Good Enough

There is a story we tell in our western culture. It’s a story about a story. We tell it in our books for middle grade kids and in our movies and sit-coms. We tell the story that most normal kids go through a stage during which they fantasize (tell a story) about their parents not being their parents. Their real moms and dads are richer, cooler, kinder, more hip, more exotic, more beautiful, more understanding. My dad used to tell us a version of this story, insisting that he was the son of the fabled Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra.

In our western culture we also tell a second story—a story about the story about a story. In the same books and movies and sit-coms that tell the first story, we are told that in the end, all the kids who fantasize about their parents not being their real parents come to realize how much they really do love their parents after all. How much their parents really do love them. How many of the traits (both positive and negative) that make up their personalities have come to them through their parents. Sometime ago I saw a video on Facebook that told this story.

The audio was in Spanish but I didn’t need subtitles to understand the action. A game-show host-type guy interviewed kids sitting next to their moms on a couch. Child after child said that their mother was not perfect. After the mothers disappeared into a soundproof booth, the host guy continued to interview the kids, apparently asking them about the qualities necessary for perfection in a mother. Then the children pushed some colored buttons and pulled a level and their perfect mother emerged from the booth. Not one of the kids appeared delighted to see that their supposed perfect mother was not the mother they had sent into the booth. One little boy neared tears as the ‘perfect’ mom tried to take his hand and lead him off the stage. So, all the moms were returned to the booth. Adjustments were made to the buttons and knobs. The lever was pulled. And out walked Mom, the child’s own mom, the perfect mom. Smiles all around.

We like to tell that happy ending. To believe that when all is said and done children recognize at a deep heart level, beyond language, that their mothers, their parents of any and all genders, are the perfect mother, the perfect parent for them. If that realization doesn’t dawn in childhood, then we like to believe that it will happen gradually as childhood gives way to adulthood or, sadly, as our own parents age and slip away. Even as we acknowledge some of the messy, painful, less than perfect aspects of our parents (but only some and often not the messiest, most painful, most imperfect aspects) we walk back, as though from the brink, to a safe position—claiming and proclaiming the perfection of our parents for us. They may not be objectively perfect, but they are perfect for us.

The world feels less scary that way. Kinder, more loving. Like it makes some kind of moral sense. Mothers, parents, are supposed to be perfect—or at least good enough, which is to say, perfect for us. But life doesn’t make that kind of moral sense. As much as we wish it so. As much as we want to believe it so—that every baby, every kid, every teen in the world has a good enough mother, good enough parent or two or more—we know it isn’t so.

The dramatic stories of mothers, of parents, who are not good enough make the news—and we needn’t rehash them here. But countless other stories never make the headlines. Stories of people for whom “you’re not my mother!” is neither fantasy nor childish curse meant to wound in a moment of anger or frustration but rather a mature and reasoned declaration of independence, perhaps sad, perhaps resigned, perhaps bittersweet: you’re not my mother any longer.

“You had your chance. But your presence in my life—the anger or the manipulation or the bewildering jealousy or the sabotage, deceit, disappearances, and other neglect and abuse—your presence in my life is life threatening and will be neither tolerated nor honored with the title you once claimed. You’re not my mother.”

Over the years I’ve listened to more than one friend talk about the necessity of removing their mother from their lives. At some point in the listening I always want the story to take the familiar turn of Western pop culture. From you’re not my mother, my mother is a perfect fairy princess from whom you stole me, to you’re the perfect fairy princess mother for me after all. Or at least to the nuanced understanding, you’re the good enough mother for me after all. But my friends’ stories and untold others don’t take this turn, can’t take this turn, because their mothers will never be good enough. And I am called, as always, to believe the truth people tell me about their mothers, about their lives. The truth that is theirs and theirs alone.

The stories we tell about mothers, about fathers, about parents of any gender, we also tell about God. Perhaps more frequently in the Unitarian Universalist world and in the realms of spiritual-but-not-religious and of the ‘nones’—those who on surveys and such check the none box rather than any of the others to describe their religious affiliation—perhaps more often in these circles than others but perhaps not. I suspect in the secret or not-so-secret places in their hearts, plenty of Presbyterians and Lutherans and Jews and Methodists, Catholics, Muslims and others tell the same stories about God. The stories that move from “You’re not my God, not the perfect Holy One I was taught to believe is God”, to “You are my God after all, perfect for me, in ways which I may or may not comprehend, good enough for me”. Sometimes the telling of the complete story—from rejection of God to embrace of God/Goddess/the Divine—takes years, and the switching of religious traditions, or a long wandering and then circling back to the tradition of one’s childhood or family roots. And sometimes the telling of the story is complete at the rejection—You’re not my God.

Even more, perhaps, than with the you’re-not-my-mother stories, I want the you’re-not-my-God stories to resolve the way I think they should resolve—with an embrace of a good enough God, an understanding of the Holy that might look and feel and sound nothing like the God of Scripture or TV evangelists or the ancestors’ God but is nevertheless the perfect Source of Life and Spirit of Love, ineffable, inescapable, undeniable. I want to interrupt the telling of these stories with, “yes, but…..”.

I’ve been thoroughly schooled, however, by some of you and by individuals in my previous congregations. Not everyone wants to, can, or should move from rejection of God to embrace or accept a redefined, differently understood God. For some, the idea of a deity simply makes no rational sense or has no place in your life, quite apart from any positive, negative or neutral introduction to the concept as a child or in previous religious traditions. Others have been wounded too deeply, battered too often in the name of religion, with the words and symbols and rituals of religion. Their “you’re not my God” isn’t immature or hasty or a resting place along the way to a good enough God. It is a reclamation of their spirit. Full stop.

I’m a theist at heart, in my soul. Religion is my vocation. I believe in the life-affirming, life-saving exploration and celebration and reimagining of spirit our Unitarian Universalist faith allows us, demands of us. My natural inclination is still “yes, but…”. Yes, but God is, can be, so much more than that, so much less than that, so different from that. The Holy is Love. Is Justice. Is Peace. And we are the Holy—in our love, our justice-seeking, our peace-making. Our God doesn’t have to be our parents’ or grandparents’ or neighbors’ God. Our God can be perfect for us. I want to say, “move beyond the fantasy of rejection, toward the embrace of an expansive understanding of the Divine—a Divine worthy of our embrace.”

But that’s my story. And my desire to cast it as the only story worth telling breaks faith with the core of Unitarian Universalism that affirms we each get to tell our own story, live according to our own experience of the truth.

So this Mother’s Day, this Sunday, this Sabbath, this ordinary day no different from 364 other days this year, I say to us all:

Here, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah, in all our imperfection and good enough-ness, we offer ourselves, one another and those yet to find their way through our doors, these promises, these blessings:

You who have good enough mothers, you who are good enough mothers, you whose you’re-not-my-mother is final and a blessing in and of itself—you are welcome here; you are known here; you are a gift to us here.

You who know God to be good enough, as the perfect Holy One for you, you who are even now seeking, crafting, discovering a God good enough for you, you whose you’re-not-my-God is final and a blessing in and of itself—you are welcome here; you are known here; you are a gift to us here.

You, however you came to be here, however and whoever you find yourself to be today, you are good enough. We are good enough. We are created, blessed and held by an on-going Good Enoughness in which, with which we are co-creators, blessing and holding the world.

Amen.