Inheritance
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Call to Worship:
Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain,
But a woman who fears the lord is to be praised.
Give her a share in the fruit of her hands,
And let her works praise her in the city gates.
May we be gathered for worship.
Prayer:
As mother's day was originally a day in which mothers prayed and worked for the health of their children and communities, and for the end of war, let us gather for prayer.
God of all people
Hear our prayers today,
Open the suffering to your healing grace,
Bring peace to those who care for them,
In these days of violence,
Help us to find our way back to peace,
And help us to appreciate it better this time.
Help us to be brave enough to offer love to one another.
Help us to know your ways
And to walk in them.
Hear our prayers.
Amen
Reading (Read by Bruce Moon):
"Swimming Lessons" by Nancy Willard
A mile across the lake, the horizon bare
or nearly so: a broken sentence of birches.
No sand. No voices calling me back.
Waves small and polite as your newly washed hair
push the slime-furred pebbles like pawns,
an inch here. Or there.
You threaded five balsa blocks on a strap
and buckled them to my waist, a crazy life
vest for your lazy little daughter.
Under me, green deepened to black.
You said, "Swim out to the deep water."
I was seven years old. I paddled forth
and the water held me. Sunday you took away
one block, the front one. I stared down
at my legs, so small, so nervous and pale,
not fit for a place without roads.
Nothing in these depths had legs or need of them
except the toeless foot of the snail.
Tuesday you took away two more blocks.
Now I could somersault and stretch.
I could scratch myself against trees like a cat.
I even made peace with the weeds that fetch
swimmers in the noose of their stems
while the cold lake puckers and preens.
Friday the fourth block broke free. "Let it
go,"
you said. When I asked you to take
out the block that kept jabbing my heart,
I felt strong. This was the sixth day.
For a week I wore the only part
of the vest that bothered to stay:
a canvas strap with nothing to carry.
The day I swam away from our safe shore,
you followed from far off, your stealthy oar
raised, ready to ferry me home
if the lake tried to keep me.
Now I watch the tides of your body
pull back from the hospital sheets.
"Let it go," you said. "Let it go."
My heart is not afraid of deep water.
It is wearing its life vest,
that invisible garment of love
and trust, and it tells you this story.
Sermon:
When I first read that Nancy Willard poem, "Swimming Lessons," I assumed that the parent in it was her father. It is clear from a subsequent poem that it was her mother. I'm afraid that I made my assumption because the parent in it was active - demonstrating independence and courage, and pushing the child toward the same. Which, I should have known, is the work of mothers. Although the courage of women sometimes takes much quieter forms than the courage of men.
Today we are talking about the things we inherit from our mothers, and the things we pass on to our children. Perhaps, if we are women, especially to our daughters. How difficult those relationships can be to figure out, and how lucky we are if we live long enough to appreciate our mothers and our children as humans completely separate from ourselves.
When we stop implicating them with our expectations, we can see more clearly, I think, what the inheritance is.
My Mom is now 78 (I always have to do a little math based on my own age to get to hers - and it always takes me a minute to remember how old I am). She took up snowshoeing a couple of years ago, and tried kayaking a year or so after that for the first time, so you know what sort of an old lady she is (may she forgive me for saying that). The sort, frankly, that I hope to live long and well enough to become.
I tried snowshoeing myself last winter for the first time, with her snowshoes. She said I was faster than she is and I hope to God she was telling me the truth.
Because my mother was older than most women of her generation when she had me and my sister, I don't really have a good memory of what she looked like when she was young. But I have photos of her and she was quite elegant and lovely - elegant in that way that women of her generation were, and she still is. Matching shoes and handbags. Tailored coats. Beautiful suits and full-skirted dresses. Things I probably wouldn't manage very well, but wish I had the knack for. I complain, actually, if I have meetings more than two days a week at work and have to make the effort to pull on something other than jeans for more than a couple of days. And I never wear lipstick. Frankly, I don't know how.
Of course Mom has now adapted to jeans herself, and doesn't enjoy dressing up the way that she used to. Though she makes 78 look really good. Gives my husband a certain confidence, I like to think.
She told me plenty of stories as I was growing up, but I confess that some of them were not as engaging to me as they were to her. They were stories that were about when she was happy, of course - about when she was learning something or having fun with her family. Or about people I didn't know. Often, they are stories about me when I was a baby, which are interesting, but probably less so for me than for her.
But one day just a few years ago she told me a story about a trip she took as a student, when she sailed on some cattleboat from Europe to New York. That story, for some reason, she held out on me.
