Tom O’Brien, a friend of mine from Tom’s of Maine, once told me a story about his family—a large, Catholic clan who lived in the Boston area. The family—his mother, his father and Tom’s six brothers and sisters—were all packed into one car on their way to visit some relatives. In the middle of their trip, they decided to pick up a few things at one of those New England General stores in a rambling building, a store that sells a little bit of everything.
The whole family piled out of the car and went in. The parents did their shopping while the seven siblings began wandering around the store. After about twenty minutes, with newly purchased items in hand, the O’Brien family got back into the car and again started down the road toward their destination. Ten minutes into that drive, Tom’s older brother looked around the car and asked. “Where’s Tommy?”
Yes, Tommy, as he was called then, the youngest of four sons, had been forgotten. He was not in the car with everyone else but was sitting on a chair drinking a soda behind the counter where the storekeeper had put him, waiting for his family to return.
On one level Tom was telling me this as a funny story—the story of a busy, disorganized family that had so many children that they forgot one on a road trip. But he was also telling me a poignant story, the story of a terrified little boy who discovered one day that his own family had forgotten him and had left him behind.
Being forgotten is something each of us knows about. It may be the experience of being left out of a discussion we thought we should have been included in. It may be running into someone we know who neither recognizes our face but can’t remember our name. Or it may be a deeper, more gripping experience: a little boy, who, even as an adult, remembers the day his family forgot him. Being forgotten is something each of us knows about.
I often think of the time it became clear to my mother that my father, a victim of dementia, no longer remembered who she was. It was early morning and they were still in bed—he on his side and she cuddled up to his back. Suddenly he sat up, turned to her, looking more agitated than puzzled, and asked: “Who are you? And what are you doing in my bed?
It’s easy to take these experiences of being forgotten, left behind or dislocated and project them onto God. And, this, of course is some of what we hear in our reading from what scholars call “Second” Isaiah this morning. In their exile in Babylon and in the face of the destruction of Jerusalem, called “Zion” in this passage, the Jewish people imagine that God has forgotten them. Being forgotten by God is devastating for them, a condition Second Isaiah compares to what it’s like to be a woman who is unable to conceive, in Hebrew thought, unable to bring about the future from within herself
And so what are the people to hope in? How are they to make sense of their sense that God has forgotten them in their exile? What are they to do given that they seem unable to secure their own future?
I know what many of us do. When we’re in exile, we may tell ourselves that God has forgotten us, but more often we go to hypothesizing that God is either indifferent to us, has so much to do that God doesn’t have the time to respond or that God isn’t real at all.
Out of these ways of conceiving of God, it’s quite natural to be preoccupied with the things our gospel mentions—to be worried about what we will eat or what we will drink or what we will wear—in that we’ve hypothesized a God who has left us completely on our own.
But this is not the way the writer of Second Isaiah can ever understand God, not even in the deepest experiences of seeming forgotten and abandoned. To get at this, the prophet stretches beyond the usual normative male images for God in Hebrew Scripture and lays before us rarer images, female images that are supposed to reveal just how impossible it is for God to forget us.
But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me,
my Lord has forgotten me.”
Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.
With these daring female, physical images, the writer of Second Isaiah challenges a people who feel barren, telling them that it is God as mother, having given birth to them, having nursed them, who will secure their future, whose own fecundity is greater than any barrenness they can possibly experience.
With these same daring female images, the writer of Second Isaiah challenges us who may have an image of God that is abstract, distant or non-existent. The writer of Second Isaiah challenges us that even under the conditions of exile, God’s is real. This care is irresistible for a God who is our mother.
One of the books I read during Lent is Belden Lane’s The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. In it, Lane draws on his own knowledge of desert and mountain spirituality, his own experience of exploring the desert and mountains, and his desert-like time with his mother in a nursing home as she and he waited for her to die. Out of all of these sources, but especially out of his experience in the desert, Lane makes one of the most riveting statements I have ever read: “We are saved, in the end,” he says, “by the things that ignore us.”
What he means by this is that paradoxically it is in the experiences of being forgotten by much of what we had hoped we could rely on in life that opens us to the ground of our own being and, I would say, to an experience of God as that deeper ground, as all encompassing and nurturing mother, a God with a womb from which we have come, a God with breasts that cannot help but nurse us. Daring images indeed, meant to shock us into an awareness of just how close, physical, and knitted to us God is.
It is a theme that mystic Julian of Norwich would pick up in the 14th century when she referred to the second person of the Trinity, to Christ as “our mother,” going on to say that while “A mother can give her child milk...our precious mother, Jesus, feeds us with himself” in the sacraments. And so Julian helps us make the connections to our life together and a feminine and deeply physical understanding of God and God’s care of us within the Church, our Holy Mother. Here (and listen to the connections to what many mothers do) we are washed in baptism, fed in Eucharist, anointed for healing and received into the forgiving arms of a loving and forgiving God in the rite of reconciliation. Jesus our mother, church as our Holy Mother in the time of our exiles, in the times we feel forgotten.
Over the past year or so, a time of my own personal exile, I noticed the emergence of a ritual that I think touches on all of what I’ve been talking about. Every morning no matter how much time I did or didn’t have to get ready for my day, after my shower, I ran a kind of shallow bath for myself. And then whether I had 30 minutes or 2 minutes to spare, I would sit back in that warm water, submerging myself as much as I could, and closing my eyes, I would enter a precious realm of quiet, of letting go of any preoccupation or worry about what I would eat, what I would wear or what I would do.
Thinking now about this ritual, a ritual that has persisted to this day, I believe it was my way of reminding myself that God is in fact like a warm womb where all my needs are met and from which I can trust that a future will be secured, not by me but by the one whose fecundity is infinite and whose love is sure.
Works Cited or Consulted
Terrence Fretheim, Commentary on Isaiah 49:8-16a at www.workingpreacher.org
Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes
