Mothers' Day Reflections

           On August 12, 1911, Margaret Bales was born in Lone Grove, Llano County, Texas. A few weeks later, on September 7, 1911, Muriel Stevenson was born in Monroe, Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. They would not meet until the late nineteen fifties when Margaret’s daughter, Peggy Ratliff, and Muriel’s son, David George met at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Texas.

            Margaret Bales Ratliff grew up on a small farm in a dry, rocky area of Texas. Like a lot of people in rural American then, they were poor by today’s standards but rich in some important ways. Margaret had a dream of becoming a teacher and went to Mary Hardin Baylor College. She and her sister had two dresses each and they would trade on weekends. She started teaching before she graduated and finished in the summers. Her brother, Albert, was killed in action in the Pacific during World War II. She married, Wortham  Ratliff, whose family operated a dairy farm, and moved to San Antonio when he got a job in aircraft maintenance at Kelly Air Force Base. They had two daughters. Margaret continued to teach in the public schools. The family was active in a Baptist church. She taught Sunday School and was active in the Child Evangelism Fellowship and the Bible Memory Association. In retirement she continued to teach adults, sometimes including men, in Sunday School in Kingsland, Texas. She died on June 24, 20089, at the age of 96, in Lakeway, Texas, near Austin.

            Muriel Stevenson George grew up in a small town in Northeast Louisiana. Her mother died when she was two, and she and her infant brother were boarded with another family until their father remarried. Her relationship with her stepmother was not good and made her childhood difficult. After high school she went to work in the office of the Ouachita Candy Company in Monroe. There she met Evans George who had come from Central Arkansas to work. They had two sons. They tried to start their own business in the late forties, but it failed, and the family started over again in Texas. Muriel went to work in a bank in San Antonio. Evans became sales manager for Gebhart Mexican Foods. They raised their children in church and maintained membership in Baptist Churches wherever they moved. In later years they lived in Denver, Colorado, where she died August 19, 2006, just short of her ninety-fifth birthday.

            Both of these women came of age and married during the Great Depression. They lived through two world wars and the tumultuous years that followed. They established good marriages and good homes. They lived in small, modest houses with few of the modern conveniences we enjoy today. They worked hard and found employment outside the home to help their families. They put all their children through college. They supported their churches. Both have lived their last years as widows, as most wives do, having nursed their husbands through their final illness.

            As we come to Mother’s Day this year, I am keenly aware of the importance of these two women and countless others like them who have been faithful to God and to their families through so many years. We have their DNA, their examples, their teaching, and their love to thank for our lives and those of our children. Mother’s Day is a time to remember and give thanks.

The Family at Christmas

On Christmas Day, after we opened our gifts, we sat down to eat. All ten of us gathered around our dining room table. Our daughter and son-in-law came from Texas with their two teenage daughters. Our two sons, who live near us in Nashville were here. One of them is married, and his wife and two-year-old son were with him.

The two-year-old was the center of attention, of course, drawing us together and warming the emotional atmosphere. It was a very happy time.

I sat in my chair at one end of the table, my wife at the other end. As I looked at my family on Christmas Day my heart was full. This kind of fullness or completeness is a religious experience. In fact religion can be defined as that which enables us to experience fullness in life (See the Introduction and first chapter of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age). Jesus said, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 14:10, NRSV).

This fullness is also, for a man of seventy, the hoped-for goal of the late adult stage of life. Erik Erikson characterizes it as integrity, the sense that our life has has meaning and we have made a contribution. It enables us, at the latter stage of life, to look over all of life with happiness and contentment and see that it holds together and is good. The alternatives to this are despair or dogmatic insistence that we were right in spite of our apparent failures.

One of my thoughts that day was of the nature of marriage. Before I married, I tried to imagine what it would be like. I could not visualize what it would be like to be a married person. I certainly could not imagine what it would be like to be a parent. If you had given me a list at that time of all the things we would do through the years, I would have been overwhelmed. But now I look back and review all that has happened and am amazed. I looked at my two-year-old grandson and my teenage granddaughters and recalled the infancy and childhood of our three children. They grew up healthy, finished college with no debts, married, in the case of two of them, and began their own families. They are all employed in useful occupations. I am proud of all of them.

I am aware that some people do not marry, or, if they do, they do not have children. Some marry, and the marriage does not work or is interrupted by illness or death. Marriage and parenthood are not the only ways of experiencing completeness and fullness. Jesus proved that you do not have to have spouse or children to be fully included in the family of God, but you do have to recognize and embrace your inclusion in God's family.

I am also aware that I cannot take credit for all that has happened these seventy years of life or these forty-eight years of marriage. Many others--parents, spouse, friends, teachers, church, school, and community, have all contributed. Above all, God has given us life and the ability to live. Some people in our secular world live full and meaningful lives with no reference to God, but for me there cannot be fullness or completion without transcendence.

As I look at my family and at my life, I find myself thanking God who is the source of it all. I find myself seeking God, who redeems us and forgives our many sins and failures (there are no perfect families or perfect parents or perfect children). I find myself relying on God to support me and my family in the face of all the uncertainties and contingencies of life and death. I find myself trusting God to preserve this great treasure of life and love that we enjoy.

The meaning of Christmas is that God has shown himself trustworthy and faithful by sending his Son, entrusting him in infancy to a human family and creating through him God's family on earth.