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“The Grace of Daily Obligations”

Wilton Presbyterian Church

May 13, 2007

It takes courage to choose to be a marriage and family person these days.

Time was when it choosing to be a family person seemed a whole lot easier…perhaps because it was, well, expected. High school, then college, perhaps graduate school, then marriage, work, and children were all part of the growing up package many remember. Not so any longer. Nowadays, choosing to have a family, to love family life and to see in family the most potent moral and spiritual center of what really matters in life takes an act of courage.

There all kinds of pressures to diminish the importance of family. Especially around these parts, work demands travel—and oftimes regular changes of residence. Seducing the heart with glittering entertainment, gratifying the demands of ambition, and all but requiring two paychecks just to make ends meet, work can dissolve attachments and loyalties. Husbands and wives live in isolation from each other. Children of the upwardly mobile can be almost as abandoned emotionally as children of the ghetto. The lives of husbands, wives, and children frequently do not mesh, are not engaged, seem merely thrown together. There is enough money; but there is too much emotional space and too little time to relate.

It takes courage to choose marriage and family these days.

And yet. And yet, we know and we believe that the family is a stronger agency of educational success than the school: family is where we learn to wonder and ask why, to think our thoughts and to test them in our first intellectual marketplace--around the family meal table. The family is a stronger teacher of religions imagination than the church: family is where we learn honesty and fairness, to fight and make up, to love, to confess, to dream, and to pray--by our bedsides, at meals, in our own heads and hearts before we fall asleep at night. And family—father, mother, and children with respect to them--is an absolutely critical social force; family is where we learn to live together with others, to listen to others, to be vulnerable ourselves, and to manage all the frictions and frustrations, satisfactions and sacrifices community entails.

There has been a lot of press about character education; and while definitions of character may differ, there is one thing all agree upon, it is this: that whatever personal character is, it is molded most clearly within the family.

The world around the family is unjust. The world around the family is scary, full of threats and risks. We know the government, the state, the nations of the world are never fully to be trusted. But one unforgettable law remains through all the oppressions, disasters, and injustices of the last thousand years and longer: if things go well with the family, life is worthy living; when the family falters, life falls apart.

From one perspective, these words go against a conventional grain. America is founded on the individual and his/her right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The result, however, is often the assumption that life is solitary and brief, and its aim, founded on a dream of the solitary spirit, is self-fulfillment of one’s own ego, happiness through concentration upon oneself (even when for the sake of service to others). As in “Live free or die,” “Don’t tread on me,” “Stand not in my way,” “My self, my castle.” Is it any wonder, then, that our society views caring as an impediment that squanders our individual potential and ties us down? Or demeans mothering, underpays day-care workers and teachers, and penalizes adults—subtly, of course--who take time away from work to care for aging parents?

But it is more than our national tradition that celebrates the individual, solitary life. It is our Christian tradition as well. Through the ages, mystic writings begin with the willingness and ability to endure extended periods of solitude through monastic (read individual) contemplation of divine mystery.

My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For

this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.

Thomas Merton wrote that on the silence that derives from monastic life. The inference seems clear: without solitude one cannot experience the creative power of God’s grace. And, of course, there is the traditional Protestant mantra that salvation is an individual thing for which each person—alone and apart from anyone else--is ultimately responsible. Is it any wonder that, expecting God to appear in those places where holy men usually conduct their affairs on mountains, in caves, in sanctuaries, in temples, in the cloister of one’s study surrounded by books, in classrooms, in the library, that we miss what God might be saying about salvation in nurseries, on playgrounds, in a kitchen, a parking lot, at the checkout counter, or at the bedside of an old woman?

From this angle, marriage and family, with their grueling, humbling, and baffling, responsibilities, can an assault on the solitary individual. Or an alliance with as minimal an infringement on the privacy of an individual as one partner or another allows. And children are not necessarily a welcome responsibility either; for to have children is, plainly, to cease being a child oneself. So that one consequence of this freedom we American Christians so celebrate can well be self-destruction…were it not for the disciplines (and terrors) of marriage and family.

Marriage is an enormous risk and one’s likelihood of failure can be rather high. No tame commitment, marriage. The nurture and raising of children, now that so few die in childbirth or infancy, brings each of us breathtaking vistas of our inadequacy. Being married and having children, if nothing else, impress upon us lessons we are forced to learn about ourselves that are not always pleasant. Seeing ourselves through the unblinking eyes of an intimate, honest spouse can be humbling beyond anticipation. A rational man, act as I act? But in some deep down deep center of our being, we know our dignity and our value as human beings depends more on what sort of spouses and parents we are than on any professional work we are called upon to do. What person would have his or her obituary include that they wished they had spent more time at the office, on the road, at work?

It take courage these days to choose marriage and family.

Which is the legacy our mothers and the lesson you mothers have to teach us…about what it means to be a genuinely human being living in what some refer to as the grace of God in daily, family obligations.

There is nothing natural about mothering, just as there’s nothing natural about being anything else (a professional person, for example; or a wife). They are all inhuman tasks that require colossal amounts of concentration. Within six months, having a child wrecks havoc on a professional life, draining a mother of energies and time needed to think, let alone write. With only two or three hours a night of sleep, it becomes incredibly difficult to sit and concentrate on an idea, sniff out a subject, walk back and forth around a thought, tease out a brainstorm, or chase down a hunch. With the increasing demands of being a mom, a mother can feel torn apart, dismantled, put back again (although never in a way that feels quite right). Having a baby in the bassinet next to their bed, nursing every three hours, changing diapers every other minute, changing and washing the same clothes all day, with a growing accumulation of baby stuff crowding her personal space, a mother can easily feel as if she’s tottering on the edge. And sometime later, to turn down a once-in-a-lifetime professional opportunity because you promised to take the kids, along with your aging father, to Disney World. (And there at Disney World some months later, glancing over at the smile on your father’s face and seeing the glee on your kid’s face, you remember why you promised to do Disney World in the first place.) To maintain human dignity in the crucible of such pressure is incredibly courageous and full of grace.

But it is this caregiving of our mothers and of you mothers that enables us adults and children alike to learn about what is really important in life.

The grace of daily obligations.

It is very difficult to stay up all night rocking a sick children, cooling his fevered brow, changing her soiled linen, rubbing her fragile body with ointments, praying unceasingly for her healing—and return to a corporate office somewhere on some twenty something floor and sign the order to lay off thousands of workers.

The grace of daily obligations.

After getting down your knees to slip the toenails of an infirm parent, combing the hair of a comatose friend, wiping the drool from the mouth of your favorite aunt who has Alzheimer’s, or feeding your grandbaby her first spoon of baby cereal, it’s almost important to order the bombing of homes in other lands.

The grace of daily obligations.

After listening to the sound of your toddler’s erratic breathing all night, it’s pretty hard to sit in a legislative chamber and vote for measures that threaten our environment and the health of our children’s children.

The grace of daily obligations.

Because these women were our mothers, they never became the professional people they might have been. If they hadn’t had to suffer the interruptions of sulking children, the vibes of brooding husbands, or the distractions of popcorn wafting in the air from the family room where the family is watching The Lion King for the 47^th time, they never received the recognition—or the money--they might have. But they embraced the bits and snatches of revelation God sent their way through their families and children, and, in honoring their daily obligations, they taught the rest of us what the privilege of being human and the grace of God is all about.

I want to close this sermon with a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Bill Collins that captures so wondrously the humanity and grace of God in our mothers and in you mothers. Its title is “The Lanyard”.

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

Off the pale blue walls of this room,

Bouncing from typewriter to piano,

From bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor.

I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

Where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

Could send one more suddenly into the past—

A past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

By a deep Adirondack lake

Learning how to braid thin plastic strips

Into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

Or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

But that did not keep me from crossing

Strand over strand again and again

Until I had made a boxy

Red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breast,

And I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sickroom,

Lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,

Set cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

And here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

Which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

Strong legs, bones and teeth,

And two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

And here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

Is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth

That you can never repay your mother,

But the rueful admission that when she took

The two-tone lanyard from my hands,

I was a sure as a boy could be

That this useless, worthless thing I wove

Out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Thank you, Helen, my mother. Thank you, Susan, mother of my children. And thank God for all our mothers and each of you mothers for the courage in fulfilling the grace of your daily obligations. Amen.

The seeds of this sermon were sown by Michael Novak in his Atlantic Monthly article, “The Family Out of Favor,” and Renita Weems in her book, Listening for God, with special thanks to Jane Field for suggesting Billy Collins’ poem, “The Lanyard.”