Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 11, 2025
Mother’s Day in USA, Japan and many other countries
Good Shepherd Sunday
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Mama
I am the good shepherd, says the Lord. I know my sheep and my sheep know me.
Andi, the newest mother in our family, is hosting Margaret her mom and Machiko her mother-in-law for an afternoon tea today. We’ve been watching old British movies, and I’m looking forward to drinking some tea, eating cookies or cake, and quickly dropping any attempts at a British accent. Perhaps we’ll have Japanese tea, and my Japanese accent is even worse than the British.
I’ll be thinking of Japanese Sensei Shozo Sato, who died in his sleep this week at age 91. He flew from Tokyo into the Illinois cornfields 60 years ago, a prolific artist who brought with him the tea ceremony, founded and helped build Japan House at the University of Illinois and inspired the planting of a cherry blossom tree orchard, which we have walked in during many Aprils. At a Professor Sato lecture a few years ago, we bought a print of one of his Japanese iris paintings.
My sheep hear my voice; I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.
Mother’s Day at Danville Correctional Center revealed much about the loyalty of mothers to their children. We brought students from the University of Illinois to sing and pray with inmates on several Mother’s Day evenings. For all of us, Mom was the first woman in our lives. The guys cried, told stories, prayed fervently for their moms. They asked for forgiveness from their absent mothers, and I always felt like they received it. What’s more important is that they felt that, too.
Mother’s Day sharply contrasted with Father’s Day a month later. Mostly the guys in prison didn’t think much about their dads. Often they told us about how they felt abandoned rather than cared for by the first man in their lives.
Yesterday I sat for a few minutes with Andi and Finn, who is just over two months old. He smiled, he fidgeted, he smiled some more. The bond between Andi and her new son felt deep already, just 63 or so days after he was born. Of course, their bond began long before, as she carried him within herself for the long months before his journey out into the world began.
The Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of life-giving water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Like everyone, mothers pass away, as have ours – Angie and Dorothy, both aged 99, and so today we think of them and celebrate them and remember how their love for us throughout our lives builds us up today and always. Steve Garnaas-Holmes means his poem “Resurrection” to describe our feelings about Jesus, and I think the words also describe something of how we feel as we remember our moms today:
The miracle is the absence.
The emptiness of the grave,
of our hands. The letting go.
Freedom from grasping.
Grief becomes openness.
The need no longer
for there to be the body
that we can still love.
An open door,
always, insistently open.
The empty space
that can’t be disproved.
The Presence that eludes
all containers, even the present,
that has escaped everything
into everything.
A dilation of this moment,
an aperture opening, letting in light,
a vacancy so pure
everything is clear and distinct.
The space left behind
when matter has turned to energy,
even death turned into love
needing nothing, even its own flesh.
After pure change
what once had to be is now missing,
Light splits open the darkness,
revealing its innards, transparent.
The substance of weakness and failure
evaporates into a vast generosity,
escaping the heaviness of necessity,
as light as light.
(Acts 13, Psalm 100, Revelation 7, John 10)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
