The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
May 9, 2010
Vol. 13 no. 194
An odd point on which to begin talking about Mother’s Day is to think of that motherly contribution to the language by Saddam Hussein. In 1991 he promised the people of Iraq and the US-led forces that this would be the “mother of all battles.” Obviously, Hussein meant the expression as a superlative - this is going to be the fiercest battle you have ever experienced. It didn’t work out that way. But Hussein’s language spawned a flurry of imitators, mostly tongue-in-cheek.
My favourite was a university professor who promised - or threatened? - his students with the “mother of all reading lists”! I saw the reading list and there have been longer ones, but everyone made sure to pay a lot of attention to it.
Still, “the mother of all ...” does place the root of all power and possibility in the right place. This phrase may be a little edgy, but it does express the fact that mothers are the beginning of what’s most important and the ones capable of pushing us to our greatest accomplishments. The traditional prayers are directed to God the Father, but in the Nativity, father Joseph is a forgotten character. It’s all about Mary, the Mother of God, as our Orthodox sisters and brothers prefer to call her. The Virgin Mary is, in fact, secondary to her being Mother.
There are lots of emotions connected with this Mothering Sunday. Not everybody is able to be a mother, and not every mother is virtuous. Do I need to point out that there is no human role or activity that is blessed with completely perfect practitioners? Yet, mothers tend to be more consistently successful at approximating perfection. For human beings, close does matter.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan