The Mother's Day Proclamation
by Julia Ward Howe

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated
Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

One of the earliest calls to celebrate Mother's Day, this proclamation was written in 1870.

A free t-shirt to the reader who guesses where I was when I heard the following this past weekend (from two separate men):

Man #1: "Hello, beautiful."

Man #2: "How do you keep your cute little figure? You must work hard at it."


Any guesses?

A bar? A party? A dance club?

Correct answer: Church.

That's right. Church. My church. Where my husband serves as pastor.

The first line was technically delivered after the service was over, as I was walking to get in line for the potluck being held that day. The second line was delivered right smack in the middle of worship, as I was walking up to the communion table. It came from the man I had been sitting next to all service, a man who was now standing behind me as we filed into line.

I didn't know how to respond to either of these comments. It's not that I didn't know how they made me feel: they both made me uncomfortable, and the second comment in particular made me feel quite vulnerable. (What part of my "cute little figure" was he looking at as he decided to pose his question to me?)

Had I been at work or in public, I probably would have responded with a polite yet firm "Please call me Ms. Gulden" to the first comment or "That's an inappropriate question" to the second. But instead I offerered only an annoyed sigh.

Why is that? Why didn't I know how to repond to these comments in my own church? Why do I think I would have reponded differently in a different context?

I seem to have a similarly difficult time standing up to such comments (directed either at me or at others) when they originate from members of my family or my husband's family. Again, why is that?

I talked with my husband after church about these two incidents, and he and I agreed that we both need to address such comments head-on when we hear them. I, as a woman, need to continue to learn how to assert myself and demand basic respect from others. He, as a man, needs to talk to other men and help them to understand why such comments are harmful and unacceptable.

But it needs to move beyond that. The church as a whole needs to remember that sexim and racism and other forms of discrimination are real. And they are alive and well in the church. We need to continue to struggle with how to rid our communities of these sins so that we can truly become the community that God created us to be: the beloved community, a community of justice and wholeness and peace--shalom.

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, essayist, and novelist. This poem was published in Peacework Magazine, Issue 382 - February 2008

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been detained four hours, I heard an announcement: "If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately." Well -- one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. "Help," said the Flight Service Person. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this." I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. "Shu dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?" The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, "You're fine, you'll get there, who is picking you up? Let's call him." We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her -- Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag -- and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were holding hands -- had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped -- seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

I don't know how to be thirtysomething.

Caught between my twenties and my forties--between young adulthood and, well, just plain adulthood--I'm perplexed.

I think part of the reason for my confusion is that I am a church-going Christian, and I also happen to work for the church. And, as we all know, it's the thirtysomethings that are largely missing from the church. So the two places where I spend most of my time are virtually thirtysomethingless.

All you twentysomethings: am I romanticizing the decade I most recently left behind? Did I really know how to be twentysomething? Do you feel like you know how to fare this phase? I think having spent most of my twenties in school surrounded by other twentysomethings gave me a pretty good clue about what it meant to be twentysomething. And I'm sure it didn't hurt that most of the older adults in my life during that stage were used to working with twentysomethings.

But now I find myself in a strange no-woman's-land of missing thirtysomethings. There are a few of us around the church, but we're not quite as visible as the twentysomethings. And the older adults I'm encountering now don't seem to know quite what to do with the few of us that are here.

I love the intergenerational reality that is the mainline church. But I miss having space to be with other people my age. Most of the thirtysomethings I know are friends from other walks of life. We are figuring out together what it means to be thirty. But I find myself longing for a mentor, for a woman who's just a few more years into this decade than I am to take me by the hand and tell me that this uncertainly that I feel is normal. To assure me that I will eventually come to know what it is that I want to do with my life. To agree with me that the myth of the working supermother is both out-of-reach and dangerous. To challenge me to resist settling down if that means getting so tied to material things that I betray the truly important things.

Where are my fellow thirtysomethings? What does it mean to be thirtysomething? Have you figured it out? Who showed you the way?

Wow. That was a long--and unintentional--hiatus.

For some reason I've been blocked from accessing blogspot from my computer here at work. For several weeks. Access was finally restored again this afternoon.

So here I am, with a LOT on my mind. I'm ready to blog again. So stay tuned...

It's good to be back.

Sumbitted by Hillary Mohaupt


One of the remarkable things about the Internet is that you can type nearly anything into a search engine and find whatever your heart desires. In the rise and fall of the last few weeks—experiencing the loss of my grandmother, getting my first acceptance letters for graduate schools, struggling with the snobbish side of Macalester’s culture, celebrating with a friend as she comes to know herself a little better by embracing the sexuality with which she has wrestled—I have been drawn back to a sentence I found years ago.

Sometime during my first year at Mac, I encountered the gentle reminder, “Life is once, twice and yet again.” I taped it on my computer monitor and it has hung there patiently, waiting for me to find it again this week. When I did find it, I wanted to contextualize it. So I turned to Google for help. The first few searches came up fruitless, and I was closer to distress than to annoyance. Here was a line that was speaking to my experience and I couldn’t even remember who wrote it!

But tonight, Google came through. Naly Yang’s poem, “In Remembrance,” appeared in Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans in 2002, and my sentence drew the poem to a close. As I wrap up my time at Macalester and in NNPCW, anything “in remembrance” seems particularly apt. As we remember, we re-experience and re-interpret.
There is hope in Naly Yang’s brief reminder. We can remember and re-interpret and even re-live what we have known, or, better, we can move on to something completely new and, dare I say, refreshing. We can renew our spirits and replenish our hearts. We are given the promise of unending love, which can transform us beyond our own experiences. God’s love in the world recalls what even Google can’t adequate convey: the darker moments will be brightened by friendships and adventures, and exuberant joy will be tempered by the call of the world to dig down deep to engage the world in hard work and complicated questions. We remember and we continue to live. In a sentence, “life is once, twice and yet again.”

Hillary is a senior at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. She is currently a member of NNPCW's Coordinating Committee, but sadly, her term ends this year. We will miss her dearly.