Friends,
As a rule I don’t do much to promote the celebration of Mothers’ Day in the Church, because I am mindful of the loneliness and sadness such celebrations cause those who do not have children, or who have difficult and dysfunctional relationships with their mothers.
I am aware, however, that Mother’s Day began not as a way to sell greeting cards (as is commonly assumed) but as an attempt to get mothers organized around working for peace. The idea was that for women the experience of motherhood might create a bond of solidarity that could transcend national aggression and lead to peace.
The suggestion that motherhood leads inevitably to nonviolence is a bit sentimental. Having two children did nothing to prevent Margaret Thatcher from leading the UK into the Falklands War; nor did motherhood prevent at least four US Senators (Feinstein, Lincoln, Landrieu, and Clinton) from voting to authorize the United States’ invasion of Iraq. Still, I tend to hope that empathy born of shared human experiences can lead us–regardless of gender or family situation–to seek peace, and for that reason I applaud the aspirations of Mothers’ Day’s founders.
In honor of Mothers’ Day’s original intent–and keenly aware that motherhood isn’t the only pathway into an experience of the kind of empathy and human connection that leads to peace–I’ll leave you with this statement from Another Mother for Peace, which my late aunt, the actor Donna Reed, helped write and promote during the Vietnam War:
I join with my sisters in every land in The Pax Materna—
A permanent declaration of peace
That transcends our ideological differences
In the nuclear shadow, war is obsolete
I will no longer suffer it in silence
Nor sustain it by complicity.
They shall not send my son
To fight another mother’s son
For now, forever, there is no mother
Who is an enemy to another mother.
God’s Peace to you,
Ben