Mothering, whether performed by a mother or someone else, requires accepting a child as they are, while also encouraging and supporting growth. The necessity of loving what is and working for change is the core and the challenge of spiritual work.
Our Unitarian Universalist third principle seems to contradict itself:
“Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.”
On one hand, we say, as a foundational principle of our faith, that we should accept one another. I take that to mean the very good spiritual commandment to love what is. To see the beauty everywhere. To appreciate the moment. To celebrate the worth and dignity of every person, as we say in our first principle. To not demand something more or different, or to waste our days in anxious striving that forever precludes contentment.
We are to cherish the world as it is and accept the people as they are in all their glorious peculiarities.
Amen to that.
But the second half of the principle asks us to take all those wonderful people we accept just as they are, and encourage them to grow, which means to be more, which means perhaps they were less than before. To encourage growth means to want, eventually, to be different. Which means we see their shortcomings now.
So are we accepting, or are we judging?
The beautiful sentiment of the first half of the principle is reversed by the second half.
Or, we could analyze the contradiction in the third principle the other way around.
We have a beautiful sentiment of encouragement to spiritual growth, undercut by a bland acceptance that signs “I suppose, it’s good enough as it is.”
But we don’t concede that ourselves or the world around us is “good enough.” We want more and different. Of course, our faith should deepen and evolve over the course of our lives. We are life-long learners, aren’t we? And fierce advocates of social change. And repair work to do on the damage we’ve done to the planet. Of course, we should incorporate new experiences and new learnings into an growing faith. Of course, we should continuously wrestle with the profound questions of existence and our answers should get better over time.
Growth and change is good. It’s even necessary, for living systems.
“Don’t be afraid of some change,” as we sang in our Opening Hymn.
“We bid you welcome,” says Dick Gilbert in our Call to Worship, “Who come to probe and explore. Who come to learn.” Words perfectly in line with the admirable second half of our third principle.
But then what of acceptance? Must we accept the people who cling to their ignorance, who refuse to listen to evidence, who misbehave, who trample the rights of others? Does that sound like spiritual health? What do we say to the stubborn ones who hold on to who they are and refuse to grow? Should we admire the ones who are perfectly happy with themselves just the way they are, “thank you very much”? If faith is a journey, not a destination, acceptance sounds like settling.
It seems the third principle wants it both ways, yet it’s hard to resolve the contradiction. Can we actually accept and grow? Either we accept what is, in which case change is meddles where it doesn’t belong. Or if change is the rule, then it’s ingenuous to claim we accept what is.
And yet there they both are in the third principle. And the two phrases are connected not by an “or” but an “and”.
As Richard Fewkes has it: “for this gathered company which welcomes us as we are, from wherever we have come;” yet continues in the next line, “for all our free churches that keep us human and encourage us in our quest for beauty, truth, and love.”
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.
We are talking in this spring season about the seven principles of our UU faith as they currently appear in the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
I’ve been taking them out of order so that I can match the principles with other events and concerns going on in the life of the church and the calendar.
We’ve already looked at principles four, two, seven, and five. I’ll look at the sixth principle in two weeks, for the Memorial Day weekend. And I’ll look at the first principle to end the series during the worship service on June 2.
I paired the third principle for today, because today is Mother’s Day, and I think that parents more quickly than anyone see how the contradiction in our third principle really is no contradiction.
My other purpose in this series of spring sermons is to fulfill the fifth of the five tasks of interim ministry: the tasks of helping a congregation review its history, refresh its leadership, examine its mission and vision, and re-establish connections with supportive partners in the local community and the larger world of Unitarian Universalism.
Mother’s Day has a connection to the larger world of Unitarian Universalism that you may not be aware of.
Like many American holidays, Mother’s Day has a more profound history than the commercialized holiday we know today.
The founder of Mother’s Day was a Unitarian, a woman named Julia Ward Howe.
She was born in 1819, in New York City. The fourth child and eldest daughter of seven, her mother died in childbirth when she was five. She was raised by her conservative and wealthy father, a banker.
Julia loved poetry from an early age and wrote and published her own poems early on. Through her poetry and her family wealth, Julia came into contact with a social circle that included Unitarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Later in life she would write a biography of Margaret Fuller.
In 1843 she met and married Dr. Samuel Howe, the Director of the New England Institute for the Blind in Boston, nineteen years her senior. They were members of a Boston Unitarian church. They had six children together. But the marriage was an unhappy one in which Dr. Howe wished to stifle Julia’s public life as a writer and speaker.
The couple found common cause, though, in abolitionist work. Julia and Dr. Howe worked together on a journal advocating for the end of slavery. During the Civil War they worked for the US Sanitary Commission. It was in this capacity, at the urging of her Unitarian minister, James Freeman Clarke, that Julia Howe wrote new lyrics to the song, “John Brown’s Body” which became “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
In 1867, she was one of the founders of the Free Religious Association, an interfaith organization for free-thinkers, led by the most radical Unitarians and Universalists.
