These are some bold, rousing words for Mother’s Day.
The imagery is intense, maybe unsettling. The words are broad in their international appeal. But narrow in their religious imagination, directed at other Christian women like Howe. This first call for a public day centering motherhood seems far removed from today’s holiday.
This is an exciting day for many people, a day to celebrate their hero, their teacher, sometimes even their best friend. It’s a day for some to celebrate one of their life’s greatest callings.
And we also know it is a heavy and complicated day for others. It’s a looming reminder of the mothers they didn’t have or couldn’t be.
This is a holiday that uplifts and celebrates some parts of motherhood, but flattens others. So to embrace the fullness and complexity of motherhood, I want to turn to another vision of Mother’s Day. Because, as some of you know, I enjoy exploring ordinary things from un-ordinary angles. I find it spiritually enlivening to let curiosity lead me, lead us, down unlikely rabbit holes.
I have to admit, though, this a real doozy of a rabbit hole. But I invite you to join me in it anyway. I can’t promise a very warm and fuzzy Mother’s Day message. This may not be what you were looking for on a bright, spring day. And I understand that.
But still, today, I want to remember one particular mother. A literal mother who had children she loved. A mother of our faith who lived in a time not so different from our own. A mother who has lessons for teaching us to live in this often heartbreaking world. Because I believe that the lives of the prophets who have come before us can still guide us today.
Julia Ward Howe1 was not so different from many of us, modern Unitarian Universalists. She came to Unitarianism from another faith, seeking broader perspectives. Raised by a staunch Episcopalian father, she came to our tradition like so many have, as an adult. She was disillusioned and alienated by the strictness of her cradle-faith. So she sought something broader. Something that would feed both her mind and her heart. And like a few of us, she found this faith’s calling first outside of church – and then followed the call inside.
By the time she started going to Unitarian churches, she had been active in Boston’s social improvement scene. A deep care for her world and its people motivated her. Abolition of slavery in the United States was the particular work she set her mind and heart on. And because of her organizing, her passion led her to meet Unitarians fighting for the same causes. She became friends with local abolitionists, including ministers like Theodore Parker. These were people known for taking bold stances on the issues that mattered to them. Parker himself was known for offering sanctuary to people fleeing slavery. And went so far as to keep a pistol in his pulpit in the event that he had to fight to stand his moral ground.2 Howe found her spiritual home through her friendships with bold people like Parker. She found a home which would give her spirit the nourishment it needed to do the work her deep caring called her to.
That attentive spirit led her to the front-lines. When the American Civil War broke out, Howe tended to wounded soldiers as a nurse. And there she saw the horrors of war first hand. As she treated and mourned for other women’s sons, no doubt she thought of her own young son and nephew back at home. No doubt this radically altered her view of the world.
And then, half a decade after the Civil War ended, her attention turned to another war brewing, between France and Prussia. She saw another war erupting, even though it was far away. She knew what was in store for other women, even though an ocean separated her from them. She knew other women who would lose their sons and husbands to injury and death.
So one day in 1870, she called for a day of action. She called for a day, not necessarily celebrating mothers, but one that called mothers to harness the care they felt for the world. A care which stretched out from their own families.
Her proclamation is punchy. Perhaps today it comes off as a little overwrought and florid. But that draws our attention to the urgency of her words, and the occasion. She has left no part of her bleeding heart off of the page. We can feel her pain.
How she shared her call to action shapes the story, too. She didn’t share this message in the local paper or magazines. This message doesn’t come to us through news reports of a political rally. She shared it through broadsides she posted in Boston.3 Posters plastered on walls and tacked to fences. Pieces of paper that blew off, peeled and crumpled in the rain, and got plastered over by other broadsides. She made this call to action as quickly as she could. It would have faded from public attention if she said and did nothing else. But starting big didn’t matter to her. This matter was so urgent that she had to get the word out. She cared enough to do something, even starting small.
She knew the horrors, and she could imagine what other women were feeling. Imagining the cruelty facing these other women, she declared “we won’t have it.” We won’t have politicians making decisions over other peoples’ life and death. Over the lives and deaths of their husbands and sons.
Howe calls anyone paying attention to understand the irony of this war. That the ones waging it wanted to take husbands away from their families. To ruin other lives and their own. And then claim that this is cause for celebration.
She knew there was nothing just about war, no matter what any politician might say otherwise.
The gulf of time between us is wide. But her time is not unfamiliar. Over one hundred and fifty years later, I feel the resonance between then and now. Between her world and ours. Howe was living in a world that made it hard to care about what happened on the other side of the world. Even then, even in that more simple-seeming world. The time she lived in was not so different from ours.
In our world, it seems, it has never been harder to care. Our hearts are willing. Our stomachs turn when we hear news of the latest round of drone strikes in the Middle East. And other places peppered by munitions made with our tax dollars. Our heartbeats quicken when we see someone camped out with their dog under an overpass. But answering our heart’s call isn’t easy when so many of us are worn down.
