Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist
“Of Rumpelstiltskin and
Helicopters”
Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris
May 13, 2007
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15661
Mediation: Meditation
Spirit of life, God of many names, we come before you this morning full of hopes and fears. One hope is simple: that our lives and the lives of those we love might be as free of danger as possible. One hope is harder to find: that our lives, that the lives of those we love, that the lives of our fellow travelers in this community, in this world, might also be free from fear.
We bring our fears into the embrace of this community. We come knowing that we need a place where we can acknowledge that sometimes the world makes us afraid, sometimes our lives and the lives of those we love are beyond our control. May we acknowledge that this fear can make us act in ways we do not wish to act, ways that beckon the divisiveness that is evil into our hearts, that shut us off from those we love, from a world that needs our care, and from our own best intentions.
In the silence that follows, may we acknowledge our fears, trusting that they can be held in the gentle, sacred trust we strive to create.
May we know the expansive good, the embracing love and the larger hope we hold here together. Amen.
Sermon: The tale of Rumpelstiltskin is among the countless tales attributed to the Brothers Grimm. In this German folk tale, a miller brags of his daughter to a king, who puts the girl in a room and commands her to spin straw into gold or die. The desperate girl makes a bargain with a human-like creature, a manikin who appeared in her locked room. As the king’s demands escalated, the manakin’s terms for completing the tasks do too until she promises him her first-born child. The King, impressed by her skills, marries her, they have a child and all is well, until the manakin showed up to claim the child. The horrified Queen bargains again: this time that she could keep the child if she could guess the manakin’s name in three days. This time she is less passive, sending a messenger out until he heard the manakin boasting of his name, Rumpelstiltskin. When the Queen guessed it, the original Grimm’s fairy tale goes, he was so angry that he ripped himself in two.
As mothers, as parents, or simply as people who care about other people, this is a horrifying tale. To have to make a bargain that involves losing one’s child is nightmarish. To be a parent, to be anyone who takes the risk of love, is to live in a world where danger seems to lurk behind every tree, to be a wilderness explorer. In her book, The Making of A Mother, psychiatrist Valerie Davis Raskin writes, “For most, there is no threat like that of harm befalling one’s child. Mothers commonly describe the profound attachment they feel to their children in terms of sacrifice: I’d give my life for this person, I’d throw myself in front of a moving train to save my child, I’d take food from my mouth to feed this baby. When new mothers talk about the first wave of consciousness of their deep connectedness with their infant, they often couch it in terms of anxiety, fear, disorientation.”
We need to treat ourselves and each other with gentleness. Some of us sit here knowing all too well of the dangers involved and that dangers can be delivered through the hands of parents. More of us recall what it meant to have parents who absented themselves from the duty of parenting, leaving us to fend for ourselves.
Which is the context for our second tale, the one about helicopters. According to Wikipedia, that cultural barometer: “A helicopter parent is a term for a person who pays extremely close attention to his or her child or children, particularly at educational institutions. They rush to prevent any harm from befalling them or letting them learn from their own mistakes, sometimes even contrary to the children's wishes. They are so named because, like a helicopter, they hover closely overhead, rarely out of reach whether their children need them or not.”
In our world, we have cause to be afraid. I certainly have heard the whirr of rotors above my head: Having experienced bullying as a child, I imagined my children could have a life free from bullying. Having been excluded, I wished them to be free from exclusion. Having fallen and scraped my knee learning to ride my bike—well, they did too but not because I didn’t warn them. Wanting to protect one’s child is just a part of parenting, and yet….
In 2005, "60 Minutes" reported that the so-called echo boomers -- the children of baby boomers, who were born between 1982 and 1995 -- are "overmanaged" and "very pressured" and treated by their parents as pieces of "crystal or something that could somehow shatter at any point."
And this is not just young children. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal found parental involvement in college life is forcing colleges and universities to create programs to deal with the parents who no longer just drop their kids off to college and get out of the way. Roommate disputes, grading controversies, scheduling issues are all fair game for parental involvement. Part of this is linked to the astronomical cost of higher education—and the need to protect a sizeable investment. Yet costs increase when institutions of higher learning need to assign full-time staff people, or form entire new departments to field parents' calls and email, or hold separate orientations for parents to keep them from meddling.
The Journal reports that “bouncer parents” are now trained at one state school to divert parents who try to attend registration and other schools experience parents attending freshman orientation instead of their children. Students who don’t get the answer they want from counselors have interrupted conversations by whipping out cellphones, speed-dialing, then handing the phone to the adviser, saying, "Here, talk to my mom." One former vice president for student affairs calls the cellphone "the world's longest umbilical cord."
This has become such a phenomenon that it has attracted the attention of
social science researchers who found that helicoptering doesn’t end at college.
In a survey of 750 businesses,
What strikes me is that the level of aggression in these parental acts. These efforts to control that grow out of fear, fear we take on, often unconsciously, so that our children will not have to experience it. Part of my mother’s cocooning of me was to forbid me to read fairy tales which, like the Bible and Disney movies, she thought too violent. Another of Grimm’s tales is that of Sleeping Beauty whose parents hear that she is to be pricked by a spinning needle and so order all needles to be banished from their kingdom. Of course when she finds one, she is ignorant of the ways of needles, is pricked, poisoned and sent to the long sleep. We have to accept that no matter how much we love, we cannot banish pain from our children’s lives—or for that matter, from the lives of anyone we love.