She had flown to Europe with a group of young people on a tour for the post-college set, and she was sailing home to New York City. Sailing home in this underpowerered ocean-going tub, moving so slowly, she said, that the QE2 passed them outbound, heading for Europe, and then passed them again heading back to New York, and then passed them a third time, outbound, as they made their return trip. And she is prone to seasickness, so she was sick on the boat for days - just lying in her bunk hoping it would all be over soon. When she finally got her sealegs, it turned out that the ship was in the path of more than one major storm. The return sail was taking as long as it was because their captain was sailing up and down, out off the coast of the United States, trying to avoid a couple of hurricanes which were then working their way up the Atlantic. At this point, when Mom had finally emerged up on deck after a week of being sick down below, one of her fellow passengers pointed out to the rest of them that the ship had been sailing in a circle for at least an hour. They confirmed that this was true by looking at the curved wake they were leaving behind them.
Finally, the crew told them all to go below and stay there. The Italian crew members came down and fairly wordlessly closed all the portholes. Then they shut the engines down.
The students all sat below deck in the quiet left when the engines cut out watching the waves rock the clothing they had hung to dry til it hung at a 45-degree angle. Mom figured this was the end of her life, and decided she would just go to sleep in her bunk. She'd been too seasick to attend the lifeboat drill, she said, and she wasn't sure where the lifejackets were. So she laid down fully expecting not to wake up again.
One young man decided he would go look for the crew for a status update.
When he came back down from the deck, the students asked him if he'd found the crew and what they said. Expecting some reassurance from the experienced crew, who had been through things like this before and were simply and calmly preparing and waiting, and expecting to get back to business as soon as it was over. And he said "They're praying the rosary."
Don't you love that?
I love it because it's a great story -- "They're praying the rosary."
But I also love it because it's a true insight into my mother as a person who had a life which was completely independent of my life - mom as person.
My father was not someone particularly gifted at encouraging the self-development of the people around him - we were all supposed defer in our personhood to the needs of his personhood. It was a different time, and he had a house full of women. He was brilliant and difficult and sometimes violent and we were supposed to serve him before we served ourselves. This is not a pattern that is greatly productive of anyone's happiness.
So the story of my relationship with my parents is complicated and in some ways not terribly helpful if what I'm trying to do is to figure out my true inheritance from either one of them. My father's death twenty-one years ago, when I was pregnant with my son, my second child, was one of the kinder gifts he gave the rest of us.
I don't mean that as cruelly as it sounds. If you had a troubled and violent childhood then you know how something like that can be said without hatred or rancor, once enough time has passed. If you didn't, then you probably don't. His absence allowed the rest of us to step forward, and eventually it allowed us to appreciate his good points without the distraction of his lesser qualities, and that is really a fine resolution.
Mother's day can be complicated - it is for some of you, I'm sure. And my own days of uncomplicated rose-colored mornings when little children presented me with oddly-shaped pottery or handprints or something have long passed. If you're still in those, enjoy every minute of them. It's going to get more nuanced before you're really ready for it.
There have been moments in recent years when I have bitten my tongue with internal impatience over something or other that my mother said or did, knowing perfectly well, finally, that whatever was annoying to me about it had nothing whatever to do with her. I now watch my daughter making her first efforts to do the same thing with me. She will, I hope, get better at it.
But I really do appreciate the effort - in ways that she doesn't know because she doesn't yet know that I can see her doing it.
Until, I suppose, she reads this sermon.
There are years in the relationships between parents and children when biting our tongues is absolutely the most loving gift we can give each other. So we do it, and we wait, and we hope that we live long enough to be able to offer better gifts.
My mother and I, thanks be to god, have gotten there. And as friends my own age share their stories of mothers dying, mothers with dementia, mothers long gone, mothers hospitalized, I am grateful to have these years of sufficient clear-sightedness to thank my mother for being who she is.
She was rescuing snakes the other day. She lives out at Tryon Farm, an ecological community in Michigan City, Indiana (where I'm going after this service). The architect and his wife put in (unwisely, I think) a little swimming hole in one of the meadows. To coax grasses to grow around it they put seed down last fall, and straw on top of it, and nylon netting on top of that. And about two weeks ago it warmed up enough for it to be snake day at Tryon Farm. They emerged everywhere. Mom had them on her walkway, but they also emerged under the nylon nets, and four of them got caught in it. It was Mom who made the first effort to cut them free, and she released one, but it died anyway. But she couldn't figure out how to cut the final loop around one snake's head without cutting the snake, so she summoned help and the other woman at Tryon Farm who isn't terrified of snakes got out there, let the snake (a blue-racer, naturally a constrictor) wrap around her arm and talked to it until it was still and then she quickly cut it free. It leaped away, swam across the pond (note to anyone thinking of letting their children swim there) and headed out across the meadow with nary a snakey-backward glance. But I'm sure it was grateful to both of them. The one on the path into Mom's house was probably sent as an emissary from all the snakes to say thank you.
