Rev. Joseph Boyd My mother has an eclectic taste in music. She loves Tina Turner, Randy Travis, Michael Jackson, to name a few. When I was growing up, we had a proper stereo system in our living room with large speakers, bass, and a six disk CD player. She would pick a random CD number and turn up the volume and blast it, sometimes on Saturday morning when I was still asleep. Her favorite Michael Jackson song was “Billie Jean Is Not My Lover,” and she would have no qualms about breaking out a few dance moves in the living room. I would tell her: “Mom, quit dancing, it’s too early for dancing.” She would tell me: “You’re alive, you should dance.” It’s taken me over 20 years to see she was absolutely right.
All of our mothers have given us the gift of life. And in a very true sense our mothers are always with us, very close to us, simply because we’re alive. We share a story of DNA, of cells, stories that are beyond full comprehension, charting our life. Of course not every mother is biological. A mother is someone who sustains and gives us life, and as we grow up, we find people who do just that. All of you in this wider sense are my mother – sustaining and giving me life, breath by breath, even if you don’t even know me. This last year I think it too tempting to get so mired down with all that has happened, and all that is still happening, that we forget something so basic and true: life is a dance. It has a rhythm, a musicality, sometimes a hook, something that matches our heartbeat, and gives us the experience of being a soul. We get the experience of being a fully embodied person who has the rare and precious opportunity to experience this very precious life. We get to find the rhythm of our problems, our worries, our fears, and like the blues, find the transcendent release that comes with expressing who we are and what we’ve been through in a community like this. It is very special, and I think gratitude for this is appropriate.
I’m so grateful for my mother, and all people of all gender expressions who have mothered me and still are: all of you that sustain my life, and help me hear the music that exists at the heart of life, encouraging me to dance to the rhythm of my heart, steady, for some of us, offbeat. I’m grateful for all of you who are currently caring for young children, teenagers, adults. You are sustaining this world through your efforts. It is nothing less than this. You are sustaining and giving life to all of us through your efforts to teach your children well.
Dancing in public can be very embarrassing if you watch yourself too closely. It’s wonderful to dance when you are able to strike the right balance between listening to the beat and also not caring too much. As long as you can feel vibration, you can dance. Even if it’s just the fluttering of your eye lids. The more you pay attention to the body, you see that it has a wisdom that is completely its own. Life breathes each of us in a unique way, giving us each a different pace and rhythm, a different heartbeat, a different rate of oxygen, in varying amounts. We each have vibrations we’re attracted to: for some of us it’s birdsong, for some of us the percussion of footsteps, the wailing of sirens. We each find environments that sustain and nurture our life: the crashing waves of the ocean, a certain tone of voice, a tea kettle whistling and giving off steam.
I saw a powerful short film recently called Feeling Through, starring an actor who was both blind and deaf. In this film, this man meets a homeless teenager who he relies on to help him get a bus in New York City. I won’t give anything else away, but what most resonated with me was this actor who had this tremendous trust and receptivity to life, an openness and trust I would find personally very challenging, almost impossible. The actor was feeling his way through life, and all of us are too, even if we trick ourselves into thinking we have more control than we actually have.
We see how dependent we are on each other. We see how frustrating that can be, when we wish others would make different decisions, think and act like us. We see we are dependent on everyone, on a diverse set of experiences and choices. And we are just a part of that, part of life, part of humanity, a part of this time and place. And yet each of us is whole, complete, a whole universe unto ourselves with our own set of stories, experiences, pains, and triumphs.
That is why this day is about the individual we might call mother, the one some might call mama, ma, mom. The one we might call by their first name, or by their last name, the one who looked out for us, and shepherded us to to be where we are. And it is also about all of us, the ways that we sustain and give life to one another, often without realizing it.
The only dance I ever really studied was Argentine Tango. I loved two things about it: it was dramatic and based on improvisation. It’s a dance of passion, heartbreak, survival, lust, sadness, every human emotion communicated through the body one move at a time. You never knew what the experience would be, and like life, the joy comes when you can fully surrender to it, and discover moment by moment. I’ve always been attracted by a certain level of intensity, but my mother’s dancing was nothing like that. From my childlike eyes, she was silly, kind of embarrassing, just having fun. As I get older, that sounds pretty good too. A dance can be a spontaneous gratitude for life, and the joy comes when we allow ourselves to feel our way through. We allow ourselves to connect to the moment, to connect to each other, to connect to a song that we know will end, but we appreciate it while it lasts. We feel something outside of ourselves and we synch up to it, we find a beat, a rhythm, something in common. We find a sense of family, family we have inherited, and family we discover.
In my experience, an inherited family is still a discovered family. There is always more to discover, more to discover who we are, more gratitude to discover. So be grateful in discovering who sustains your life. There is no end to that discovery. I’m grateful for all of you. You literally sustain my life, all of you across the country and across the globe. I’m grateful for my birth mother who brought me into this life so that I could be alive for this moment with all of you, and even have something to say about it. I’m grateful for all the people, women and men, who have nurtured that little spark in me: the fire of commitment, the commitment to keep on, and never forget that there is music in the heart of existence, a rhythm and a pace that can hold us steady this day and every day: if we are willing to listen and let our bodies receive it. May we receive the music on this day, the music that comes from our mothers, and let us dance in gratitude.
