Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.

I am agnostic on what—if anything—happens to us after death, but I like something the Dalai Lama (a believer in reincarnation) says. He says that whenever you meet someone, remember that they were, are, or will be your mother. He says that if you never knew your mother or your relationship with your mother wasn’t good, then choose someone else; your father, a grandparent, a favorite teacher, a spouse. The idea is to treat each person with whom you come in contact with the kind of respect and care with which you would treat your mother or the other person you chose.

When asked to define love, for years I have said love is care and respect for another. bell hooks, in her book All About Love, has a longer list. She writes, “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”

As I think about the quote from the Sufi poet Rumi, that I used for our opening words, “We are born of love. Love is our mother,” I wonder what he meant. Surely, some of us were born of the love between our parents. But what of those born of a one-night stand, or worse, of rape?

Rumi does not say some of us were born of love. He uses an all-inclusive “we”: “We are born of love. Love is our mother.” Rumi also says, “Love is my religion and my faith. Love is my mother.” He speaks of love as the very ground of his being, if you will, his mother.

The twentieth-century Christian theologian Paul Tillich says something not dissimilar. Tillich writes, “The most intimate motions within the depths of our souls are not completely our own. For they belong also to our friends, to humankind, to the universe, and the Ground of all being, the aim of our life.” Of love, Tillich says, “I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, because there is no higher principle by which it could be defined. It is life itself in its actual unity.”

Love is “Life itself in its actual unity”; “Love is our mother.” All of us, no matter the details of our conception and birth, come from love.

One of my favorite spiritual teachers, the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote three books with love in the title: How to Love, Teachings on Love, and True Love: a Practice for Awakening the Heart. He said, “Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name.” I thought about that quote as we heard the story of The Memory String by Eve Bunting for our Time for All Ages. It was only when Laura began to realize that her stepmother Jane understood her pain at the loss of her mother that she began to allow her into her life.

Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that love is not just the very ground of our being. It is how we relate back to that ground. He says, “Through my love for you, I want to express my love for the whole cosmos, the whole of humanity, and all beings.”

How do we find this love that is our mother, that grounds us in our very being and that we can reflect back to that ground? From Thich Nhat Hanh again, “The first element of true love is loving kindness. The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person.”

If we are lucky, we may have been taught this love by our parents. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? There aren’t courses or classes in love. If the grown-ups know how to take care of each other, then the children who grow up in this environment will naturally know how to love, understand, and bring happiness to others. The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all.”

To return to bell hooks, she writes about her own family in her book All About Love. She says, “An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as we were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.

“Raised in a family in which aggressive shaming and verbal humiliation coexisted with lots of affection and care, I had difficulty embracing the term ‘dysfunctional.’ Since I felt and still feel attached to my parents and siblings, proud of all the positive dimensions of our family life, I did not want to describe us by using a term that implied our life together had been all negative or bad. I did not want my parents to think I was disparaging them; I was appreciative of all the good things that they had given in the family. With therapeutic help I was able to see the term “dysfunctional” as a useful description and not as an absolute negative judgment. My family of origin provided, throughout my childhood, a dysfunctional setting and it remains one. This does not mean that it is not also a setting in which affection, delight, and care are present.

“On any day in my family of origin I might have been given caring attention wherein my being a smart girl was affirmed and encouraged. Then, hours later, I would be told that it was precisely because I thought I was so smart that I was likely to go crazy and be put in a mental institution where no one would visit me. Not surprisingly, this odd mixture of care and unkindness did not positively nurture the growth of my spirit….

“Pressed in therapy to describe my household of origin in terms of whether it was loving or not, I painfully admitted that I did not feel loved in our household but that I did feel cared for. And outside my household of origin, I felt genuinely loved by individual family members, like my grandfather. This experience of genuine love (a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect) nurtured my wounded spirit and enabled me to survive acts of lovelessness.”

Most of you know that my daughter was adopted. She was adopted through the foster care system, so, yes, there were problems in her birth family. But her grandfather, though he could not raise my daughter and her sisters, always stayed a part of their lives. In their childhood he regularly took them to the playground by the Baltimore airport where they could watch the planes come and go. My daughter kept a shiny pink raincoat long after she could fit into it, because it was a gift from her Pop Pop. Pop Pop died a few years ago. My daughter and each of her sisters keep some memento of him.

If genuine love is—as hooks describes it—”a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect,” who offered that to you? Maybe it was not your mother, but still today might be a good day to thank them, whoever they are. And then turn the question around: Are you able to offer genuine love to others? If not, what can you do to become able to do so? Remember the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself… Then you have something to offer the other person.”

As a foster/adoptive parent, I was required to take courses in parenting. Despite that, I was blindsided more than once in what came up along my journey of being a mother. I am afraid that none of us are ever going to become perfect in offering genuine love 24/7. All of us lose patience. All of us are going to have something come up that we have no idea how to handle. All we can do is do our best and keep growing in our love and acceptance of ourselves as well as of those we care about.

American writer and teacher of meditation Jack Kornfield says, “Parenting is a labor of time. It’s a path of service and surrender, and—like the practice of a Buddha or bodhisattva—it demands patience, understanding and tremendous sacrifice. It is also a way to reconnect with the mystery of life.”

“We are born of love. Love is our mother,” and it is love that will enable us to truly mother or father others.

In my files of readings is one titled “A Prayer for Men” by Rev. Kirk Loadman-Copeland, which begins, “On this Father’s Day, let our final words be words of praise.” For today’s service I am going to change “father” to “parent.”

He writes:

“Let us praise those (parents) who have striven to balance the demands of work, marriage, and children with an honest awareness of both joy and sacrifice.
“Let us praise those (parents) who, lacking a good model for a (parent), have worked to become a good (parent).
“Let us praise those (parents) who by their own account were not always there for their children, but who continue to offer those children, now grown, their love and support.
“Let us pray for those (parents) who have been wounded by the neglect and hostility of their children.
“Let us praise those (parents) who, despite divorce, have remained in their children’s lives.
“Let us praise those (parents) whose children are adopted….
“Let us praise those (parents) who, as stepparents, freely choose the obligation of (parent)hood and earned their stepchildren’s love and respect.
“Let us praise those (parents) who have lost a child to death and continue to hold the child in their heart.
“Let us praise those … who have no children but cherish the next generation as if they were their own.
“Let us praise those… who have (“parented”) us in their role as mentors and guides.
“Let us praise those… who are about to become (parents); may they openly delight in their children.
“And let us praise those (parents) who have died but live on in our memory and whose love continues to nurture us.”

Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, consider everyone you meet today as though they were, are, or will be your parent. On this Mother’s Day, honor them all.

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