John 15: 9-17; I John 5: 2,3

The mothering gap

On Mother’s day we tend to get into this celebration and demonstration of motherly love.  This is good.   People need to be more grateful for the people who have given us motherly love, who have showered us with their maternal instinct.  But there is a problem.  Not everyone receives and gives as much or the same quality of motherly love as the next person.  This we do not like to talk about on Mother’s Day , but it is reality .  

The Bible pretty much lays it out in our lectionary readings today, in the Gospel of John and in the first letter of John: love is a commandment. It is a Christian must.  And this commandment should give us joy.  Love, commandment and joy are tied together.   We are not always comfortable with that, friends.  We see love more as a feeling or a gift or a privilege or a treasure to be found somewhere, either by surprise or as a result of hard searching.  Now of course we are not talking about romantic love here.  That is a whole different discussion.  What we are talking about here is unconditional love, love for the sake of love, love without a hidden agenda,  love for us as we are, as we come, with all our flaws.

When we think of that kind of love, we are more likely to think of mothers than we think of anyone else.  But is that really fair, friends?  Is that really fair?  We still tend to associate that with the idea of the woman who physically gives birth and raises a child with a kind of serene, calm wisdom and patience.  It’s almost like some stereotypic idea of womanhood.  Is this fair to children who did not have or do not have that or to women who are not like that or to men that are like that?  I think we understand a lot more now.  We know about testosterone and estrogen change in men and women at different times of life.  We know motherly love is not limited to a biological mother.  We know now that gender is a complicated thing and will understand more as time goes by.  ‘Where am I going with this,’ you may think.  My point is that not all of us give or receive motherly love in equal measure.  There is a mothering gap.  Not every woman can give enough and not everyone receives enough.   Some people get more of that motherly love than others.

In the seventies novel The Conservationist Nobel prize winner Nadine Gordimer shares the thoughts of her main character, a white city business man in South Africa who has bought a farm on the high veld, the high plain of the Transvaal. He thinks about life and at one point he muses, thinking about the poverty of the African population. He thinks:”when will it be our turn, when will it be our turn to be poor and to starve.”  It is an acknowledgment that people do not receive in equal measure, whether it is wealth, money or love.  Arundhati  Roi, another celebrated woman novelist, this time from India, in “The God of Small Things” writes beautifully about a girl called Sophie Mol who comes to the Christian region of southwest India known as Kerala.  Bad things happened to her and the author wonders why and she starts talking about love.  She wonders if all that happens to people has already been laid down, including love, as if there are laws about love.  She writes (p.33):”It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.  That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that laid down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”(p.33)   Friends, we have talked about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the love they received as a child and how different their experience was.  It shows that the experience of motherly love does not come in equal measure, how painful that may be.

In the mountain forest below the Himalayas in China’s Yunnan province there are a group of elusive white furred monkeys called snub nosed monkeys. They are gentle animals over all who are unafraid of humans.  In the KVIE program Nature it showed two male babies being born to the same mother.  No one explained why but the mother coddles and pampers one and rejects the other.  The pampered one throws temper tantrums when he is being weaned while the ignored one has to struggle and fend for himself from the get go.  In the end the tribe helps care for him, including adult males who are not his father. Nevertheless the two youngsters become fast friends.  There is the mothering gap right there friends.  Not everyone gives equal love and not everyone receive the same love.  Others have to step in. This does not make it right. It still violates God’s love commandment, but it is reality.  The Church can learn from this.  One of its main reasons for being is to share God’s motherly love for all with those who have received less love. Like the monkey tribe it has to fill and close the mothering gap.  May God give us the wisdom, the commitment and the strength to fulfill this commandment with joy.