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.