With that whole anxiety-filled experience of growing up with my father, and personally finding the courage to stand up to him - a pattern he came to expect, and which no doubt propelled me eventually into my current career in a "helping profession" - I frankly used to think of myself as braver than my mother.
This isn't true. We are brave, in our various mild ways, differently. I started a non-profit, and I manage to pay everyone every week pretty much. That takes a certain kind of courage. But there is, frankly, no conceivable way I could overcome my skittishness about snakes enough to get close enough to rescue one. Maybe when I perceive myself to be closer to death, who knows.
But I doubt it.
This is the kind of courage my mother has always had, although during the years that my father was alive it was not a kind of courage that was noisy enough to be terribly discernable, over his personality. It's taken some quieter decades for it to re-emerge - or for me to learn to appreciate it.
Women's stories are like this, I think. They are about patience, steadfastness, encouragement from the periphery. This is why history tends to erase them. They sometimes lack the dramatic central narrative figure that our expectations demand from stories. So we overlook them. Mothers' Day is a good day to remember that the things that the women around us have done for us, and their stories, are worth remembering.
I have finally lived long enough to appreciate my mother for who she is, rather than depreciating her for the ways in which she somehow failed to meet whatever my narcissistic expectations for her were at the moment. I hope my children live long enough to see me as simply a human with the full panoply of human foibles, and to not blame me for it, even though, in some significant ways, I have disappointed them.
And no doubt will continue to do so.
Given my own natural introversion, an at-times intense childhood home and a 17-year marriage to a gay man, I like to think that I can be excused for being slow to catch on sometimes to what is actually going on around me. And for sometimes seeing the world as more threatening than it really is. But through the benevolent action of the Holy Spirit, transmitting the love from the transcendent God, who is God, to the incarnate God, who is God in us, I have received, at last, a commonplace but extremely helpful insight. If you can relax your unrelenting grip on your desire for a perfect past enough to get an arms-length look at it you may find that it is the main obstacle to your current happiness.
I'm telling you what I'm telling you about myself this morning not because it's particularly important any more, but because it lets you know that I know something about the deferral of happiness.
If we live long enough to grow past our most intense years of narcissism, which I hope God grants us all to do - and then to stay there - we can start to unpack, with a certain detachment, what our inheritance is. Someone can talk about fathers here on Father's Day - it's not my day to be with you. But from my father I got a certain clarity of intellect which I appreciate and enjoy. He also had a great sense of humor that I like to think I share - a sense of tragic absurdity that makes life funny even when it's terrible. Some of you would be aghast at the full blackness of my humor, I'm afraid, but it helps me. I also know something about his dominating personality from the inside - and I have learned to work at keeping it under a more compassionate wrap, where it can actually do some good. That compassionate overlayer is something I got from my mother.
This is the real inheritance, and this is the pleasure of traveling to Indiana with a cake and my children in the car to celebrate with her and the snakes.
Once you can let go of whatever thing you thought
you needed - the expectation of a perfect childhood, for example - you can start
to appreciate what you have.
I hope someday my children get to the point where they are just glad for what I
can offer them, and not regretful, any more, of the things I couldn't do or be
for them. I hope they get there while I'm still alive.
I'm grateful to have had this rather pedestrian
revelation while my long-suffering mother is still with me, still paddling about
in her kayak, still rescuing snakes in the woods.
So let me give you some advice that I have earned the hard way. Try to put down
the expectations you hold for the people you are webbed to that come from your
need and not from their ability. Try to put down your fantasies of the perfect
family, which yours is not (and neither is anyone else's). Try to distance
yourself from what you thought you needed, so that you can look at whatever it
is that you did get. In some cases there really will be nothing there but sorrow
and if that is you then you are in my prayers. But in most cases there are gifts
- inheritances - that are best realized while everyone is still on earth to say
thank you to.
I'm sure that my mother has become braver in the years of her widowhood, because she has had to, and because she has had the opportunity to. I like to think that my newfound appreciation of her has helped her with that (which just might be my narcissism again - assuming that she couldn't possibly manage it without my help). But whether this part of her personality receded in the presence of my father or not, it was certainly always a part of who she was.
There are some kind of funky things going on with my feet that come straight from Mom. I've got arthritis developing in the same places on my fingers. And I have to stop kind of a long time at the top of an escalator before I can coordinate my foot and my sight to get on. All of that comes from her, and all of it passed right on to my daughter. We live with that. But I'm hoping that the things I'm finally learning to appreciate about her - that other people around her have appreciated for a long time - passed on to me also. I'm hoping I find myself in a kayak when I'm pushing 80. And maybe even rescuing the snakes. If I do I will know it for what it is. A gift. Inheritance.
Happy mother's day.
Closing words:
My heart is not afraid of deep water.
It is wearing its life vest,
that invisible garment of love
and trust, and it tells you this story.
Go in peace.