Mother’s Day: Underdogs And Beloved Children
By Michael Adee, Executive Director, More Light Presbyterians
On Sundays after we got home from church, my older brother Steve, our father and I would be watching football on a 25 inch Zenith TV. Mom would walk into the room and always ask the same question, “Alright, who’s behind? I want to cheer for the underdog.” No favorite team for my Mom, she believed in a level playing field. All these years later, I trace my sense of justice to my Mom asking that simple question.
Mother’s Day is today. Signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, the first observances of Mother’s Day were by women’s peace groups in the 1870’s. I’m thinking about my Mom today. She died too early in my life when I was 24 and in seminary. Mom grew up on a dirt poor depression farm in west Texas. She was raised Baptist and became Presbyterian when she married my Dad after WWII.
Her smile, easy laugh and generous spirit lit up a room. She embodied compassion in her care for others and the practice of hospitality that ruled our home. If company was coming, she’d spend all week cleaning, cooking and baking to ensure that every person was treated as an honored guest. If an unexpected guest arrived at the door, she had home-baked cookies in the cookie jar ready to share.
Her love for her two sons, neither of us easy, was fiercely unconditional. The signature of her life was her unconditional love, hospitality and care for others. My Mom died before I could come out to her. I was 24 and still on the journey to accept myself as a gay man. Back then the deck was stacked against my reconciling being gay and Christian by a conspiracy of silence and a brick wall of homophobia. Such experiences caused me to doubt God’s love that seemed real and true when I was a kid.
Dr. Renita Weems says, “I cannot forget my mother. She is my bridge. When I needed to get across, she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely.” During my Mom’s life and since her death, she has been a bridge for me in countless and profound ways.
In 1991, I was loved back to faith by Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. When Rev. Hal Porter spoke about a theology of hospitality this made perfect sense to me because of my Mom’s practice of hospitality. The unconditional love and generous hospitality of her life and my childhood home was now being offered to me, a gay man, in church. No more underdogs. I was carried by God’s grace and a Mother’s love across that bridge to the place where I started as a beloved child of God just like everyone else.
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Image courtesy of More Light Presbyterians