“She Will Lead”
A Mother’s Day Sermon
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven
May 12, 2019

Reading: That Country by Grace Paley

Sermon:

I was about thirteen when I first read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. The idea of a society made up only of women fascinated and delighted me.

(I’m not sure if it had anything to do with Herland, but the next year, I did end up in an all-girls high school.)

The novel is told from the perspective of three men who happen upon a country comprised of only women and girls. Their customs are unfamiliar, shocking, even, to the men, and the women are described as “inconveniently reasonable.”

Published in 1915, Herland was Gilman’s vision of a feminist utopia, complete with collective childrearing and women living lives dedicated to social reform and educational advancement.

That said, Herland is a complex book, rife with overtones of eugenics alongside its radical feminism. Undesirable traits are “bred out” of the population and the collective childrearing,
while powerfully redefining the concept of “family” on the one hand also stems from a belief that only the most skilled and “worthy” members of society should rear the children. This is indicative of the progressive thinking of the period in which Gilman was writing, but it is problematic to say the least.

You might have guessed, if you did not know already, that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a Unitarian. And her understanding of women’s role in society included unique perspectives on women’s role in religious thought as well.

In 1923, her book, His Religion and Her, outlined what was considered an entirely new religious perspective using the metaphor of birth, rather than death or sacrifice, as the central symbol.
“Let us see clearly what has been happening on earth,” she wrote, “where women come in, their special nature, power and purpose…

She goes on: “Now, if we can see the position of the … human mother in her responsibility to human life, to human progress, there begins to appear some shining dawn of what the world may expect when she does her duty; some foreshadowing of her effect upon religion, and of the wide new hope which such changed religion would open to us….

“Thought of God aroused by birth leads along a different road,” she says, “to a different conclusion.”

“Here is Life” she says. “It comes in installments, not all at once. The old ones die, the new ones come. They do not come ready-made; they are not finished, they have to be taken care of…”
Gilman imagined that women might conceive of a Mother God: “The first Mother, Teacher, Server, Maker.”
And the result of this different religious perspective? For Gilman: “The new premises for our religious thought will inevitably lead to right conduct as the old premises have led to wrong.
Where the older religions left life on earth neglected, the new will find its place of action here.”
“The new will find its place of action here.”
~
Gilman is not the only one who has reimagined religion by embracing the feminine.
Master musician Bobby McFerrin re-wrote the 23rd psalm in honor of his mother. McFerrin shares the story of the rewriting saying: “I’d been reading the Bible one morning, and I was thinking about God’s unconditional love, about how we crave it but have so much trouble believing we can trust it, and how we can’t fully understand it. And then I left my reading and spent time with my wife and our children. Watching her with them, the way she loved them, I realized one of the ways we’re shown a glimpse of how God loves us is through our mothers.
They cherish our spirits, they demand that we become our best selves, and they take care of us.”

Replacing “he” with “she,” he set the psalm to music – sung so beautifully by the choir this morning.
It’s important to say here that just as with images of a loving Father God, images of a loving Mother God resonate for some of us and not for others depending upon our lived experience.

Some of us may have no use for images of God at all. Others of us may be hungry to turn on their head images that were passed down to us. The idea of God as Mother may be as radical to us now as it was one hundred years ago when Charlotte Perkins Gilman was writing.

But let us also not forget that this was not, is not, a new idea. For millennia, human beings conceived of God or Goddess as Mother of us all.
~
This week, it was the phrase “beside the still waters, she will lead” that caught my imagination.
“She will lead.”
And I found myself asking: How might changing the image of God from male to female, influence the way we think about leadership?
A note here to say that I am increasingly aware of the binary nature of conversations about femininity and masculinity, female and male, women and men. Today’s sermon is not an invitation to simply replace male with female or to privilege the perspective of women over that of men nor over that of non-binary or trans people. Nor is it a demonization of masculinity or male-identified people.
It is an invitation, though, on this day set aside to reflect on the influence of mothering in our lives, to think about the ways that our society is not only still built around the gender binary, but also about how we collectively, still today in 2019, privilege and prioritize the male perspective, the male gaze, how we value the masculine over the feminine and defer to masculine forms of communicating, of operating, of conducting business, and of constructing and running societies.
Women’s leadership is, of course, not a panacea. We could share plenty of examples of corrupt women leaders, of greed and injustice perpetrated at the hands of women.
But as I reflected on this idea of female leadership, the image that kept coming to mind was that of New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern wearing a hijab as she attended Friday prayers after the shootings in Christchurch. She has been both praised and criticized for doing so, with Muslim women around the world weighing in on both sides.
What I saw, though, was the courageous act of meeting people where they are, of stepping out of one’s own comfort zone to enter the world of another.

This is the definition of compassion and empathy, to feel with another.
Leadership that is centered in compassion and empathy is vulnerable, open, curious, nimble and, frankly, refreshing.
Brené Brown writes that “To be alive is to be vulnerable; to be a leader is to be vulnerable every minute of the day. You don’t get to opt out. Vulnerability is terrifying and it’s dangerous and scary.”

And she says, vulnerability is the road to leadership that connects to people as human beings, leadership that provides clear expectations and is courageous enough to admit weaknesses and to see them as opportunities for new discoveries.

Here at USNH, we have been thinking more about leadership and leadership development within the congregation. As you continue these conversations, I encourage you to think together about vulnerability and connection, clarity and courage as qualities you will seek to cultivate in each other and in yourselves.

All of us – whatever our gender – can be leaders who meet others where they are, leaders who are vulnerable enough to step out of our comfort zone and enter the world of the other.
All of us can lead and act and be with love and care as our ultimate guides, with the idea of birth and new beginnings as models for our own curiosity about the world, with a sense of abundant love rather than scarcity as our orientation.

All of us can “cherish each other’s spirits, demand that we become our best selves, and care for one another.”

When we lead and act and live in this way, the values that follow are clear,
and our “place of action” even clearer:

We side with love.

We fight so that people have the right to make choices about their lives and their bodies.

We fight so that children don’t have to fear being shot in school or being separated from their parents at the border or being held in detention centers.

We march on city hall, and we demand justice for those unjustly shot at by police.

We fight like hell for families to stay together, for humane treatment for all people, for peace, and for freedom.

There is much so work to be done, folks.

And so, today, we give thanks for our foremothers before us, and our forefathers too. We give thanks for all the prophetic people who lived and died that we might carry on in these days,
these dangerous days, in this country, so that we might sing and fight for what gives life,
so that we might keep marching, so that our hands will remain steady.

May it be so.