LAST SUNDAY

"Love One Another as I Have Loved You " (05.13.12) 

By Dick Rice, Transitional Spiritual Leader

Scriptures: John 15:9-17

We continue to linger in the Easter season and to linger in the 12th step. Hopefully, as our celebration of Easter goes on, we are more deeply and fully awakened to the care of our God for us, to how beloved we are, and to the unity that is ours with all creation.

As we linger, our reflection on who this higher power is for us Christians gets simpler.  Two weeks ago we reflected on “I am the Good Shepherd.” Last Sunday it was “I am the Vine.” Today it is “Love one another as I have loved you.”

LOVE:  Is there any word so used and abused today as that word? What did the word mean to Jesus and what does it mean at best to us? We could reflect on Paul’s words in 1st Corinthians 13:4-7 which remind us that love is not just thoughts or words, but is most realized in actions. We could reflect on a superb contemporary description of love from Brene Brown:  Love is when we share our most vulnerable and our most powerful sides and when we are received by the other with kindness and respect. 

The older I get, the more convinced I am that our lives are all about love and only and finally about love—love given and received for true intimacy and true mutuality. 

With that said, let us apply LOVE to Mother’s Day, in a way that includes us all.  Our Jewish/Christian scriptures treat mother’s love as the paradigm of all love. Psalm 131 prays “Enough for me to rest, like a weaned child on my mother’s lap.” Isaiah 49 states that “even if a mother should forget her child, God will never forget us.” Mother’s love is usually considered the ultimate love, the touchstone of all other love.

But what is God’s invitation to us on Mother’s Day if our mother did forget us or did abandon us, if we find ourselves carrying resentment today toward our mother, living or dead? We all know how toxic resentments are for us in our recovery, how important it is for us to ask God to remove them. 

I will share my experience, strength, and hope as to how God has done that for me, regarding my mother. 

Only when I got into recovery at 40 and after I dealt with my anger toward my dad, the active alcoholic in my family, did I realize how angry I was toward my mother. I was the first child in an Irish Catholic family. I now at 40 realized that my mother had enlisted me as her emotional respondent when my dad proved to be unavailable. I was furious when I came to this realization. Fortunately, I was on a retreat and had the time and the resources to deal with my rage. Being inclined to depression, I chose instead to pound a boxing body-bag as though it contained the picture of my mother.

After a few hour-long sessions of this, I discovered my anger was finite and was morphing into sadness. I ached with grief at the death in my head of the imagined quite perfect family I thought I had been part of. Gradually, my grief gave way to acceptance and I began to understand why and how this relationship happened the way it did. My mom had been abandoned by her dad when she was 16. Now, ten years later, she was married to a man who was quite unavailable to her. Anxious and needy, she reached out to the one who was available to her and somewhat in her control. That was me. It was unfortunate but understandable. As I accepted this reality, I also began to give thanks for the great gift of “attentive listening” that I received from the relationship. That dark grace has been the foundation of my service as a spiritual director and counselor. I like to listen.   Now I could even begin to give thanks for the relationship as it was and for my life as it is. I realized my mother did the best she could with the lights she had. So did yours.

It is also important that we acknowledge that we have been mothered by many others than our biological mothers. My first best friend was my Grandma Tot. It might have been grandmothers, aunts, godmothers, teachers, counselors, or neighbors who mothered us well along the way. And if all of the above were lacking, I submit that our God let us know in some direct way that we were special and loved. Through it all, our God has cared for us and given us exactly the mothers we were meant to have. 

My prayer this day is that all of us can say loudly and deeply “Thank God for our Mothers.” 

Happy Mother’s Day!

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