"Mothers and Mystics"
Julie Madden
Sunday, May 14th 2006

“Taste this. You’ll like it. No really, you’ll like it. Trust me, I’m your mother. Here, I’ll take some – mmm. You don’t even have to swallow it. Just taste it. Just taste it. Just…..Fine, live on cheerios, see if I care. ”

Matthew Fox writes: “Wisdom is always taste – in both Latin and Hebrew, the word for wisdom comes from the word for taste – so it’s not something to theorize about. The psalm says “Taste and see that God is good”; and that’s wisdom: tasting life. No one can do it for us. The mystical tradition is very much about tasting and trusting experience, before institution or dogma.”

We spent a lot of time during Lent at St.Joan’s this year talking about mystics and the mystical experience - when we know we are in God, God is in us and all is well. It is not about belief IN God but an experience OF God within us, God in each other and God in the world.

Today we celebrate the act of mother-ing, and I believe that work is certainly not relegated solely to women raising children. Everything we do to build the Beloved Community and transform this world is mothering. It seems to me that the experience of mothering and mysticism are similar in many ways.

Both experiences break us open and reveal our authentic selves. Mothering brings out your authentic self and oh, that’s not pretty. A few years ago, I had just gotten out of the shower and pulled my clothes on and I had to run and pick up my son and his friend from the rec center. So they get in the back seat and for some reason they think I can’t hear them and Josh’s friend says “What’s wrong with your mom? Is she sick?” and my kid replies “I don’t think she put her eye makeup on.” My authentic self needs work.

Another comparison I would draw between the experience of the mystic and the experience of mothering is that sense, even for a fleeting moment, that we are all connected in creation and in God. Just as the umbilical cord connects a mother and child, there is a deep cord running through the human family and through all of creation. We are all in God and God is in us. Catherine of Siena describes the mystical experience of oneness this way: “As we grow in prayer and union with God, God becomes the home we never have to leave; as water surrounds and embraces the fish, becoming its very life, we begin to live in God like the fish in the sea and sea in the fish.”

That deep connection we know spiritually, we are beginning to confirm scientifically. According to this amazing article in a recent National Geographic: “Scientists have compared mitochondrial DNA from women around the world and now calculate that all living humans are related to a single woman who lived roughly 150,000 years ago in Africa, a “mitochondrial Eve.” If geneticists are right, all of humanity is linked to Eve through an unbroken chain of mothers.” I could have told you we were the ones holding it together all this time.

Both the mystical and the mothering experience call us to experience God in each other and that is always the ground of compassion. Frederick Buechner: “Compassion is that sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside another’s skin.” And just think about it – for all of us, our first home was living inside someone else’s skin. We emerge into the world out of an experience of compassion and that is, I believe, our true nature.

In mothering, we know compassion in our bones. When my son is in pain, I can feel it sometimes as though I was literally in his skin. In kindergarten he came home kind of sad one day so I asked him who he talked to at recess and he said: “My jacket.” He was fine the next day – I still obviously haven’t recovered.

Dorothy Day says: “We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship. We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

And that’s where all of you come in.

As a mystical and a mothering community, every day you show me and my child the hands and face and feet of God:

We see God in the way you reach out, always – today our Int’l Ministries show us ways to reach out across the world to build relationships of mutuality and respect. And this Friday you are invited to come with us as we join hands across North Minneapolis with over 1000 others to reach out to our neighbors and reclaim our city for peace.

And we know God in your joy. We are very uncool but we are joyful. The first adjective in our mission statement says so: “We are a joyful Christian community.”

We see God in your work for peace. As followers of Christ, we must be peacemakers. And as mystics and mothers if we truly experience that oneness with God and one another, we cannot send our children to kill and be killed.

Finally, we know God in your welcome.

The Johnston family are parishioners here. Molly Johnston brought the kids, Jack and Emma who are 10 and 7 to a rally at the State Capitol a few weeks ago for people of faith who oppose amending the MN constitution to ban gay marriage. KARE 11 interviewed them. The reporter asked Jack if he believed in Jesus and Jack responded “Yeah. Yeah. I do.” The reporter then asked Jack what he thought Jesus would say to gay people and Jack replied: ”He welcomes all. So I guess he’d just say they’re ok and come on in.”

Jack is my new favorite theologian.

So let us give thanks to God who holds us this morning, in this gym, in an embrace of tender, fierce, comforting, challenging love. She holds out a spoon and says: “Be compassion. Be peace. Don’t be afraid – I’m always with you. Taste this good world and transform the places of suffering. C’mon. Taste. Trust me. I’m your mother.”