A Gentle Shining—A Sermon by Galen Guengerich

Mother Nature, Mother Earth, mother country, mother ship, motherland, mother lode, mother hen, Mother of God, Mother Superior, mother church, mother tongue, mother's milk, Mother's Day. The list of concepts linked to motherhood covers an astonishing range of experience, from the sustenance we depend upon as infants to our most wide-ranging and far-reaching questions about whence we have come and whither we are going. It is both curious and telling that a similar list of associations for the word father is much shorter. Founding Fathers, Father Time, Father Christmas, God the Father—as in "Our Father who art in heaven," which is the first line of the The Lord's Prayer.

The link between fatherhood and the divine is not happenstance, since the most ancient root of the word father appears to make reference to a supreme deity. The English word mother, in contrast, is based on the ancient Iranian word "ma," meaning breast, which formed the root of madar, meaning breast-haver. Madar became mater in Latin and eventually mother in our language. Our deep-seated sense that fathers are godlike authority figures to be feared and mothers are nurturing figures to be adored has grown from primordial roots.

With both mothers and father, however, the connection between procreation and parenting is often tenuous at best. The ability to produce offspring doesn't make you a good parent, nor does having breasts make you a good mother. As one wag put it, having a child doesn't make you a parent any more than having a piano makes you a pianist. Of course, having a piano in the first place dramatically increases the odds that you will become a pianist. But having a piano and playing one are two different things. The same principle applies to the parental gender difference. Being male does not mean fathers can't or shouldn't nurture their children, nor does being female mean mothers shouldn't set down commandments.

The ancient view that fathers are godlike—powerful, capricious, inscrutable—and mothers are womblike—warm, compassionate, longsuffering—persists even today. For example, it is evident in the widespread assumption that boys will be boys and girls should be nice. It is instructive to watch what happens when a girl turn out not to be nice after all. On Friday, one week after the Iraqi prison abuse story emerged, The New York Times showed a color photograph of Private Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a naked Iraqi prisoner's neck. The photo was on the front page of the newspaper, above the fold. As of Friday, it was the third photo in The Times of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. The other two photos were on an inside page of Tuesday's edition; one of those two was also of Private England.

It may well be true, as the article on Friday suggested, that Private England is "perhaps the most prominently displayed person" in the abuse photographs. Given that Private England is one woman among a number of men who committed these atrocities, I wonder how the photographer would explain her prominence. I also wonder how The Times would explain her prominence in their choice of photos to print. Even with today's front page, Private England is in half of the Times prison abuse photos in which American soldiers are identifiable. Yet she clearly does not constitute half of the abusers, and no one is suggesting that she perpetrated half of the abuse. Nor has she yet been charged with a crime, as have a number of the other soldiers.

Acts of tyranny are always horrific—regardless of the gender of the perpetrator. Because these atrocities against Iraqi prisoners were perpetrated under a banner of freedom and justice, they seem especially pernicious acts. My hope is that we will level the field of judgment not by becoming more tolerant of women who abuse their power, but by becoming less tolerant of men who do so.

The fact that we tend to react more strongly when a woman acts like a man suggests that women, especially mother figures, symbolize something profoundly important to us. My own belief is that our panoply of mother associations represents not many different desires, but rather one fundamental desire that pervades every aspect of our lives. What is it that we want? The answer is not the obvious one; our sexual desires are one way we express our deepest longing, but sexual experiences do not represent the satisfaction of it. What we want most deeply also goes beyond our literal dependence on mother's milk or even Mother Nature. As I think about terms and phrases about mother and mothering, one clichŽ strikes me as especially noteworthy. It is this: a face only a mother could love. Only a mother could love: what does that mean?