After the war, Howe became a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement. When the National Woman Suffrage Association divided over whether to support the 15th amendment, which would grant the vote to black men, but not to women, Julia joined Lucy Stone in founding the American Woman Suffrage Association which endorsed the 15thamendment. Julia Howe became the editor of the association’s newspaper, the Woman’s Journal for the next 20 years.
Julia Howe’s experience during the Civil War led her to become a peace advocate and she spoke widely, particularly at Unitarian churches.
It is in the context of her peace work, in the wake of the devastating American Civil War, that Julia Howe became associated with Mother’s Day. Her Mother’s Day proclamation, from 1870 is this:
“Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”
Julia Howe’s call for Mother’s Day was not for a card, a bouquet, and a brunch. That would come later when Woodrow Wilson inaugurated a national holiday to honor mothers.
Howe’s earlier call was for an international conference of women, who, from their experience as mothers would never allow their son’s to be trained to injure other mother’s sons, and would therefore, if women were empowered to address the “settlement of international questions” would find “the means whereby the great human family can live in peace.”
Julia Howe knew, as a mother, and as a daughter, that children must be loved as they are, and encouraged to be something more than they are.
She speaks in her proclamation of her duty to teach her sons, “charity, mercy, and patience” understanding that those virtues even if latent in us must be brought out of us through nurture and affirmation.
She knew as a child of a strict father, and as the wife of a controlling husband, that she had more to offer than she was allowed to be. She needed to love herself enough to advocate for and educate herself to become the woman she wished to become, not accepting the reduced person that others saw.
Julia Howe grew from a strict religious upbringing by her father into a religious liberal, a Unitarian, a co-founder of the Free Religious Association. From a protected society girl, she grew into an abolitionist, a suffragist, and a peace advocate. From her early love of poetry she developed her literary gifts throughout her life. From the closed domestic sphere of her marriage she grew into a powerful public speaker and published author.
It would seem that Julia Howe was never one to accept, but always to push and to strive and to grow.
For herself, and for her children, and not only in childhood but throughout her life, she questioned herself and the criticized world. She critiqued the place of women in society, the roles of wives and mothers, the use of violence to solve political conflict, the constraints on religious belief. Julia’s life was a continuous call to change. She sought it for herself. She encouraged it in others, in her family, her friends, and for her nation.
But Julia Ward Howe is an example of growth and an example of acceptance. How can that be? Because to think of acceptance only as resignation or submission is to miss that acceptance begins with seeing clearly and acknowledging reality, which Julia Howe did unconditionally. Acceptance is the opposite of denial. We cannot critique reality if we can’t see it. To begin to change means first to accept what is.
Julia constantly questioned the life she had been given. She saw. She accepted the reality but never submitted to it. It is because Julia Howe accepted the world so completely that she worked so diligently to change the world.
Acceptance does not mean acquiesce. Acceptance means allowing into ourselves a full experience of reality. This is the spiritual admonishment to live in the real world, with its beauty and its flaws. Acceptance is living in the moment, the truth of this moment. This life, not fantasies of a better future that hasn’t yet arrived, nor clinging to a painful past that the present has long left behind.
Acceptance means honest assessment, clear vision, embracing reality. And then so armed with the truth, deciding what to do about it.
Mothers know this. This is who my child is. What they can do for themselves. What they need help with. Loving the child at every stage of their development. Accepting them for who they are. Sometimes a little less accepting what is and a little more wishing they’d grow out of it.
But always both. And not just as children but throughout their life. Accepting the adult they’ve become. The choices they make for themselves. But also encouraging continued growth and development far into adulthood, and delighting when they see it.
Acceptance of one another means seeing each other with clarity. Seeing the truth. With compassion and love, acknowledging the whole person that stands before us.
We sometimes get hung up on this principle because we think acceptance of one another means tolerating bad behavior. But that’s not acceptance, that’s permissiveness. I accept who you are. I don’t have to countenance everything you do. No mother would simply accept a misbehaving child. The mother’s job is to love the child enough to correct the behavior. That’s the role of a church for its members, too.
Acceptance of one another means saying that you, like all human persons, are a person of worth, deserving of dignity. To be treated with justice, equity, and compassion. And like all human beings, your imperfections and maladjustments, and what we kindly call “growing edges” are as much you as are your gifts and it is of no service to you to abandon you to your unfinished state when with encouragement you could be so much more.
Our promise, as parents, as a religious community, as fellow citizens of a nation is to say, “We see you. We know you. We accept you and the world for what it manifestly is, and, as we are able, and as you are willing, we will strive to partner with you in creating lives of health and joy for ourselves, each other, and the world we share.”
The “and” in this religious principle of ours, the third of seven, means that for all of us, the quality of acceptance comes with the condition of growth.
You are accepted as you are, and you, like the rest of us, as children and throughout our lives, are urged to grow. Encouraged to become the better you, you can be. Encouraged to respond to the changing circumstances of a changing world. Your identity is not static. We accept the you you are and encourage the you that grows into the future.