letting go is the practice that love requires especially in the moments when our impulse is to cling.
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron speaks of a meditation technique of loving and letting go in her book, The Wisdom of No Escape, where we can approach our experiences with “softness,” and learn to “make friends with” our fear, anger, or depression rather than, trying “to get rid of it.” I’m new to meditation, but through practice, I have felt a difference in my ability to be present and yet less attached. I’m trying her specific technique of focusing on the out breath only and gently naming whatever thoughts that come as “thinking, thinking” before softly letting them go. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.
I also wonder if letting go happens in the moment we realize that we have no choice. That there’s really not much we are actually holding onto. In the words of poet, philosopher, Khalil Gibran in his book The Prophet, ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.’ Sometimes letting go can happen when we remember and name the truth of transience.
I experienced something like this when I stood at the open door of an airplane at 10,000 feet, strapped to a much more experienced skydiver. I found letting go was easy in that moment because I had no choice. I WAS going out of that airplane in tandem with this other, larger person, and because I had no choice, fear drained out of me. Letting go happens when we stop kidding ourselves into thinking we have control when we don’t. The responsibility of parenthood can fool us into thinking that we are in charge or that we are supposed to be. Of course we have a responsibility to protect, nurture and guide our children but we need to remember the limits of our control over others and life itself. The serenity prayer spoken often in twelve step meetings is a good reminder: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The difference is pretty simple: I can change some aspects of myself. Everything else is pretty well beyond my control.
We are, in every moment shaped by each other and concurrently shaping one another through relationship. However, we never own or possess one another. Humans oppress, marginalize, and destroy other human bodies but we cannot own the mind or spirit of another being. Letting go is an illusion because we never really hold anything. We are mutually co-creating every moment, everyone and everything, but never truly possessing. It is the mind’s trick on us that leads us to think that one person can own another and yet, paradoxically, we do belong to one another – in our infinite, intimate interconnection.
Does letting go mean abandoning our responsibilities? If we let go of expectations, are we expecting too little of ourselves and others? When we have high expectations of our children, it is said, they rise to meet them. And the same is true of low expectations. But can we be gentle and honest with our expectations? Can we write our hopes in the sand and let the wind take them where it will? Can what we want from one another be separated from our worthiness and our love? Can I love you even when you disappoint me? Can I love myself when I let myself down? In my experience this process of letting go of my son, who is now almost an adult, about to leave home for college, has been like watching him leap off a ledge into the dark and I have wanted so many times to turn away, to not look. I have wanted to absolve myself of my parental responsibilities because it is so hard. And I acknowledge and mourn the fact that there are parents who do that, who resign from parenting in all kinds of ways, and I have shirked my responsibility in moments of despair. But I know I can’t really turn away. I can’t quit my job as a mother because I love my children and part of who I am is the person who has walked with them through total dependence into a gradual interdependence. I’ve protected, nurtured and trained them to be independent and happy people. I must keep loving them, holding them against my bones knowing my own life depends on them, and when the time comes to let them go, to let them go. I must share with them my hopes and expectations for them but let my expectations be blown away by the wind of their own visions for themselves.
The struggle to love and let go is alive in all being and becoming. The struggle happens whenever we create something and have to let that creation become its own thing. As differentiated beings we long for the connection that is always there but too easily forgotten. We become enmeshed. We lose ourselves in the loving of another or lose ourselves in the creation of something. It is so natural to over identify with those we care for and lose our sense of value beyond our relationship to that person or thing.
Losing ourselves can be wonderful sometimes. To be out of our own heads, out of our own way, in the zone. But this flow only happens when we really are letting go and allowing ourselves to be a channel for something higher, for love to move through us.
Letting go need not mean turning away from the world or each other with cynicism and despair. As Krista Tippet said this morning on the NPR show, On Being, “Love crosses the chasms between us and it brings them into relief.” We are called to stay engaged, to stay connected to one another and to the pain in the world. We are asked to write our hurt and pain in the sand and let the wind blow it away. And we are called to carve the transformative, life-saving love we experience in relationship into stone so that it can break our hearts open and let more love, more hope, more creative possibility to flow in. May we continue, in each moment, to let go and let creating, sustaining and transforming love pour into the openings in our hearts.
Please rise in body or spirit and join in singing
Closing Hymn #21 For the Beauty of the Earth
Sharing the Light - “we extinguish the flame of this chalice, but we recognize that the real light is to be found within each of you, to be seen in one another’s faces. Therefore, let us take a moment to recognize that light in one another. You may turn to the people near you and share the peace or your light with them. And then turn back for the words of the benediction.”
Closing Benediction
Let It Go
by Danna Faulds
Let go of the ways you thought life would unfold, the holding of plans or dreams or expectations – Let it all go.
Save your strength to swim with the tide.
The choice to fight what is here before you now will only result in struggle, fear, and desperate attempts to flee from the very energy you long for
Let go. Let it all go and flow with the grace that washes through your days whether you received it gently or with all your quills raised to defend against invaders.
Take this on faith; the mind may never find the explanations that it seeks, but you will move forward nonetheless.
Let go, and the wave’s crest will carry you to unknown shores, beyond your wildest dreams or destinations.
Let it all go and find the place of rest and peace, and certain transformation.
Postlude
[1] Ruddick, Sara, Maternal Thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Beacon Press, Boston, 1995