It means that a mother's love is unconditional, at least ideally. Curiously enough, researchers at University College in London have found that maternal love and romantic love activate many of the same regions of the brain. The implication of this discovery is that maternal love is the evolutionary basis of romantic love. What researchers discovered is that love—whether maternal or romantic—leads to a suppression of brain activity associated with criticism and negative emotions. In a loving relationship, the brain turns down the judgment. When young mothers gaze at their children, the same brain areas are stimulated as when lovers stare at photos of their partners. In both cases, the systems of thought necessary for making negative judgments are diminished. Love reduces the need to assess critically the character and personality of the beloved. Perhaps this is why we have come to say, for example, that there are faces only a mother could love. Perhaps it is also why we say that love is blind.

However imperfect individual parents may be, maternal love symbolizes the commitment to love someone no matter what. No matter how imperfect our faces or how flawed our character or how dire our circumstances, someone will stand by us and love us anyway. The desire to be loved unconditionally, I believe, is the deepest desire we have. Love in this sense is an expression of both concern and obligation. Part of the reason we hold on tightly to maternal love as an ideal is because it's one of the few places where we find deep concern for other people and a feeling of continuing obligation to them.

While this may be true, it shouldn't be. The sense of duty and obligation to children should be as true of fathers as it is of mothers—and of step-parents and adoptive parents. Raising children is about an abiding commitment to love them and suffer with them. But this unconditional concern for others should extend beyond the walls of our homes. It should extend to our neighbors, says the Hebrew Scriptures, and even to our enemies, adds Jesus in the Christian New Testament. This kind of love doesn't necessarily indicate fondness for another person or approval of their actions or their character. It simply indicates an unconditional commitment to their good. Sometimes this kind of love requires judgment or punishment. At other times it requires long suffering. Whatever happens, it is an unalterable commitment, a bond that cannot be broken. Of course, this kind of commitment is impossible for even the best mothers to sustain, which is why humans have always looked to a divine source of unconditional love. The New Testament states the situation concisely: love is from God, for God is love.

There is a moment in Madeleine L'Engle's book A Wrinkle in Time that captures the transforming power of love's unconditional commitment. The book describes a cosmic battle between good and evil, a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The foot soldiers in this battle are three children: Calvin, Charles Wallace and their leader, a girl named Meg. One of the mother figures in the story, a wise old woman named Mrs. Whatsit, gives each of the children a stratagem to use in their fight against the forces of darkness. To Calvin she gives the ability to communicate with all kinds of people, to Charles Wallace she gives resilience, and to Meg she says simply, "Meg, I give you your faults." Mrs. Whatsit adds, somewhat later, "I love you, and I will always love you." Because Mrs. Whatsit accepts Meg's faults, Meg can too, and her faults—anger, impatience, stubbornness—turn out to be the key to their triumph over the forces of evil. Through Meg, the power of unconditional love ultimately vanquishes the forces of darkness.

In symbolic terms, the book describes end of the battle this way: "Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness, the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure."

The theological term for what Meg received from Mrs. Whatsit is grace. Grace is the experience of being loved unconditionally, without a view to our merit or worthiness. Paul Tillich, one of the greatest theologians of the Twentieth Century, describes the experience in the following way. "Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we love, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure has become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: 'You are accepted. You are accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know...' If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience, we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed."

This, I believe, is what we want more than anything: to be accepted—as we are, where we are, without conditions or qualifications or performance guarantees. Grace comes to us when we are accepted not because of our strength but despite our weakness, when we are celebrated not because of our achievements but despite our failures, when we are embraced not because of our beauty but despite our lack of superficial appeal. In the presence of a love like this, everything is transformed.

At its best, Mother's Day celebrates the presence in our lives of someone who says to us: "I give you your faults. You are accepted—unconditionally." I believe that there is nothing we want more than this: to be accepted, just as we are. When divine love comes to us in this way, everything is transformed. Life becomes luminous; a gentle shining pervades everything.

As Meg discovered, human beings are channels for divine love. Whether or not we are mothers or even female, each of us knows someone who today is struggling alone in the darkness. Our challenge is to say to them, "I give you your faults. You are accepted." Then watch the light begin to shine.