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Mother’s Rooms in the Father’s House

Mother’s Rooms in the Father’s House

Last updated on: May 7, 2017 at 2:56 pm by Nancy Rockwell

Mother’s Rooms in the Father’s House 2017-05-07T14:56:24-04:00 Nancy Rockwell

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A Mother’s Day Reflection on John 14

It’s with some irony that I read the Mother’s Day gospel: “in my Father’s house are many rooms . . .”

And the irony deepens considerably when, in this week, which after all proclaims a room for everyone – the devout and pious Christians in our government have used their power to pass a health care bill in which all aspects of maternity care are declared to be pre-existing conditions, rape is declared a pre-existing condition, pre-existing conditiona are optional for coverage and subject to higher rates, and birth control and abortion are set aside from being covered .

In this gospel passage Jesus is declaring the obvious and hospitable nature of God. And all sorts of feminine imagery is employed, by Jesus, about himself, especially, and about God, often. Yet in America, men who declare themselves Christians are drafting a national health care system that excludes women.

Jesus’ feminine imagery: Preparing rooms. Who else does that, now as then, but mothers?

Showing the way in to this hospitable place. Around the world, it is women who greet and show guests to their rooms.

I-am-in-Him-and-He-is-in-me, a sort of spiritual cum physical copulation, particularly popular in women’s romance novels, which Jesus employs here as demonstrative of God’s love.

Family resemblance, the way mothers verbally note the connection of eyebrows, turns of phrase, shared traits of bashfulness and glee, the signs of family relationship. And Jesus says, if you know me, you know God, and to know God is to know me. He really isn’t talking about gender here.

And yet the disciples vent frustration to Jesus, that God is not obvious and they have no way of knowing whether or not God is hospitable, and he, Jesus, hasn’t made anything clear.

And after two thousand years, the loudest religious voices in the culture are sure of only one thing about this text, that it is about gender. That the strongest resemblance between Jesus and God is maleness, and that femaleness just is not part of the deal. That the point (which is never mentioned in the passage, by the way) is, you have to get through Judgment before you can enter the room that Jesus has prepared. So conventional theology says the room is at a distance, beyond the rules and the judges, and getting in the door of this house is the hard part.

In fact, Jesus’ meaning is as clear as Matt Damon’s meaning, in his work with Water.org.

Damon, who grew up the son of a single mother in Cambridge, MA, responded to the water crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, in which 2.4 billion people lack access to clean water and the dignity of a toilet. Especially for women and girls, who have to spend hours of every day collecting water for the family and bringing it home, often over a distance of miles, the water crisis prevents working and going to school.

Damon, already aware of the burden mothers face in providing for families, was quick to see this as a problem that, when addressed, could change the world. The work of Water,org, Damon saw, could help bring to life a vision of a world in which room is prepared for everyone. Room in the classroom. Room in the house. Room in the global working economy. Room in the international conversation about caring for this earth. Room in the presence of God.

And so Matt Damon’s work is like the vision Jesus is sharing with us, of a room for everyone in the obvious kingdom of heaven and in the generous hospitality of God.

Jesus, too, is the son of a single mother, a woman who is alone by the time he is a young man. Because of her, he is sensitive to the inequality of gender burdens and the need to be sensitive to the good will of God for all people.

Jesus defends burdened women. The bent-over woman, whom he insists deserves healing on the Sabbath. The prostitute who is more faithful, Jesus says, than the skeptical rich man who is his host at a dinner when this woman breaks in to kiss Jesus’ feet. The foreign born woman who begs Jesus to help her ill daughter.

Jesus, who was born in a stable because there was no room in the inn, spends his ministry preparing room for people everywhere. Room in their hearts for one another. Room in the Sabbath for those most in need. Room in their friendship circle for those who are not pious. Room in their social understanding to accept that sharing supercedes pious customs and prayerbooks as signs of fitness for the world of God.

And this is the kind of religious learning that, in every faith, is taught by women to their children. Sharing, caring, sympathizing.

Years ago, in a course on spirituality for clergy,taught by Krister Stendahl, the few ordained women huddled together to endure the onslaught of disapproving comments by fundamentalists, evangelicals and the Orthodox. Stendahl patiently drew out the conservatives, getting them to talk about who it was who taught them how to relate to icons (their grandmothers), how to pray (their mothers), how to share their faith with those outside their families (the women in their churches).

By the end of the term we did, in fact, become one room. It took those months for Stendahl to persuade these men to ‘see’ how much their religion depended upon women as teachers, how much the image of God that was dear to their hearts had come to them solely from women, and how much of that image was, in fact, feminine.

When Jesus says to his followers in John 14, that he is going to prepare a place for them, is not inscrutable, it is what they already know. They need one another, and there needs to be room for everyone.

On Mother’s Day it is of the utmost importance that we proclaim Christianity to be far more than a men’s locker room, far more than a guys rule religion.

We need to proclaim the femininity of Christianity in our historical moment to make clear the utter foolishness of a national health care plan that throws maternity care, family planning including abortion, and rape care, outside the safety net of general care. God may be able to raise up children from stones, but human beings cannot. And the projected costs increases for having a child under Trump are are 425% greater than at present, or approximately $17,000 per child.

God, who sought a young, single Hebrew woman without funds to bear Jesus, does not want human reproduction to become something like Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian futuristic tale of women held in captivity for breeding purposes by rich Alpha males, a theme also explored in last year’s Oscar nominee film, Mad Max: Fury Road.

Women’s reproductive health care must remain available to all women for little or no fees, so that the children of the future, the children of God, may belong to all of us, rich and poor, single and married, old and young, and not only to rich white men.

Mothers’ rooms in God’s house, as in all our houses, are the rooms where we feel welcome, valued, included, and loved. Which is what heaven is, for all God’s people.
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Image: The Sleeping Child. by Mary Curtis Richardson. 1911. The Legion of Honor Building. San Francisco, CA. vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

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