Dr. Valerie Davis Raskin whose practice is centered around parenting issues notes that parental love “is as close to pain as it is to sweetness. Love that powerful renders you vulnerable in the extreme. But you can’t live there. You can’t view the world as a constant threat to your child’s well-being, and thrive. You aren’t likely to raise a resilient child if you’re convinced she’s too fragile to cope with the ordinary bumps of life.”
The risk of all kinds of relationships is that in caring for another person, we have to acknowledge that at some level, that person’s life is beyond our control. If you are caring for your parents, if you are trying to be friendly with someone who is having a hard time, if you are trying to be a person of integrity in your relationships at a toxic worksite, you know the sense of fear from realizing that you cannot be the sole and complete protector of another life. And that fear is voracious, rendering us capable, like Rumpelstiltskin, of injuring ourselves in its name.
Caring for ourselves is part of effectively loving another and not doing so may mean that our own difficult paths can be part of our baggage as well. We live in a world in which some of us are all too familiar with the short-comings of our own childhood and the act of parenting offers a path that is redemptive, to a point.
“Today’s culture hooks a vulnerable mother…by the extravagant promises that a person can undo her past by getting it exactly, perfectly right,” Davis Raskin notes. One professor of pediatrics says parents are creating the “perfect statute” of a child. He predicts that the coddled and protected to a degree that threatens their ability later in life to strike off on their own and form healthy relationships and proper job skills.
Children, like those amazing lives that we welcomed into this community this morning, are often the repositories of our deepest dreams, our wildest hopes, our sweetest loves. At some level, this is all about our desire to live, to pursue life. At this time of year, just before dawn, the insistence of life is heard in dawn’s intense bird chorus and in the evening frog orchestra. Our natural, evolved duty is to care for our children, to protect them, to offer them our version of “mama’s promise” that Marilyn Nelson wrote of in our call to worship. It is in our genes to fight for our young. My aggravation in the story of Rumplestilskin is with the miller—why did he brag, why didn’t he rescue his daughter from the King in the first place? Yet is it anger or empathy that is called for, for a poor tradesman could not control a king and the system that gives more power and resources to some and far less to others.
For some the world is less friendly, those parents of
exceptional children among us know they have to navigate their own boundaries
of digging in and letting go. And some structures
are just not friendly. Our daughter,
Garner, navigated her own way around admissions and her entry into the
We are threatened by more than the random and extra-ordinary. For too many, the threats are day-to-day. Today the Washington-based Children Defense Fund is heading a coalition of 140 organizations seeking to call attention to the fact that this Mother's Day, close to two thousand children will be born without health insurance. And the most perverse, violent and dehumanizing acts are distilled into a sickening syrup that oozes out of our television sets and our movies and our video games.
We try to make these bargains, to shelter our children in this way, because we know, perhaps more than any generation has known, that we live in a dangerous world. This week, I rode one of the UTS buses where the young driver was subjecting her passengers to satirical songs about shooters, perhaps her way of mastering her fears. What does it cost us when we try to thumb our nose at life’s terms rather than to deal with its painful truths? Davis-Rankin observes: “Since no mother can guarantee her child a pain-free life, or deflect all of life’s potential blows, mastering the challenge requires self-acceptance and relinquishing grandiose fantasies of maternal omnipotence. It requires a mother to accept that she has not failed in her duty to protect her child just because something bad has happened.” In today’s world, this is not just about mothers, it is about parents and it is about people who care.
So, with a gentle resolve, we should remember that Mother’s Day has its roots in Mother’s Peace Day begun by Unitarian Julia Ward Howe whose words we read today.
Among the important work of our congregation is that important work of being the village that helps raise the child. Some clichés persist because they are true. And if our villages and our towns, our cities and our places of exchange, our businesses and our marketplaces are not safe, our children –and our parents and our friends and our co-workers and, yes, our precious selves, are not safe. Yes, we need to take precautions and to teach our children to do so, and yet how do we also engage some of our energy and passion in making the world safer for all.
We need to do what we can—and also acknowledge that much of it is beyond our control. That is why for me, a certain amount of being a mother is rooted in my prayer life, trying to release my fears so they do not come out in anger at myself, my partner, my children, or alienation from the world in which we all must live.
To have a child is to know that their imperfections will at some point be a blinking neon arrow pointing to one’s own, to care for a parent is to accept that past mistakes may remain unacknowledged, to be a friend to someone is to ensure that you are bound to disappoint and be disappointed at some time in the relationship, to work for a better world despite the seeming futility of these acts, these are the true expressions of faith. On this Mother’s Day, may we also have the courage to come together to turn our fear into action, to believe that the rose that holds the promise of each human life will open, that nothing evil will cross our door powerful enough to turn us away for our deepest dreams for our children, that the rafters of love and trust we build will withstand the battering of the storms that are an inevitable part of life in this flawed and fantastic world, that while we cannot create a perfect world, we can create a better world for our children and the others in our interconnected web, and to hold all of them in the light of a larger hope. May we be the ones to make it so.
Benediction from
Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.