REFLECTIONS

"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as
in what direction we are moving -- we must sail sometimes with the wind
and sometimes against it -- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at
anchor." ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
--- Dale Carnegie

"Eternal Spirit, who givest wisdom, show us how much of what we pray
for in the world about us is waiting to be found within ourselves."

- A. Powell Davies

A man loves his sweetheart the most, his wife the best, but his mother the longest.

--- Irish Proverb

My Turn: Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Celebrate Mother's Day as a day dedicated to peace

By PAULA SUTTON


Mother's Day is not a Hallmark Holiday; it is a day dedicated to women's public activism and peace. Better known for penning the famous Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) proposed Mother's Day as a day dedicated to peace.

As a wife, mother, daughter, writer, poet, lecturer, Unitarian, patriot, abolitionist, feminist, suffragist, social reformer, Howe devoted her life to peace and justice. She was inspired by the work of Anna Reeves Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker, who beginning in 1858, tried to improve sanitation in her community through what she called Mothers' Work Days. During the Civil War, Jarvis expanded her sanitation campaign to both sides of the conflict and organized women to care for the wounded. After the war, Jarvis convened meetings to persuade people to lay down their hostilities.

Julia Ward Howe witnessed the carnage of war and other devastating realities affecting loved ones, the economy, and the environment. In 1872, she wrote a Mother's Day Proclamation as a passionate plea for women to gather and call for disarmament and peace.

"Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, Disarm, Disarm! ... As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel..."

The Unitarian poet, Julia Ward Howe, had this to say about mothers:

"Every woman is not, in God's Providence, a wife, and every wife is not
actually a mother. But every true woman has the mother in her and this
grand, spiritual motherhoood, exerting its influence and watchfulness
in all the walks of life will give every woman a noble part to perform
in the great drama of the world."

Prayer of Thanks
For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food,
For love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
[God] in heaven,
We thank thee.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All truth passes through three stages:
- First, it is ridiculed;
- Second, it is violently opposed;
- Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer