Möbius Mother

“Möbius Mother”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
Mother’s Day
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 10, 2009

What you just heard, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Canon 1 a 2, was part of his “Musical Offering.” It’s a complicated but somewhat whimsical offering. If you see the musical score, you’ll find that the beginning joins with the end and that it’s equivalent to what we would recognize as a Möbius strip. I didn’t prepare a physical model of Bach’s canon for you this morning, but I will prepare a Möbius strip. It starts out as a rectangle [show] with two obvious dimensions, length and width, a couple of edges, a topside and an underside. If I take it and give it a half twist and then join end to end, what happens to the dimensions? What happens to topside and underside? What happens to the two edges? It becomes a surface with one side and one edge. If I run my finger along the edge of this piece of paper that a moment ago had two edges, I’ll return to my starting point and cover the length of what was formerly both edges. There is no interior or exterior. There is no boundary.

It was discovered independently and about the same time, roughly the midpoint of the 19th century, by two German mathematicians, August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing. While it holds mathematical and physical complexities that I won’t even begun to get into, I wonder if those two German mathematicians weren’t just tinkering one morning with a long strip of paper and a bit of glue, and this strip with such fascinating properties became the unexpected gift of their play!

But this is Mother’s Day, not Mathematicians’ Day, so where’s the connection with this quirky but fascinating concoction of a couple of 19th century mathematicians and motherhood?

I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.

So goes the refrain in Robert Munsch’s endearing story of mothering, Love You Forever. It’s a story of a particularly devoted Mom and possibly our ideal of what we hope for as children. We all want to be loved forever and liked “for always.” We long for a mother who will somehow regard us as her baby as long as she lives. We might not want a Mom who crawls into our bedroom when we’re sleeping teenagers and picks us up and rocks us, but let’s cut a little slack for a writer to make his point. What jumps out of this refrain for me are “loving forever” and “liking for always.” The longed for mother love does this. The more humanly understandable mother love is like a strip of paper that doesn’t always know—and sometimes never knows—it can aspire to becoming a Möbius strip.

The flat strip has dimensions and edges and limits. With a gentle twist and a critical connection, we have a form with a single surface and a single edge. If an ant traveled the course of the flat strip, she would eventually come to an edge; and if she wanted to continue her movement, she would need to reverse direction or back up or fall off. Not so with the Möbius strip. At any point, an ant could hop aboard and begin her journey and move forward and forward and forward; and if this ant had the power of spatial recognition, she would discover that she was returning again and again to her starting point. She would always be on the outside and the inside, because outside and inside are meaningless in this form. She would always be moving forward because there is no backward. Theoretically she would be on a journey without end. Forever and always would take on new meaning in this physical connection between the ant and her Möbius world. The entire surface is accessible to her forever.

Idyllic mother love is available and navigable forever, at least the forever that is the mother’s life and the child’s memory. There is eternal access. In the province of psychology and theology too, boundaries are a good thing. But in our idealized notion of motherhood—and our idealized notion of the holy—there is eternal access, eternal connection. Boundaries can be healthy and protect our singularity; but no boundaries are physically necessary when a child develops in utero and, for awhile, during infancy. Even if a child parts with her birth mother right after birth, there is a need to attach to another mother or mother figure; and for a time, that attachment needs to be so close that boundaries are barely discernible. Child and parent or child and primary caregiver weave in and out of those boundary gradients lifelong. It’s the stuff of thousands of hours of therapy, and probably thousands of hours of Circle Ministry—or small group ministry—conversation! It’s the tough stuff of discerning how Möbius our mothers were or are and how Möbius we who are mothers were or are.

Then there’s the take on motherhood offered up by Erich Fromm in his Art of Loving. “Motherly love,” declared Fromm, “is unconditional affirmation of the child’s life and his needs…” Any wonder why those of us who are mothers think that we will never but never measure up or why those of us who were once children—I think that’s everybody—feel like we’ll never get enough? Fromm elaborates on what he sees as needed: “the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preservation of the child’s life and…growth” –in other words, sustenance and maintenance—and “the attitude which instills in the child a love for living”—in other words an infectious joi de vivre. A loved child is a healthy child, who is glad to have been born.

