Five years ago, I was staring down the celebration of Mother’s Day in a church I’d been serving for just over a year. I’d been able to skirt around it the year before, when I was two weeks’ in and just figuring out how the printer worked, but now, people were starting to ask. Would we say a prayer? Would we hand out carnations?
As an only child with a living and loving mom, Mother’s Day was relatively uncomplicated for me. But as a queer person with federal marriage rights just barely awarded, serving in a church that represented the range of people who had lost their moms, to people who couldn’t become moms the way they’d expected to, to people who couldn’t speak to their moms after decades of abuse … the complication was clear.
In 2017, I wrote a Litany for Mother’s Day. Sojourners carried it online, edited into a commentary. In 2018, we read it again in worship, and other churches did too. I started working on a Father’s Day version for coming years.
In 2019, two weeks before Mother’s Day, my friend Rachel died.
I don’t know how best to talk about Rachel. We became friends when she was already well known, and so I was always tender with our friendship, not wanting to take advantage when she had so many connections. I let her reach out first—and she did. A group of her Minnesota connections all got burgers with her when she was in town. She invited me to speak at Why Christian in 2018. That same year, just after having birthed her second child, she graciously accepted my anxious invitation to write the foreword to my first book. On its release in 2019, she reminded me: “Every person who gets your book has invited you into their life for a little while. It really helps when I focus on what an honor that is.”
Two months later, I flew to Tennessee to be at her funeral.
I’m 37 now, the same age Rachel was when a random infection and an allergic reaction to the treatment put her in a medical coma from which she couldn’t wake. I still don’t understand it — not from a medical perspective, and not from a faithful one. Rachel shouldn’t be dead, and yet she is. She’s with Jesus, and I wish she was here. That’s all I know.
On Mother’s Day in 2019, blinking through tears, I changed the title of the prayer. It had originally been A Mother’s Day Litany, with the idea that surely everyone knew a litany was a set of call-and-response prayers by pastor and congregation. Rachel would have known that. She also would have known that straightforward language is usually better.
Since 2019, it’s been A Celebration of Women of Valor, an adaptation of the “eshet chayil” that Rachel used to say to cheer on so many people she helped and befriended and loved. Since 2019, Rachel’s name has been part of it, named as the beloved mother that Dinah and Joseph and Benjamin lose too soon.
The name Rachel appears twice, actually — the first time, as a list of the biblical women who we know struggled to bear children. My wife and I have been planning and trying for children for over two years now. She’s due September 1st, with a baby boy that so far has been healthy and wriggly and perfect. I wish I could tell Rachel. I know she would have prayed for us, and told me funny stories to soothe our hearts, and probably cried with me a time or two over a stupid stick with only one stupid line on it, and rejoiced like only she could rejoice when our first round of IVF gave us a clump of cells that grew and grew and grew until he had a nose and two hands and two long legs that kick gently but surprisingly into my wife’s ribs.
I miss my friend. I wish I could tell her so much. I wish she was here to hold us fast to Jesus’ promises and to call the church to account and to eat a burger with me when she happened to be passing through my city. I wish all of this, for all of us: that we know who we are, and whose we are, and what it’s worth making time for.
May you, dear reader, be honored today and all the days by whoever has mothered something in you into life.
We remember the mothers of our faith, the bearers of God’s story.
We remember Rachel, Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth,
and every woman who found herself unable to bear children —
every woman who has faced miscarriage, infertility, and loneliness.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember every woman who held her newborn child
and found it to be the greatest gift and the hardest task of all.
We celebrate with you.
May the God who births new life in us awaken joy in you.
We remember Eve, Naomi, Mary the mother of Jesus,
and all women who buried their children, lives lost unbearably early.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember Dinah, Benjamin, and Joseph,
who saw their beloved mother Rachel buried.
We stand beside all those who face this day without their mother.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember Moses’ mother and Pharaoh’s daughter,
one who gave up her child to save her child,
one who took in a child despite the risks.
We stand beside all women who have given up their children
in the hope of a better life for them. We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember Mary the mother, given by her own son Jesus
to be mother to the disciple he loved.
We honor all those who have labored to make new family
through adoption, remarriage, and stepmotherhood.
We celebrate with you.
May the God who births new life in us awaken joy in you.
We remember Dinah.
We remember all women who are victims of sexual assault.
We stand with everyone whose body, sexuality, marriage, or children
should be a source of joy
and instead has been destroyed by someone else’s sin.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember Hagar, and Tamar; women whose only hope for
protection and care lay in having a child with a man
who was not married to them.
We stand with all women who face
pregnancy and raising their children alone.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember Rebekah, who felt her twins
Esau and Jacob already at war within her,
and chose a favorite son.
We remember all children and parents
wounded by those who did what they thought was right
but instead sowed seeds of distrust, jealousy, and hatred.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember the foreign women, the wives of God’s people,
who came home with their husbands to rebuild the temple
only to be cast aside by men claiming to be righteous and pure.
We stand with all women who have been made homeless,
often for reasons beyond their control. We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember all the mothers who have lost their children
not to death but to brokenness and trauma,
and all the mothers of children slaughtered
by the greed of others in war, famine, genocide, and child slavery.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember the woman at the well,
and all the unnamed women silenced and subjected by divorce.
We stand with those who found that
their splintering family broke their heart. We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember all those who have in the processes of divorce
found freedom and new life. We celebrate with you.
May the God who births new life in us awaken joy in you.
We remember Mary and Martha and Lazarus,
a family of origin who became a safe home
for the Son of Man with nowhere to lay his head.
We honor those on the journey to their own family of choice.
We celebrate those who, like our savior, have knit together
a community in which they are seen, heard, known, and loved.
We celebrate with you.
May the God who births new life in us awaken joy in you.
We remember the Canaanite woman, alone, unsupported,
who refused to be turned away from help for her child.
We stand with every woman who advocates for others,
recognizing that there is no such thing as other peoples' children.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember Mary Magdalene, the first preacher of the resurrection,
soiled by centuries of slander and misalignment,
turned from wide-eyed witness to reformed harlot.
In her resurrection testimony, what the men called a foolish tale,
she gave birth to the church.
We stand with all women whose gender, sexuality, history, or bravery
has been used against them and the gospel they proclaim.
We mourn with you.
May the God who mothers each of us be a source of life for you.
We remember Mary of Nazareth, cradling her stomach with wonder,
facing the sheer shock of a miracle and the sureness of societal judgment
with a simple and determined “Yes.”
We stand with every woman who has found an inner courage
to face impossibilities. We celebrate with you.
May the God who births new life in us awaken joy in you.
My daughter, whom I raised, lost her mother to suicide Thanksgiving weekend. They had an estranged relationship and this upcoming Mother's Day is a source of anxiety and the unknown for her. I pray for peace to wrap her in its arms. Thank you for sharing this prayer, it's strong, yet comforting.