BY Chris McLaughlin

I am thinking big thinky thoughts on the way to Meeting, wondering if some version of them will rise to sharing. You can’t preplan this stuff, it has to bubble up anew or it’s all about you, it’s preaching, something I no longer really care to do, in or out of Meeting.

Most of the time.

It’s Mother’s Day, always a fraught day. I miss my own mother who fell square into the category of A Good One, by which I suppose I mean none of her quirks and flaws landed on us in a very damaging way. Once I grew up (that took some time), we were always fond and easy with each other. I know it’s not like that with everyone.

The commercial obligations of the holiday annoy me even as there is this: my own children will not be present and fussing over me. I have always denied wanting such a thing, but oh, I want it. I am now stuck with the casual ways about celebrations our family has held with secret pride. I wonder at our failing to prioritize each other, the ones we love most. Our custom wears a mask of respect. Is it really fear?

(This is what I mean by “fraught.”)

 You can’t dwell there in those thoughts long. So I crawl down the rabbit hole of the history of the day, Mother’s Day.

We know about Ann Jarvis, how we believe she started the day in 1907 to honor her mother, how in 1914 Woodrow Wilson glommed onto the idea as an excellent way to display the American flag on government buildings and make it not about a one-of-a-kind mother (your mother, mine) but “a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.” AKA patriotism. Ann hated the appropriation, tried and failed to get the “mothers of our country” day rescinded.

I didn’t know who Ann’s mother was, though, the one she was honoring, and how she, Anna with an ‘a’ at the end Jarvis, really got things rolling. In 1858, civil war still raging, she “declared Women’s Friendship Day, convincing local mothers to be fair to both sides. They went into camps to treat the wounded and to teach sanitation and disinfection. After the war, local leaders asked these women to teach former enemies how to get along.” Now that’s some kind of great mothering!

By 1870, Julia Ward Howe, who we do know about, launched a “Mothers’ Peace Day to promote global unity after the horrors of the American Civil War and Europe’s Franco-Prussian War.”

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands will 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, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

Well, you can see why that wouldn’t stick, the “great and general interests of peace,” the reeking with carnage thing. So unseemly to mention.

This is what I bear with me to Meeting, notions about how Mother’s Day could be a tribute to greater things than our own beloved nuclear families or mere patriotism.

I am walking from parking lot to meetinghouse when geese fly into my head. This morning the adults ushered three downy yellow babies across the lawn. One is not quite right, stumbling often, getting a little lost, smaller than the others. The following parent is patient, waits, assists. Despite their flaws—geese are assholes much of the time—they are such good parents.

“If a message starts to form, test it.”

“Is it from the Holy Spirit, not the intellect or ego?”

“Intended for the community?”

Thank goodness for that guidance from the Friends General Conference. I test like mad and know the words, so many of them, are all intellect and ego. So no. They will not grow to the level of community.

But “from the Holy Spirit,” boy howdy, there’s a pickle. It’s not like a godly voice interrupts the thinky thoughts and says “You there: this is a true thing and important so say it now. It will be prophetic: get out of your own way, the way of your opinions! Let it be my message, not thine!”

Prophetic. Doesn’t that mean a prediction of things to come? At best, I can see my blind woman’s piece of the elephant directly before me, or maybe understand better something that happened before. I think I will put prophecy aside for now.

Maybe it works that way for you. The call to speaking in Meeting is not one experience but as many as we are many. So we are tender when something other than Spirit causes us to think “what on earth is that one going on about?” (I am working on that and hoping you’ll extend me the kindness too.)

For me, something unexpected rises. I hold onto it, turn it over, try to cast it aside, but it moves into my gut and stays there. Did I say pickle? It’s prickly, this urgency, this feeling maybe someone else will feel this too, or something like it. Something useful to them.

But wait a bit and wait a bit longer.

Today luck steps in. I will not have to wrestle with the fairly alien quality of appropriateness in vocal ministry. Someone must greet at the door. I sit outside the meeting room, listening to the silence through earphones, settling in, settling in, keeping quiet.  

And it comes to me, from that place where the Spirit might be wandering about: no one is interested in what I think, what anyone thinks really. Of course not. Even I am not interested, despite the morning of engaged pondering that felt important but does no longer.

The day is beautiful, warm, the sky a color artists have names for but not me, to me it’s just Oh That Blue! I watch a family in the community garden where they are Meeting for Worship with Attention to Vegetables.

The mother, you know her, but she could be just The Mother, all curves, dark curls spilling from a hair band, bends to tuck something into the soil, then rises to gaze around. She is taking in everything, things I see, things only she sees, and there is joy in her and peace. Also sweat.

The father, you know him too, is almost comically concentrated and industrious, bent on his chores of digging and finding water: where is the hose? He has the gift of focus here.

There is a boy you know, as easy in the soil and the garden and the woods as a wild creature, and he helps, looking for the hose before something wonderful, bug or bird or just the call of his own young body, lures him. And the girl you know, she has a different way of helping: she brings to the mother a blowball headed dandelion to send wishes to the winds.

And there it is, this gift of revelation. This moment has been given, this seeing and this feeling. Maybe you know what it means: I know only the lifting of love.

Here I am again, looking for words to explain the mystery. There are none. There just is the mystery.

I can’t help you know when to speak in Meeting. But when you do, if you tell a story that’s true and it surprises you, you might be on the right track. As they say, pray you can improve the silence with your words. That’s where the “clearly worded and you’re compelled to speak” part comes in. But sometimes it’s good to say nothing.

Let silence be a loophole for the mystery of life to enter, words or no words.

Keeping Quiet

by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth let’s not speak in any language, let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines, we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victory with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about; I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.