Happy Mothers Day

Have you met my mom? You don’t have to stop and think about the answer to that question. If you’ve met her she’s unforgettable. If you haven’t….well then, I guess you’re just marking time until you do…

My mom is motivated by what’s to come. In all the time that I’ve known her, most days she would remind us that what we’re doing matters MOSTLY based on how it builds God’s Kingdom. And she lives that reality very concretely. She chooses to pay attention to people who aren’t gratifying to know.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone and you’re thinking in your head -- while you’re being polite and nodding – will this person ever realize how long they’re droning on? And have they ever asked anyone a personal question? Or listened for just a minute? Or do they spend their whole life obsessing (in longwinded ways) about themselves?

The answer to these questions in your head depends upon whether or not they’ve met my mom. Because my mom patiently listens to these people – in church foyers, in her living room, in grocery stores, on the telephone, at school – but she doesn’t just politely nod and wonder when its going to be over. Instead, she makes contact with that person again. Asks them questions about their crisis (real or perceived), she keeps contact with them, tells them honest things that they may or may not have already observed, introduces them to the network of other people who she’s collected and continues to pour her time and her energy and love into them for as long as they need it or will receive it.

My mother collects needy people. And she pours her life into them. Several years ago, she won the Muskegon, Michigan Mother-of-the-Year Award and when it was time for essays to be submitted for judging – her four children all submitted our essays, but these other people who she has poured her life into testified to her mothering too. Because once Gloria Rudd has collected you, your life will not be the same.

When I was a little boy, we would listen to music on phonographs together. Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven. She would beckon me into the music helping me feel the music with my body as well as my ears. Thumping the downbeats of the song on my chest with her powerful pianist hands. Drawing my attention to the dramatic, inevitable, driving fatedness of these composers she loved. The cellos and the basses and the timpani gave their music gravity, intentionality, purpose and direction. The majesty they generate is tinged by a sense of the tragic and the profound. They march toward the kind of greatness that can only be earned by understanding the great sorrows that life affords.

My mom’s motivation, purity of vision, and passionate devotion is rooted in a deep understanding of sadness. I’ve never known anyone else who could cry as deeply and quickly and genuinely as my mother. Goodbyes. Deaths. Conflict. Illness. Loss. Disappointment. My mother’s ability to Understand these emotions so personally also gives her the fortitude to live in a way that is so clearly directed toward helping people into the Kingdom.

My mom does not wear beige. She does wear turquoise, dramatically draped black, exotically patterned fabric, gold lame. And Red Hair. So when some well meaning friend advised her before my wedding that the mother of the groom wears beige, it became a running joke through all three of her son’s weddings. She didn’t and doesn’t wear beige.

I suppose people who wear beige do not produce musicals either. My mother does. She has an amazing sensibility of balancing spectacle and story. In the twenty or so theatrical productions that she’s directed and produced, every one of them has had (intentional) surprises so breathtaking that the audience erupts in applause. It could be costumes, lighting, explosions, pulleys, multi-media, casts of (literally) hundreds. When I started getting surprising hair cuts, wearing clothes from different decades and wearing glasses that I did not need – my mom teased that I thought of clothes as costumes. But we both always knew where I got a respect for the spectacular and the theatrical.

People who wear beige do not know how to tell good stories. One of the most enjoyable moments to watch my mother is when she’s telling a story to three-year-olds. She loses herself so fully in the story that she becomes every character – unique voices, ridiculous gestures, dramatic pauses, thrilling conflicts. I try to channel her whenever I’m telling stories to my children or when I’m in the three year old class at church. The ability to commit fully to a story is more than a way to entertain three year olds – it’s a way of being in the world more completely and fully.

Beige wearing people don’t know a good glissando when they hear one. In The Lovely Bones – the main character is a fourteen year old girl who dies long before she should have. When she arrives in Heaven, she’s surprised to find that it’s a series of soccer fields, playgrounds and wide open, well mowed spaces. This particular heaven is only shared by others who would have found that space to be perfect on earth. If I had to pick a heaven, it would be a tough choice, I’ve had a really good life, but one of the top choices would be –

Lying in bed with the lights out and down the long hallway of the ranch house echo the gentle fingers of my mother playing and playing and playing the piano. Sometimes she would be practicing a particularly troublesome phrase, more often --just playing. Laying there hovering just above sleep I would feel profoundly that the music was a kind of visceral fabric that bound my brothers and sister and father together throughout the otherwise quiet house in the rhythms, the melodies, the countermelodies and always, the sweeping glissandos.

My mom drags her finger up the keyboard, but then slows each of the last notes to one by one keys at the top of the scale and just before the next musical phrase starts there is the slightest of pauses, too brief to fit all of these words into, but long enough that your soul starts to yearn expectantly toward the resolution of the chord, the forward motion of the music, the next great possibility.

This is what my life with my mother has been like. A dramatic, spectacular, creative, expressive sweep up across a keyboard, but then, as the next movement is almost ready to begin there is that very intentional movement of those strong, short fingers over two maybe three notes – to remind me and us that our lives, that my life, are to be lived toward the future. We work toward the resolution of the chord, toward the possibility of the next movement, and with the clear careful intentionality of someone rooted in the sadness but celebrating the joy that defines the most perfect music.

thank you for that music, mom.

Happy Mothers Day