Motherless Children of Another Exodus

The second chapter of Exodus begins with a story of a mother’s sleuth and chicanery to outwit the Pharaoh’s command that all the boys born to the Israelite slaves by killed. This unsung lady hid her little newborn in a basket in the bulrushes on the Nile in Egypt where the Pharaoh’s daughter discovers him, takes him home and unwittingly hires his birth mother as the nursemaid. She names the kid Moses because, as she put it, “I drew him out of the water.”

Even with a such a confusing family tree, Moses emerges as the biblical hero who will confront the evil regime in Egypt and demand that his people [who just happen to be God’s people] be given walking papers so that they can set out on the Exodus toward some land deal that God kept promising. The long road from slavery to that land of milk and honey [but no oil] took the better part of forty years. Moses never put foot in it and knew not the mother who had to give him up in order to bless him on his way to Mt. Sinai’s Torah that said “Honor your mother…, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” Now, there’s the possibility of a great plot for a movie starring the NRA’s late Charlton Heston.

Mother’s Day just might be a good time for us to focus our attention on the mothers of a current exodus from Central America and Mexico who have to put their sons and daughters in the stream of migrants seeking safety from all sorts of Pharaohs trying to kill them. Some of them actually end up in the Rio Grande River, just like Moses. However, too many of us are in “denial” about what’s happening to these borderline children who are getting the short end of an ugly stick. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the mothers just south of our border weeping for their children [who just happen to be God’s children]. Just like that weeping sound out of Ramah that Jeremiah recalls: the wailing of Rachel [wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph and Benjamin] as her children are being led into Egyptian captivity and slavery right over her grave.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe was one of the first Americans to intimate the idea of a day to honor mothers. She was an abolitionist, served as a nurse in the Civil War, and wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She also wrote these words for a mother’s day proclamation: Arise, then…women of this day! Whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: 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, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

Mothers without borders or boundaries can become a strong force for peace and non-violence which might threaten the unjust powers in our day and time. In her column last week, Margaret Renkl from Nashville, asks us to look at Mother’s Day differently: Mother’s Day is a saccharine invention, a national fairy tale in a nation that does almost nothing to support mothers. But it is also a day for contemplating the ways in which we’re connected to one another, through times of joy and times of sorrow, across time and across species.