In Biblical terms, Fromm draws on the notion of “the promised land…’flowing with milk and honey.’” The earth as our mother is an ancient understanding. A land that flows with milk and honey is like a mother who gives milk and honey. Milk, suggests Fromm, sustains us and helps us grow. Honey lends sweetness to life, a joy that we simply are. Fromm claims that it’s easy to spot those among us who got only milk and those among us who knew both, the milk and the honey.

I’m not so sure. Back to that form with a twist. With a simple surface of two dimensions, it’s easy to think and hope in terms of either/or, maybe even both/and. But when we shape it into a form of singular surface, no distinctions, and a forever travelogue, a remarkable blend takes place. In milk and honey terms, there’s no accounting for when we’re sustained with milk and when we’re sweetened with honey. It’s all one substance. So it is with motherhood. What sustains us sweetens us and what sweetens us sustains us. A child or an adult can starve from want of either and surely from want of a basic beautiful blend. The ant traveling along that Möbius strip laps up both.

Consider the Biblical psalm that embodies comfort and security and hope more than any other, the 23rd Psalm. I can speak it from Presbyterian memory:

“The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want;
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He restores my soul…
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

You can test me later on the middle part.

Then we hear the haunting adaptation of Bobby McFerrin, dedicated to his mother and sung by our choir:

“The Lord is my shepherd, I have all I need,
She makes me lie down in green meadows….
She restores my soul…
She leads me in the path of good things…
She sets a table before me…
world without end.”

Milk and honey and more flow through both; but in the adaptation, they flow through the bounty and largesse of mothering. No either/or, but a wondrous blend. And both are forever—like a mother’s idyllic love, forever. Like a journey along that Möbius mother, forever—no holding back, no boundaries, no perilous edges.

Is it any wonder that in ancient times, God or divinity or the most high or the holiest of holies was rendered as a woman, not as a woman over and above all other forms, but a woman nurturing, sustaining, inspiring, and with the forever dimension of regeneration embodied in the seasons of earth, mother earth. Such are the riches of this history that a sermon or two or a hundred and two are suggested for another day.

Where does that leave us on this day, this morning, with the mothers we’ve had or have and the mothers we are or aren’t? Where does that leave us?

Back to those two forms of the strip—the flat one with no twists and no connections, with edges and boundaries and limits, and our Möbius friend, our Möbius mother. As a daughter and a mother and a stepmother and a grandmother—even as a minister and a psychologist—I believe that we go in and out of these basic forms. We’re human; we have limits; we have boundaries; we have exhaustible supplies of milk and honey. Sometimes, we’re just plain exhausted. Then we stretch our humanness. We do that half twist. We connect our beginnings and ends into the idyllically maternal form. Like the earth itself, we give and we take. We warm and we chill. Like the countless notions of holiness, we are bountiful and sparing, affirming and disparaging, accessible and remote. Like life we embody joy and anguish. We are of this world and of this life. We give birth, but what gives life remains a mystery. We raise children, but forces beyond us determine in part how those children navigate the unexpected curvatures of life. What we can all do—birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, grandmothers, and every male here—is to travel the miracle of each day mindful of the forever that is experienced when anyone among us feels nurtured and sustained and glad to be alive because we have traveled at their side. This we can do, mothers all!

I love you, each and all.

Amen.



Sources:

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1956.

Bobby McFerrin, The 23rd Psalm, Dedicated to My Mother, in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, Unitarian Universalist Association, Boston, 2005, 1038.

Möbius strip, Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip.

Robert Munsch (written by), Sheila McGraw (Illustrated by), Love You Forever, Firefly Books Ltd., Richmond Hill, Ontario, 2004.

Psalm 23, The Book of Psalms, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Strange Paths: Physics, computation, philosophy, “Canon 1 a 2,” at http://strangepaths.com/canon-1-a-2/2009/01/18/en/.