Remembering Mom

Mom, celebrating 90 years in October, 2017

The little Presbyterian congregation that I serve in metro DC has spent this summer studying the 25^th chapter of Matthew, and asking ourselves what it would mean to be a church shaped primarily by that foundational gospel text.

I probably should have just told them about my mom. She spent her entire life living out the deepest meaning of that chapter from the New Testament.

When I was sitting with her a few days before her death, I picked up her Bible and read those verses from Matthew 25. Mom marked up a lot of passages in her Bible, but she didn’t actually mark any of the verses I just read. I don’t think she needed to be reminded of them because her life testified to the importance of those words for the way she chose to live her days.

When mom encountered people who were hungry, she figured out how to feed them even though she hated cooking and wasn’t really all that much into food herself. She helped countless poor families throughout Chattanooga figure out how to navigate systems so that they could get breakfast and lunch for their children.

At the same time, she fed us day by day, and though she didn’t find a great deal of joy in the kitchen, she did find joy and share it at the dining room table. We ate dinner together as a family almost every evening of my growing up, and I know that practice passed along to the next generation. There is, of course, something profound and sacramental about breaking bread together, and we are shaped through such simple practices. At the table that my mother set, we were shaped for the kinds of service that our parents provided in their professional lives.

When mom encountered people who were naked she clothed them. She was part of the Neighborhood House system in North Chattanooga from its earlies days, both donating and delivering all kinds of gently used items of clothes that made their way to families in need. She stood in solidarity with poor families in their most trying times, and served them in ways as simple and profound as finding shoes and winter coats for their children, and in ways as complex and difficult as going to family court with them.

One of my strongest memories of mom is of going with her, after the Christmas Eve candlelight service here, into Chattanooga’s public housing projects to deliver Christmas to families whose trees would be far less richly adorned than the one I’d wake up to the next morning on Avalon Circle.

When mom encountered lonely people, she visited. In retirement she volunteered in all manner of ways, answering calls for Chattanooga’s crisis line often on holidays, serving as a hospice volunteer, and, in work that brought her deep joy, volunteering for years at the little house in the Children’s Museum where she often reconnected momentarily lost little ones with their parents.

Although she would likely have rolled her eyes at the divinity school vocabulary, what I’m trying to say is that my mother understood incarnational theology. That is to say, she deeply believed that whatever she did with and for the least of these – the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the lonely, the children of Chattanooga – she was doing with and for Jesus.

You always have a choice when you look at others. If you look for the worst in others you’ll find it. If you look for the Christ in them, you’ll find that, too. You’ll also find yourself a whole lot happier.

I learned from my mother that complicated abstract responses to unanswerable questions do not add up to a life of faith. Entering the kindom prepared for you from the foundations of the earth is not about your answer to the abstract question about the divinity or humanity of Jesus; it’s about seeing the divine spark in every human being and treating them the way you imagine you’d treat Jesus: with kindness and humility.

Thirtysome years ago I gave mom a wall-hanging for Christmas with the words from Micah 6:8 – do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. Mom served the least of these through that lens. She was a fierce advocate of basic fairness, and a system rigged by and for the rich and powerful deeply offended her. She walked through every day with a loving kindness that touched everyone she encountered. And she always shined the light on others, being an incredibly supportive partner to our dad, a proud parent who always showed up for each of us, and a loving, doting grandma who, as Kaycee noted, taught her grandkids that there are some things an Ensign doesn’t do.

I was never clear on what those things are, and I’m pretty sure that her kids and grandkids stretched her imagination on just what things were acceptable. I will leave those things to your imaginations. In that way, as well, mom grasped something profoundly important: if you begin with love you can build and hold on to relationships through most any challenge.

In recent years it was challenging to get out of places with mom. Some of that was because her body started giving out long before her indomitable spirt waned, but most of it was because most everywhere we went with her she would run into folks she knew and they would want to stop and talk with her. Mom spent her lifetime building and holding on to relationships that began with her loving spirit.

She extended that curiosity to people in every walk of life. She knew the family stories of every principal in all of the schools that she served, and she also knew the family stories of every custodian.

My mom never turned down a chance to talk with an old friend, or a new friend, or a potential friend. She had a curiosity about life that drove her to want to learn about you, and a fundamental kindness that compelled countless folks to want to share their stories with her.

Throughout scripture salvation means wholeness, it means well-being, it means communion with God and with neighbor. All of that begins and ends with love. Mom lived and loved into such salvation day by day, and she rests in it now and forevermore. Hallelujah. Amen.