"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
Kittredge Cherry at Jesus in Love notes that today, Mother's Day (in the U.S.), is also the feast day of one of my favorite saints, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, whose writings celebrated the maternal love of Christ. Here's a quote from her Revelations of Divine Love:
"A mother can give her child milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most courteously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament, which is the precious food of life itself...The mother can lay the child tenderly to her breast, but our tender mother Jesus, he can familiarly lead us to his blessed breast through his sweet open side..."
Mother's Day brings up complex emotions for me, because it reminds me that my long journey through infertility and adoption has not yet come to a resolution. That's why I greatly appreciated this article on Care2: "Today, Think of the Birth Mothers". It's a reminder that the opportunities for adoption in this country will not improve until we start respecting the loving sacrifices made by women who place their children for adoption. For adoptive parents, this includes honoring our agreements about openness (continuing contact between child and birthfamily). For the rest of society, it means ceasing to stigmatize women with unplanned pregnancies, and busting the myths about why a woman might make an adoption plan.
To end on a positive note, here's a picture of me and my non-biological mom Roberta after yesterday's Northampton Pride march. (T-shirt courtesy of TruthWinsOut.org. Thanks John!)