Let’s name the truth that, whether you think there’s a better option or not, our economic system is draining us. Because capitalism prioritizes economic production over everything else, and acts of care are not very lucrative. Caring for the sick, watching your neighbor’s kids, cleaning up the yard and house, doing the dishes. All of these big and little acts of care help us survive and thrive. But they are not very lucrative. Even when capitalism finds a way to squeeze a penny out of this work, it goes underpaid and underappreciated. So instead, we live in two- (or more) income households. We work past our supposed retirement. And at the end of the day, our bodies and souls are exhausted.4
Capitalism limits our capacities to act in caring ways. And our bodies ache against this restraint. In the skipping beats of our hearts, in the churning of our stomachs, in the tightening of our throats. Our bodies ache because we humans are profoundly caring creatures. We are certainly not unique among the earth’s creatures because we care. But perhaps we are unique because, when we can’t care with our actions, it hurts. Tremendously.
Some scholars have realized in the last decade that the way we experience grief as humans is connected to the ways we experience love. We experience it as this profound connection. A connection to other people, other beings, sometimes even other times and places. And when life severs those connections, we feel that severing as grief. Grief marks our place in a web of interrelationships, by revealing the ruptures in that web.5 Grief is the trace left behind by the losses in our lives.
Grief is the other side of care. Of Love.
This is really what makes Howe’s world feel so much like our own. I imagine that exhaustion in Howe’s world, too. She was living in a country exhausted by a civil war and its aftermath. And worn down by a war with Mexico before that. And the further our country got from these exhausting wars, the more its wealthiest business owners extended their influence. Howe wrote her proclamation a decade before the height of the Gilded Age. A time when, like this one, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. And I wonder if Howe ever felt like she was yelling like no-one around her had the capacity to care.
This is how I hear her words echoing today. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Men who have spent little if any time in combat are whisking other mothers’ children into a seemingly endless, unjust war. For “national security?” For “economic security?” Our hearts ache as much as Howe’s surely did.
And still, Howe persisted. Howe put hope into action. Hope that people can find a way to care even when it’s challenging. With others sharing her vision and values, she continued fighting for “A Mother’s Day for Peace.” She did live to see Mother’s Day become a national holiday, even if it departed from her original vision. She persisted in care, even when it was hard.
Perhaps we will find the key to her persistence at the end of her proclamation. It’s striking to me that she makes two, specific calls at the end. The second is familiar. “Solemnly take council with each other.”6 Discuss! Collaborate! Organize! That’s how we Unitarian Universalists often put our values into action. She lets out a call for a very public, networking action. One we continue following today.
But before that, she says something else must happen. First, she tells the women, the mothers reading her broadside, they must gather to mourn. To acknowledge the grief they feel, rather than hide it or rush past it. To feel it. To give it the ceremonial respect it deserves.
This, as I see it, is where we struggle more. Where we need more vision and encouragement. Howe understood that bodies and spirits seeking justice need care and attention too. That Justice is fed by Love.
We are realizing this in new ways today. By proclaiming Love as the central call of our faith, we proclaim that it nourishes everything else that we do. That our stamina for justice, for transformation, for giving of ourselves, is nourished by Love.
And grief, we can say, is another side of Love. That doesn’t make it easier to face. Our culture does not prepare us well for grief, calling us either to ignore it or throw ourselves into it. But still, it dwells among us. It cries out for acknowledgment. It reminds us to embrace the fullness and complexity of Love. Will honoring it as a facet of Love may help us dwell with it more honestly?
This is the message our prophet and foremother has for us today. One hundred and fifty years later, Howe calls us to love radically. On this Mother’s Day and every day. To celebrate what calls for celebration. To organize our values through our actions. And to care. To care in all the ways Love calls us to.
1. Joan Goodwin, “Howe, Julia Ward,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, May 28, 2002 https://www.uudb.org/howe-julia-ward/
2. Khleber M. Van Zandt V, “Theodore Parker’s Pistol,” First Unitarian Church of Alton, November 4, 2007 https://www.firstuualton.org/Sermon_files/TheodoreParkersPistol.htm
3. Dan McKanan, “Julia Ward Howe, “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” 1870,” in A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism: Volume One, From the Beginning to 1899 ed. Dan McKanan (Skinner House Books: 2017), 405.
4. The political theorist Nancy Fraser calls these acts of “social reproduction.” The contradiction is that capitalism relies on social reproduction even as it devalues it by partitioning and subordinating it from economic production. In its contemporary form, Fraser observes that capitalist society has externalized care work onto fragmented social units, like nuclear families, while making care work more difficult. See Fraser, “The Contradictions of Care and Capitalism,” NLR 100, July-August 2016: doi.org/10.64590/nt2
5. Svend Brinkmann, “The grieving animal: Grief as a foundational emotion,” Theory & Psychology, vol. 28, no. 2 (2018), 202.
6. McKanan, “Julia,” 404.