Mothers

Mothers

“On this Mother’s Day, we give thanks to God for the divine gift of motherhood in all its diverse forms. Let us pray for all the mothers among us today; for our own mothers, those living and those who have passed away;

 for the mothers who loved us and those who fell short of loving us fully; for all who hope to be mothers someday and for those whose hope to have children has been frustrated; for all mothers who have lost children; for all women and men who have mothered others in any way—

those who have been our substitute mothers and we who have done so for those in need; and for the earth that bore us and provides us with our sustenance. We pray this all in the name of God, our great and loving Mother. Amen.”—Leslie Nipps in Women’s Uncommon Prayers (Morehouse, 2000), p. 364.

many mothers

Sarah Kinney Gaventa wrote an excellent piece in GrowChristians.org called “Liturgical Trapdoors: Preparing for Mother’s Day” about how difficult secular holidays such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can be for some people and how the Church can compound their pain.

Having all the mothers stand up in church can be painful for those who are undergoing fertility procedures. People with unhappy childhoods may have difficulty comparing the love of a mother or father with the love of God.

So many people come to spiritual direction to grapple with these very issues.

Gaventa offers this more universal prayer for mothers from Women’s Uncommon Prayers as a start. We know the love of God through other people, but when a standard is presented for a specific role for mother or father, and ours does not fit, we can become even more wounded.

Gaventa suggests we talk more about the feminine aspects of God and Jesus. We can discuss God caring for us as a mother without criticizing those human mothers who have fallen short.

She also reminds us that Ann Jarvis, the woman who started the Mother’s Day movement during the Civil War, was a peace activist.

So, perhaps one way of honoring all mothers might be to suggest an outreach project for peace so that mothers would never again have to send their fathers, husbands, sons, and daughters to war.

Joanna joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Connections, Travel

Sue Monk Kidd: Connections, Travel Near and Far

“Remember that little flame on the Easter candle. Cup your heart around it. Your darkness will become the light.”—Sue Monk Kidd, “A Journal Entry” in When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (HarperOne, 1992).

joanna blue mosque

 I wish I could have Sue Monk Kidd’s book When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions with me and read it when meeting with other spiritual friends. I hope to remember her message about waiting. Many friends coming for direction live in the biblical tradition of waiting called the “night sea journey”: Jonah in the belly of the whale, Christ in the tomb, or Joseph in the well where there is only darkness.

 I hope to remember Kidd’s phrase when we have difficulty letting go: “Put on your courage suit” and cross the bridge of letting go.

I began this book on Maundy Thursday in the Chapel of Repose with the Reserved Sacrament. I ended it in Greece with my husband, my daughter, and her husband in the fourth week of Easter as we overlooked the Acropolis.

Kidd’s later books are about her trips to Greece, especially with her daughter, and becoming more connected to the feminine part of herself and God. My daughter and I wrote a book together as Kidd and her daughter did—so much serendipity.

Kidd ends her book by describing a drawing of a mother and child that came out of her true inner self, based on a sketch she made at Kanuga, the home of my spiritual direction class. Several years ago, on Mother’s Day, we dedicated a sculpture of a mother and child in the garden next to St. Luke’s chapel that my husband had commissioned.

More connections.

As you can see, Sue Monk Kidd gets my attention and connects to me. So today, as I relive journeys, I try to follow more of Kidd’s direction, stay in the moment, and feed my soul real food instead of junk food.

I am remembering past trips to ancient and nearer parts of the world we both visited with our daughter and granddaughters on land and sea, where we learned, surrounded by those we love and away from our busy world, to let go into the moment.

Retake a virtual trip in your mind to a country you once visited with loved ones, perhaps carrying a book by a favorite author. Maybe you traveled to England, Italy, China, Spain, Germany, Greece, Norway, France, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, or Israel.

I remember Buechner’s words in Wishful Thinking: “There are two ways of remembering. One is to make an excursion from the living present back into the dead past. The old sock remembers how things used to be when you and I were young, Maggie.

The other way is to summon the dead past back into the living present. The young widow remembers her husband, and he is there beside her. When Jesus said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ (1 Corinthians 11:24), he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia.”

            Give thanks for those you love who have traveled with you. Give thanks for writers who speak to your soul. Pray for that author, your family, and for people in that country to remain safe, especially the families of Ukraine and the Middle East.

Joanna joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Paths for Difficult Times

 Guest Writer: Jennifer Horne

Spiritual  Practices and Paths for Difficult Times

Walking a Pandemic Path

“What we are looking for on earth and in earth and in our lives is the process that can unlock for us the mystery of meaningfulness in our daily lives. … Truly the last place it would ever occur to most of us to find the sacred would be in the commonplace of our everyday lives and all about us in nature and simple things.”—Alice O. Howell in The Dove in the Stone: Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace.

In March, during the pandemic, we listened to the endless honking of Canadian geese on the lake we live by, the sounds reminding me, in my fear and helplessness, of slowed-down ululations of grief. Sometime in April, when I could no longer stand to watch the images of COVID victims on the nightly news, I began doing tai chi in my study between 5:30 and six while my husband watched CBS.

I’d been doing tai chi a couple of times a week for the last seventeen years, after taking a class from James Martin, a kind, elegant Vietnam veteran who had learned the practice to soften the demons he’d brought home with him from war. James died fifteen years ago, and as I followed the path of the twenty-four poses, beginning, going through the sequence, returning to where I started, I felt grateful for the legacy he left, how he taught us to “take a little journey,” breathe, and let our minds rest as our bodies moved. 

In fall, as darkness closed in and the days grew short and cold, I felt the need for some kind of outdoor movement, something brief but restorative, somewhere close by. Our house is nestled in woods, and I had been wanting to make a labyrinth but didn’t have the right spot for one. Instead, I made an oval meditation path in the woods off to the side of the house, finding, raking, and marking its circumference, then placing whimsical items along the way, all related to birds: an old birdhouse, in which I placed a bright orange plastic egg, a birdcage with no bottom, a piece of driftwood shaped like a heron’s head.

My favorite part is the approximately 2-x-2-foot nest of twigs I made at one turning in the path. As I walked, these things reminded me of how we were “nesting” at home but would be able to “fly farther afield” someday, and the shape of that simple path reminded me that life happens in cycles and circles as well as linear time.

Whenever my mind got too busy with pandemic thoughts, I loved going out and walking for as long as I needed to while I looked at branches, sky, and ground, so that my inner space came to resemble the outer calm and natural changes I was observing.

Staying home to stay safe from the virus, we weren’t going anywhere, and it felt constraining. Still, on my path, even though I walked in circles, it felt like I was going somewhere—somewhere deeper, more expansive, connected to a greater being, to an out-of-timeliness beyond the current fraught moment.

On the last day of March, I went out to the path after the rain stopped. The woods are greening at time-lapse speed, and the path is sprouting life: wild iris I’d never noticed before, and also the first shoots of the poison ivy that covers the woods in summer. Soon there will be ticks and chiggers and the occasional snake as well.

It’s time to leave the path until next fall, another cycle.

As I do my evening tai chi, repeating the phrase “this day, this light, this moment, this breath,” whenever I need to re-center myself, I move toward and then away from the window to the woods.

I can’t see the path now, but I know it’s there. I imagine, in times to come, it might remind me that even when I’m stuck, I still can find ways to move forward so that in walking my own small path, something good can happen.

Jennifer Horne

Poet Laureate of Alabama

Recent books:

 Dodie Walton Horne in Root & Plant & Bloom: Poems by Dodie Walton Horne, edited by Jennifer Horne and Mary Horne.

Since this writing in 2021, Jennifer published in 2024, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield and

Letters to Little Rock about memories of her father.

Joanna Seibert joannaseibert.com

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