This morning, my sister-in-law gave birth to a baby girl, and now my mother-in-law is on a flight across the country to help with the newborn. While I’m happy that mother and baby are well, man, what an inconsiderate infant! I hope that those gathered here today have a more relaxing Mother’s Day.
Whenever I prepare to speak, I seek feedback from my wife, Elisabeth, and I thought it especially wise to do so for Mother’s Day. So if I offend any of you in any way, know that I had her blessing. But in seriousness, she suggested that I get out ahead of a less-familiar word that will come up: magnanimity.
Magnanimity is a virtue, or a “Christlike Attribute” if you prefer Preach My Gospel terminology. The usage of the word has declined over the past two centuries. At the height of its usage, Webster defined magnanimity as: “Greatness of mind; that elevation or dignity of soul, which encounters danger and trouble with tranquility and firmness, which raises the possessor above revenge, and makes [her] delight in acts of benevolence, which makes [her] disdain injustice and meanness, and prompts [her] to sacrifice personal ease, interest and safety for the accomplishment of useful and noble objects.”
At first, I thought it a shame that the words magnanimity and its adjective form, magnanimous, have declined in usage, but then I realized that we have a simpler term than magnanimous that renders it redundant: Motherly. Nevertheless, I like that aging adjective–maybe because I can’t be a mother–so I’m going to use it.
A couple weeks ago our family spent a night camping in California. We had lovely weather, good food, and good company. But that evening a sickness that had been making its rounds rounded on me, and I retired to our tent earlier than the rest. In the early morning hours, I was roused by retching–not of my own–but of our little two-year-old Ris. In the cramped quarters of the tent, Elisabeth, her mother, was already at her side to comfort and to contain.
As I lay there watching her work, afraid that my own action would incite the same involuntary reaction, I appreciated the magnanimity manifest in the mess before me. I drifted in and out of sleep as the scene repeated itself over and over again throughout the night, and each time I woke, I recalled similar magnanimous moments and captured a couple clauses of what women are wont to wade through. You may need to pardon my overt observations. In truth I hope their explication elicits only appreciation.
Kneeling, numb, and nauseous,
The morning is for mourning.
Swelling and salivation
Betray a body building.
A bloody breach is birth.
The pale and purple pallor
Slips slimy and screaming into
Arms overlooked for valor.
She steals semi-conscious sleep
From faithful feeding's fury.
And with wailing wakes to wet,
Then drifts and drips so dreary.
To ill, majesty is moved
And cradles a child in care.
Violent vomit then ensues;
Stench of sick and sullied air.
Confess, motherhood's a mess,
But yet, most magnanimous.
There’s no mincing words here. Motherhood is messy, but the magnanimous are magnified in a mess. This entire existence is a mess–the biggest mess there’s ever been–and the only way we’ll get through it is with the help of those willing to roll up their sleeves and sully themselves with other people’s problems. Nothing is nearer to godliness than extending such grace. Only those who do have claim to the title of Christian, and from my own personal observations, women wear that title best.
Those of you that know me know that I have a mother–big reveal, I know. Those of you who don’t know me don’t know how much time my mother must have spent listening and attempting to answer questions. I have a nephew who went through a phase of incessantly interrogating with the word ‘why’, and the impatience it invoked impressed upon me what I must have pressed upon my parents. But to this day, interested or not in the topic, my mother is always interested in me, and listens. She listened even at inconvenient hours when I’d return home late as a teenager or at hours earlier than invited when I was young.
When I was seven years old, I awoke on a summer morning and walked into my parents’ bedroom, as I usually would, expecting to find my parents there preparing for the day. Instead, I found blood: a pool of blood on my mother’s side of the bed, another on the floor, and trails leading to and from the bathroom. The scene remains vivid in my mind to this day. I was a little alarmed but not sure what to do. I went downstairs, and there I found my grandfather resting on the couch. He explained that my mother had gone into labor and, though her placenta had ruptured and she lost half of her blood, she was alive and recovering at the hospital.
We went to visit her and my new baby sister, whose new life nearly cost her mother’s. Though just through life-threatening travail and tremendously tired, I remember my mother happy and engaging with my three younger siblings and I. She later went on to have two more children, and that baby sister went on to bloody battles of her own as she delivered a baby boy despite a dangerous deferral of treatment for progressive ovarian cancer.
Through these experiences and others I’ve developed an appreciation for the sanctity of life and the cost that it exacts of the giver. With such experiences as a backdrop, I read our Father in Heaven explain the comparably sacred cost of eternal life: “inasmuch as ye were born into the world by water, and blood, and the spirit, which I have made, and so became of dust a living soul, even so ye must be born again into the kingdom of heaven, of water, and of the Spirit, and be cleansed by blood, even the blood of mine Only Begotten; that ye might be sanctified from all sin, and enjoy the words of eternal life” (Moses 6:59).
Magnanimity-made-mortal manifested in a mess of blood. The benevolent Lord of this world became the Savior of the same by condescending to assume our mortal mess and purchase forgiveness with the blood that he freely spilt. In reviewing the rituals of the Mosaic law this past week, one cannot escape the blood spilt. Blood was everywhere, covering everything, somehow sanctifying. This past Easter, we also recently reviewed the events these sacrifices alluded to, our Savior’s atonement and resurrection. This year, among the familiar stories from the week of atonement, the acts of several women impressed me.
Prior to entering into Jerusalem, “as [Jesus] sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head.
“And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, Why was this waste of the ointment made?...And they murmured against her.
“And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me…She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying” (Mark 14:3-8).
This woman, who John identified as Mary, seemed to understand more than most the week that Jesus was about to have. Though she may have felt insignificant in the events that were about to unfold, she did what she could.
Later, after the world had had its way with its Christ, leaving his bruised and bloody body hanging upon the cross, a couple men spent some money. Joseph procured a tomb and Nicodemus purchased some spices. But because the Sabbath was nigh, they had time but to hastily wrap the body and place it in the tomb, deferring the dressing and anointing of the body until after the Sabbath.
So it was that early on Easter morning Mary, likely the same, and her fellow women proceeded to the tomb to do what they could: to wash and anoint a body that they expected was now laying for its third day.
Their swiftness to succor, even through death, qualified them to preempt even special witnesses of Christ. “They found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. And…two men stood by them in shining garments and…said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen…It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which [then] told these things unto the apostles” (Luke 24:2-10).
Encouraged by the women, the apostles went and found an empty tomb, but soon enough “scattered, every man to his own” (John 16:32). Mary Magdalene alone remained, mourning. She was the one who would not leave his side but now his side she could not find. And so, preempting even his longed-for reunion with his Father, “Jesus saith unto her, Mary” (John 20:16), and Mary became the fitting first witness of the resurrected Lord.
I testify that Jesus the Christ, the embodiment of magnanimity and every virtue, lives. I am grateful for the women in my life who likewise embody virtue, by whose magnanimous actions I may infer who the Savior is, what he is like. I pray that with his help we may all willingly engage in the messes of life, from birth to death and through all the complexities in between. May it ultimately be said of us as it was of Mary of old: we did what we could. I wish you all a happy Mother’s Day!
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.