Mother's Day is coming up.  I have an ongoing battle with the church observance of the day, which gets me in trouble sometimes.  It's not a religious holiday, it's a Hallmark Holiday.  It started as a protest by mothers who wanted to put an end to their sons and the sons of others being marched off to war.  It began as a Peace Sunday and that is what I try to observe.

I am not a pre-conversion Scrooge about this.  I gave my mom gifts when she was alive, give my partner gifts, and help (well I used to) my kids choose gifts for their mother.  We need to honour mothers.  We, collectively, need to give thanks for and pray for mothers.  But to make that lovely moment on a Spring Sunday the focus of our attending to God is problematic for me.  We need a more peaceable society so that every woman, mother or not, is able to nurture herself and our children and grandchildren in a place of security and well-being.

That is where this comes from . . .

Surrender to Hallmark

We stand before

Your egalitarian commercial intensity

hands

wide open fingers flexing

not grasping anything.

We run our

fingers

over the precious

metals of sentiment warmth and

being remembered

then kneel to

the ground and wait

to shoulder a yoke with one whose

hands

are coarse and unmanicured

hands

that have embraced wounded dug

graves pounded on doors of injustice

We are assayed

on the

touchstone

of a rusty Imperial spike.

We own no hallmark but

the nail prints on our

hands.

There are people I have been grateful not to have buried, presided at their funeral, because I have known them to embody an evil so great and so apparently well-hidden that I would have given in to the temptation to publicly out them.  At least that’s what I thought in the cold of the moment.  Then I hear from people in the community what that person really was like and find that the evil was not so well hidden after all.

So why didn’t anyone do anything about it?  Small communities weigh the benefits and costs of outing someone who is evil.  They may know that the person has a partner who will be harmed by the public shame that would be necessary once the secrets were no longer hidden.  They may put up a fence around the evil so that no one can be harmed by it.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes a person has such a good reputation in the community that no one suspects that they are abusing children or people’s trust.  They inflict pain from behind a cloak thicker than the Wizard of Oz’s curtain, and no one thinks to pull it back to reveal a terrible truth.

There have been people of exceptional grace who cared for their elderly parents who subjected them to abuse when they were young because they were able to see what their parents could not see – that they were human.  That the parents were human and so were the children.  They treat them with a dignity the abuser could hardly imagine.  As often as not they don’t recognise it, they just continue to believe it is their due.  They may even believe that they continue to exert control on the child. 

The child, though, is completely free.  They have discovered their own dignity and worth in spite of their treatment when they were younger.  Through a combination of therapy and prayer and finding a place in the community where they are valued they have risen above the demeaning influence.  And it is at their funerals that it is even harder to bite my tongue, because I want to trumpet how they have transcended their pain and are examples to each of us who long for dignity or need encouragement to offer it to others.

Why is there so much hand-wringing and calling out for justice and 
vengeance for the person or persons who planted the bombs at the Boston 
Marathon?  I was horrified by this attack on a festive event--I know people who 
were participating.  I also am horrified by the civilian casualties inflicted by President 
Obama's drone strikes, and the seeming impunity with which the CIA has 
become a paramilitary organisation.  If you are going to operate as a military democracy you are going to 
live with civilian casualties.

And I think legislators understand this and are weirdly consistent when 
they won't pass sensible limits on automatic weapons.

Canadians are complicit, we are grateful that no one seems to think 
we're enough of a threat that we would be attacked but we seem to 
believe that our neighbours would protect us and so admire their ability 
to extend their military might.

It's horrifying and unfortunate (that doesn't seem like the right word 
but it does seem like one that might be used to describe collateral 
damage) but we have always known that those who live by the sword die by it.

I'm intrigued by Jesus' response to the disciples when they told them 
they had two swords: "It is enough." I don't know if he was being 
sardonic or tired of dealing with people’s unfulfillable expectations or 
tired of worrying about his disciples being defenseless when he was 
gone, or it was enough to get him arrested or he was angry.

I wish a few more people would say "it's enough."

There are two ways to take the phrase "Everybody hurts".  The second way affirms that we all cause pain to someone else.  We are thoughtless and deliberate, manipulative and directly wounding, uncaring and vengeful.  Some of us are "better" at it than others.

Why?  What motivates us to hurt others?  What makes us participate in evil?  I read this week some soldiers of the Syrian government have been targeting and killing medical workers, particularly those who treat "rebels".  Physicians and nurses have been killed, some tortured.  People who have committed themselves to alleviating suffering and illness, in many cases without regard to status or political conviction.  Why would someone want to systematically harm healers?

If I turn the question around, why do people try to avoid hurting others and even try to prevent harm coming to others?  I keep coming back to a fairly simplistic answer:  gratitude.  People who have a sense of wonder and joy at life, no matter what or whom they see as the source, are less likely to try to harm someone else.  They appreciate what they have and don't have a deep need to acquire more, whether it is money or power or anything else that must be gained at someone else's expense.  They don't need to harm someone else for the sake of keeping what they have or lowering everyone else to the level of despair they feel.

They also tend to be able to deal with more pain and ambiguity in life, seem to live at a level of serenity that allows us to believe that we can be less manipulative, wounding and thoughtless.  They draw us to them because of the sense of peace they have that we want and half-understand that we can't take it from them, we have to find it ourselves.  I think it starts with appreciation for all that is.  

At the end of the Gospel of John there is a campfire.  It’s a scene of laughter and suffering and wonder.  Jesus’ disciples are still trying to puzzle out what effect his resurrection is having on them.  They’re out fishing and he calls to them from the beach.  One of the disciples recognises Jesus and Peter, the disciple who denied knowing Jesus during his trial and was one of the first to run and check the empty tomb,  leaps out of the boat and splashes to the shore.  His spontaneity could make anyone reading the passage smile, or laugh or nod with understanding at the excitement of seeing a friend you thought dead alive and cooking.  Up until now in the story he has been conflicted and hasn’t lived up to his own image of who he wants to be, doubting Jesus and his commitment to him.

Jesus and his followers sit in the early morning hours and enjoy a fish fry.  It’s a good moment at the end of the story, the friends all gathered together, somewhat astounded that they are eating with a man they abandoned and were sure was dead.  It doesn’t stop there.  Peter is about to get wrung out again.

Jesus asks him if he loves him.  Peter, taken aback, answers “Of course!”  Jesus repeats the question, gets the same answer.  This is not a private moment, and Peter appears to be humiliated.  Or uncomfortable.  He wants it to stop, but this is Jesus’ campfire.

He asks Peter again.  Each time when Peter has answered ”Yes” Jesus tells him he has a job to do, to feed Jesus’ sheep. The third time Peter is hurt and frustrated:  “You know I love you!”   Jesus changes the subject, telling Peter the day will come when he is lead around like a child.

There are many interpretations of this passage but I think Jesus is telling Peter it’s time to grow up.  It’s time to leave the easy camaraderie of the campfire, time to leave the familiar family business, time to face his failures, time to take his place in the world.  Being told it’s time to grow up hurts.  It suggests a lack of maturity, makes us examine all the past choices we made.   But there it is.  Peter the impetuous and almost child-like has to become Peter the more responsible.

His namesake, Peter Pan, never wanted to grow up.  Growing up requires us to look at the world around us and make a decision about our part in it and then choose to do something.  Or nothing. 

I have presided at many funerals.  If I did not know the person, and that often is the case when someone had a very loose connection to the church, it was always a trick getting the eulogy right.  Most people who help you with a funeral want to put on a good public face.  So you get a catalogue of virtues, or just one or two lines:  “She loved to cook.” or “He was always a great host.”

Sometimes grief stops the flow of words: all of us are memorable but the memories don’t always rise to the surface.  Sometimes it’s a stretch to find good things to say.  Death doesn't always take away the hurt, although I always suggest to the living that those who have died have no unfinished business with them; they only have to come to terms with their own unfinished business with the person who has died.

That conversation may be public -- someone tells their story to others at the funeral.  Or private.  It may take place at the graveside when no one else is listening.

I have heard people eulogize someone who wronged them and told the people gathered at the service what that person really was like.

I have, based on limited knowledge, eulogised (said good words about) someone and then been approached afterwards to hear what the person really was like.  “She hated me for taking her daughter away, all through our marriage”, said one man of his deceased mother-in-law.  The community knew her as a generous and kind woman.  After the funeral he took me aside and in some sadness said “No matter how wonderfully I treated her daughter, I was always 'You son of a bitch.'”

Some of us pass judgement on others for what we have lived and how that did not square with our expectations.  There are too many stories about families who would not attend the funeral of a child who died of AIDS or who would lie about the cause of death.

I remember watching a woman in a palliative care unit clinging to life until she saw her youngest daughter.  She had more morphine in her than any of the medical staff could conceive of yet still she arched her back with only her head and heels touching the bed, so great was her pain, but she would not die until she saw her daughter.  But her daughter was the black sheep of the family and had wounded both her parents and all her siblings and they would not allow her in to see her mother.  One died in excruciating pain, the other still carries hers.