Easter V, Year C

Acts, 13:44-52
Revelation, 19:1,4-9
John, 13:31-35

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

"I believe in God," Sheila says. "I am not a religious fanatic. I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice
. . . .  It's just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think God would want us to take care of each other." ⁽¹⁾

Robert Bellah is a rare bird, a sociologist specializing in religion who is also a best-selling author. In the mid 1980s, he came across Sheila Larson, a young nurse, as he was doing interviews for a book. Bellah thinks that Sheila's religious beliefs are consistent with the faith of many contemporary Americans. He explains,

I think we can say that many people sitting in the pews of Protestant and even Catholic churches are Sheilaists who feel that religion is essentially a private matter and that there is no particular constraint on them placed by the historic church, or even by the Bible and the tradition. [In the mid '80s, a Gallup poll] indicated that 80 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that "an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any churches or synagogues." Now, again, that isn't the way it really happens. But just the notion that religious belief ought to be a purely internal thing, and then you go to the church or synagogue of your choice, shows how deeply ingrained a kind of religious privatism is, which turns the church into something like the Kiwanis Club or some other kind of voluntary association that you go to or not if you feel comfortable with it - but which has no organic claim upon you. ⁽²⁾

Today is Mother's Day, and May is also a month in which we honor our Lord's mother, who is in a way our mother because we are members of her son's body. We obviously have an organic link with our mothers, and to some extent also with S. Mary because we eat and drink the risen body and blood of her son. Sheilaism seems completely at odds with what we are honoring today. What is best about Motherhood contradicts the radical individualism and the lonely isolation of Sheilaism. However, we often behave like we believe the same thing as Sheila professes - that other people have no claim upon us, but in our hearts, in our best instincts, we know that's wrong.

Let's first recognize that most of us are tempted to be nostalgic and sentimental about motherhood. Nostalgia means remembering only the good, forgetting the bad. Nostalgia is remembering something that never existed; it's false memory, an illusion we've created to serve ourselves, usually as a balm. It prevents us from dealing with reality. It makes us less authentic, less honest people. Nostalgia is a spiritual and emotional and intellectual malady that corrupts much more than just our feelings about motherhood. Another day, for example, we could think about how nostalgia corrupts our view of Christianity.

Norman Rockwell once said, "I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers . . . only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard." ⁽³⁾ We often focus the same rosy lens on motherhood.

We get nostalgic about motherhood because our mothers have made us so much of who we are, and it can be difficult to think highly of ourselves if we don't think highly of our mothers. Mothers have great influence over the person we become because they are the first person with whom we have a relationship. They are our introduction to humanity, to community, to fellowship, and so to the growth of our character. Relationships make us what we are. We become human beings only through relationships with other people; our character develops only through relationships with other people. A self-centered mother, a mother who finds her meaning and purpose inside of herself, stunts growth, and people can spend a lifetime trying to recover.

Motherhood requires risk and sacrifice and pain and suffering and inconvenience; it's about love. When we get nostalgic, we think that this love comes naturally. Bishop Douglas Feaver, many years ago a bishop in the Church of England, said, "I can't think why mothers love them. All babies do is leak at both ends." ⁽⁴⁾ I suppose most mothers feel that their children have some kind of organic claim upon them, and that would be healthy, but there are a lot of other natural instincts in us saying, "Ignore the brat." Once a mother begins sacrificing and suffering for a child, and that happens long before birth, that's when love begins. Real love doesn't begin by being gentle with yourself. It begins through risk and commitment and sacrifice, living for more than yourself.

The radical individualism of Sheilaism recognizes no organic claims, no claims by others that take priority over our own individual freedom. There's no sense that our character becomes godly by making ourselves vulnerable to other people, by serving and loving other people. Motherhood is not a voluntary association; it's not a personal, private matter. It's a social thing. And it's a pre-eminent claim upon our person, and how we respond to that claim shapes the essence of our character and whether we can love ourselves.

Where motherhood can lead us in the development of our character is also where our faith should lead us. The qualities we admire and honor today about motherhood are the same qualities our faith honors, and they really all boil down to what Jesus says in today's gospel: "Love one another as I have loved you."

Jesus tells this to his disciples at the Last Supper just after he has washed their feet. The washing of the feet shows us how God loves us, and how we are to love one another. Washing feet is an unpleasant task to be done only by the humblest, the lowliest in society. Here our Lord stoops to serve his followers. He does for them what they would not be willing to do for each other. He does this for them even though one of them will betray him, even though they will all run from him, even though one of his best friends will deny knowing him that very evening. What mother doesn't know about serving ingrates? What mother doesn't know about rejection? What mother doesn't know about being abandoned to deal with someone else's mess? A mother who doesn't know about those things has succumbed to nostalgia and sentimentalism. A mother knows about them because they come with loving.

The most important thing any one does in life is love. It's why God has put us here. It's his way of preparing us for himself. Our God is love. We are self-centered. The journey of our life is to move from being focused on ourselves to being focused on other people, to loving other people. More than anything else God wants us to love each other, and he wants his Church to be known for that. In today's gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, "By this [by your love for one another] shall all men know that ye are my disciples." One of the things that must most grieve our Lord is when his Church, his body, fights among itself, focusing on its own conflicts and uncertainties and needs, not the world's. It scandalizes the Church and hurts her mission. Our greatest commandment is to love one another. That's more important than any other Christian principal. A lack of charity is never justified. S. Paul says, "Make love your aim [in life]." (1 Cor 14:1)

We can't love one another unless we have a relationship with other people. God wants us to be around other people - often difficult, petty, frustrating people - because we can't love on our own. There's no love in isolation, not even love for ourselves. The Sheila in us, and we all have some of her in us, needs to be cast out because we don't even have any authentic love for ourselves until we love other people. Once we reach out of ourselves then our insides can heal and grow.

One of the benefits of being a parish priest is having to deal with the reality of death on a fairly regular and intimate basis. The benefit is that death continually reminds us what matters in life. It's not achievements, or luxuries, or career. It's people, people we love. The things we miss most in life are people, and at our death the only thing that matters is other people. That must always be our first priority.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, University of California (1985).

2. Robert Bellah, 'Habits of the Heart: Implications for Religion,' lecture at S. Mark's Catholic Church, Isla Vista, CA, 21 Feb '86.

3. Norman Rockwell, quoted in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988), from The Washington Post, 27 May 1972.

4. Quoted by Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988).