"Abide and Bear Fruit" | The Rev. Luk De Volder | May 8, 2021

Happy Mother’s Day. Every year it is such a beautiful day to honor our mother, the mothers in our lives, to celebrate all the persons in our lives who give us motherly care. 

This year Mother’s Day comes on the heels of Teachers’ Appreciation Week and Nurses’ Appreciation Week. And, of course, during this pandemic we want to honor them as well. And this has also been the week of the 200 hundred anniversary of Napoleon’s death, you know, that French guy who made us all drive on the right and who lost the battle against the English in Waterloo, Belgium and that is why the English are driving on the left. But we can comfortably leave this little Napoleon aside, who was certainly not a motherly figure by any stretch.

My inclusive expression of all persons who give us motherly care is not just because I aspire to be politically correct or to diminish the hard work of everyone who is actually a mother. Rather, we all have experienced motherly care from so many people and I don’t want to overlook anyone. Therefore, on this Mother’s Day, I would like to lift up each one of you who are down in the trenches of life. More than we realize we have experienced and witnessed motherly care from several people in our lives. 

Especially during this pandemic we need to honor our mothers. More than 4 million women left the workforce during this pandemic, mostly because the home front was calling them to report for duty. And after leaving their job, they landed at least four more jobs while being home with the kids as teacher, cuisine chef, gym trainer, computer technician, therapist, Zen guru, and so much more. So often over the past 16 months, their mantra was the one from Finding Nemo where Dory says: “Just Keep Swimming.” Or at other moments the mantra was more like: “Breathe in ‘lavender-peace’, cool down the soup.” What a mix of intellectual, emotional, and behavioral discipline! The pandemic has shown us once more the crucial place women have in our lives, with a job that so easily gets overlooked.

The Gospel of Today calling us to “abide-in-me” and to “lay down your life to bear-fruit” is particularly helpful to address some of the challenges that mothers face all the time. For women the message has mostly been to “lay down your life to bear-fruit:” sacrificial living as the essence of the caring person. Your identity is to serve. Giver you shalt be. 

But for many women this Christian ideal has led to caretaker burnout after being pinned to the existence of invisible laborer. The moment of “abiding” never came. The “fruit” part, as in harvesting some result, was conveniently postponed to the afterlife: your reward will be in heaven. For now your destiny and act of love is sacrifice.

This is where the “Abide and Bear Fruit” dynamic should have been a corrective for everyone who is thinking about care and motherly presence. Because “Abide and Bear Fruit” was never meant to be an endorsement for a mere sacrificial production model, whereby women should bear fruit and “produce results.” No one can really care for others without opportunity to care for yourself. 

To this point, it always struck me that the very caring and outgoing sisters of mercy, the religious group founded by Mother Theresa, have a schedule whereby they spent six hours a day on the streets helping others and four hours a day at the convent chapel in prayer.

But our culture is still leaving motherhood in a very functional definition. We see fruits in a ‘productionist’ model. We need to produce, perform, achieve results. We often overlook the lifeline that is essential to keep this giving going. In his book Give and Take, Adam Grant talks extensively about the givers on our society and how many of them risk to topple into burnout. One giver he interviewed, a director of a university call center, had the sign in his office that reads: “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit. You get a warm feeling but no one else notices.” This sums it up for givers in the world. 

Grant has been analyzing why some people are successful and others are not, he explores the available research on successful people. Numerous people pass the review, and mothers are not part of it, no surprise. What is useful in his observations is to learn who are most successful Givers or Takers. In studying engineers in California, medical students in Belgium, and salespeople in North Carolina (Belgium seems to be the 51st of the US in this study), it turned out that the most successful people in each category where the givers. But the least successful people were also the givers. Turns out, it all depends on how you give. 

• One marker of successful givers is self-care. People who avoid selfless giving, meaning giving by losing touch with your sense of self, they do so because they keep in touch with their own needs.

• Another crucial marker of successful givers is that those who give by taking in account the conditions of the receivers, whether they are takers or people who operate with the principle of quid-pro-quo. Giving with boundaries is an important self-protection.

• One last marker important to mention is that successful givers often have the time to connect with the people to whom they give. Ones caregivers can really hear about the fruits of their labor, they report far less caregiver fatigue.

These aspects of protection for givers may be known to you but they are still not widely applied. Motherhood in pandemic times may have alerted us to the care mothers need, but the higher challenge due to the pandemic caused many to hit that invisible yet very tangible Covid wall.

The care for Givers has in fact been part of the Gospel. Jesus in John’s Gospel is calling us to respect the balance between Abide and bearing fruit, between the recognition of your true self as God created you and the creative output that flows from that. This is very different than the sacrificial model that makes you feel like a wheel in the production process. All too often mothers and caregivers feel reduced. The balance between Abide and Bearing Fruit seeks to interrupt that production conveyer belt thinking and to ensure that each one of us can connect with her or his inherent blessedness and foundational smile of the divine that is being cast upon your being, as Jesus expresses so often and also here. And once we are connected with that shower of grace about who we are, we can sense a holy energy of life and loving creativity flowing from our being that brings fruit, successful fruits that last, more than we can imagine. 

Let us insert this crucial corrective in our lives right now, and change our view of motherhood. Every mother should have the opportunity to Abide, to take in the blessing they are, to celebrate their inherent blessedness, that divine smile upon our soul. And every caregiver, especially mothers, should have the time to sit down with the fruits of their labor and enjoy for a moment the success level they have reached. 

So for all mothers, I wish a time to abide in the divine smile and to enjoy the fruits of your labor and love.