Invisible Work
A MOTHERING SUNDAY SERMON BY REV LINDA HART
Sometimes with a little luck and intention the invisible can become visible.
About two years before my father died, my brothers and I had the task of sifting through his possessions and deciding what to do with them. Depressed and weak after a surgery for cancer took away his voice, and seemingly not caring what came of all he had accumulated in his life, he was happy to abandon that task to his three children, my brothers and me.
Those of you who have done such work know that it is both banal and astonishing. Discovering what people have kept as treasures, or what has accumulated like leaves swept by an autumn wind into a sheltered place, and deciding what to save and what to bin and what to give away and to whom can be a daunting task. My father who had felt the shadow of death cross his path some 20 years earlier, had given away a few especially prized possessions, but there was inevitably more to discover in the three small rooms where he lived.
Throwing away stacks of newspapers and magazines was not difficult to do. Piles of old bills were torn up and put in a sack. I found letters I had written to him, a few of the chatty ones I’d written whilst at university, one or two angry ones from the time when we were estranged.
Small treasures emerged, too. I found a ring, with a tag attached to it. Old enough to be already turning brown, one side had my father’s name in the shaky and yet perfectly formed cursive hand of an elder relative. On the other was written ‘Grandma Rosie’s engagement ring’. The rose coloured gold in the ring held a small piece of stone, embossed with a flower traced in gold, and the tiniest chip of diamond at the centre. Examining it carefully, I found an inscription: ‘Friend to Rosie’ in curving letters around the inside of the ring.
I had no idea who Grandma Rosie was, nor where the ring had come from, but it was a lovely little treasure, and I took it with me along with some letters and a few other mementos. The ring and mystery soon slipped my mind as my father went into a care home and began to fail and eventually died. I never managed to ask him about it.
After his memorial service, I talked with his sister, my aunt Lois. She was a woman of incredible strength, but very flighty and easily distracted. Sometimes, she had a hard time following a thought all the way through to its logical conclusion. (I must add my favourite story about her was from a time when I visited her when I was 16. I had begun to smoke, and as she and I talked shortly after my arrival – I would be staying with her for several days – she commented upon the habit that I had taken up. Pulling hard on her own cigarette, which she had lit off the one she had just finished, she exhaled and said to me, ‘Oh, I hate to see young girls smoking!’)
I asked her about this ring. I described it but she had no recollection of it. I told her of the tag, that it was Grandma Rosie’s ring, and still she had no idea. The inscription didn’t seem to make it much clearer, apparently ‘Friend to Rosie’ was as meaningless to her as it was to me. Who was Rosie’s friend? Several minutes passed as we sat outside in the chilly January air, Lois smoking.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it might have been Friend and Rosie Jones, the people who fostered your grandmother.’
Yes, I expect it was.
My father’s mother, Kitty, was, I knew, raised by the Quaker family who had lived next door to her parents. Irish immigrants to the US, Patrick and Suzanne O’Quinlivan had come to find a better life. Patrick died in some kind of industrial accident not long after Kitty and her twin sister Jenny were born, and by the time they were 3 or 4, Suzanne succumbed to consumption, tuberculosis. Defying the parish priest who pressed her to have the children raised by Catholics, she insisted that Friend and Rosie would raise her daughters. Threatened with losing her soul, Suzanne refused to change her mind, and the priest eventually gave in and agreed that when she died she would be buried in consecrated ground, blessed by the church. She would suffer no loss of that final blessing because her children would be raised by one who knew them, who loved them already, who could help them find their way in life.
Grandma Rosie. One who did that invisible work. A meaningless name, written in neat script on a small tag. Early in the 20th century, she took in the neighbour’s children, as one did when tragedy so dire struck. Not because she was special or particularly saintly. I imagine that she did it because it was what was needed at the moment, that these small girls needed someone who could tend their shattered hearts, and help them find their way in the world.
The invisible work of making the world whole again, like the worms in the garden helping the earth to breathe, and the bees ransacking the world so that we have juicy fruit and ripe grains.
Nearly lost to me, but now named and known, Grandma Rosie who lent her heart to the work of making the world more whole. Truly there is no other art.
What is it that we lose when we don’t notice and appreciate that work done in the world? We often miss that work, done by others, done by ourselves.
Once when Claire was still quite young – perhaps she was two. We were in the grocery store and I was finishing up the shopping for the week. I don’t even remember what it was I was doing, talking to her, I suspect as I did nearly nonstop for the first years of her life, telling her what we’d be doing next, or making a plan for the next day, handing her something to play with and retrieving it when she inevitably dropped it to the ground. The woman behind me in line said, ‘What a great job you’re doing with your daughter.’ I was startled. ‘Thank you,’ I had the presence of mind to say. ‘Parents don’t hear that enough,’ the woman continued, ‘but it’s easy to see that she’s a happy, loved child and you’re doing a great job of raising her.’
It happened one or two other times while she was young. Some stranger would offer a compliment to my parenting skills. And I bring it up not because I was some sort of angelic, ideal parent, far from it. There were ample moments – still are – when I despaired that I would not be able to do what was needed to raise a whole, healthy and happy human being.
From the same time, I remember leaving a shopping mall and insisting that Claire walk instead of being carried. She would go two steps and fling herself to the ground in full tantrum. I would wait, telling her that she needed to get up and walk, and we inched our way through the store on our way to the car. I was certain that every eye in the store was upon me, judgement weighing heavily on me. Several women walked past, looking at Claire red-faced and screaming at my feet. ‘I believe I’ll be getting the Worst Mother Of the Year award this year,’ I said to one of the women who had a kind face. ‘No,’ she replied smiling, ‘I think I’ve got that one wrapped up....’
There are moments when the invisible becomes visible, when the fabric of life that upholds us all the time while we’re distracted with other things becomes most plain.
This work of stitching up the world, is carried on all the time all around us. The work is as common as fixing the evening meal or kissing a bump. The work is as common as listening when you have a headache or are tired. And when we feel lost or dispirited or wounded, we need to have some soup that’s holy, have some soup that’s been made holy not by incantation or blessing by a priest, but by the love that went into the making. Anne Lamott has it just right that the holy isn’t found somewhere else, isn’t discovered in incantations or the silence of the monastery. It is found in what is homely and common, in that invisible work of the worms and the bees, in the stitching up of the world, in the mothering that happens all the time all round us. As the poet says, there is no other art than the work of a heart, which is the work of the heart of the world.
We stop here on this day to look, to find what is invisible, to shape our intention to see those tendrils of love growing around us. We can be so easily distracted from seeing what is there before us. Captured sometimes by petty worries, by small betrayals, by drama that can seem unending, we miss what is there. Lost in the numbing details and chores and challenges that life presents to us, we can forget to look.
Grandma Rosie’s ring reminds me to look and ask, to find the treasures that are always there just under the surface, the gifts of life and love that come to us, sometimes across the generations, sometimes just across the breakfast table, if we take the time to see truly.
Prayer
Today we pause on this Mothering Sunday, and remember:
those who have given us birth,
in body or in heart,
those whose love has fed us, whose love is holy.
We listen for the whispering of our mother the earth,
the sea, the winds that come,
and not wholly listening,
still we know
the work of our hearts is the work of the heart of the world:
growing in compassion,
reaching beyond boundaries,
offering what gifts are in our hands to give.
We notice the common and plain, essential love that
binds the world together, the healing work going on under the ground,
the mostly unnoticed simple acts that sustain us all
and bow in gratitude.
In thanksgiving, we ready ourselves to depart this time of worship.
Let us leave with a song in our hearts,
and our eyes open.