A Different Kind of Mother - A Different Kind of Day

Robert Frost famously and rightly said, “Home is where, if you go there, they have to take you in.” The woman and her son dying of thirst in the desert surely knew, if they’d ever doubted it, that the place they recently left was no home and never had been. A slave is property. She can be used just as a piece of crockery is used, fill it with what you want, have it for a while then toss it all out.

Sarah was finished with Hagar and Ishmael. There was no need of either of them once Isaac was born. In fact, it was possible that Abraham, the old romantic, might just decide to let Ishmael share in Isaac’s inheritance. So out the door they went into a desperate and deadly future.

How much of a mother to Ishmael was Hagar? At first, she was simply a vessel to deliver to Abraham some sort of son so that his line and fortune would continue. Did she love Ishmael then? Did she delight in his little-boy antics, or did she withhold that love knowing he would not be hers for much longer? He would have a clear future. She might be allowed a livelihood. Would he cherish her or would she embarrass him when he came into his true place?

We will never know because that story did not play out. What did play out was their exile from the house and land of Abraham. Certainly, wandering there in the desert Hagar loved Ishmael. They shared fear, hunger, thirst, despair. Did she look at him and feel she had failed him? If she’d been just a bit more conciliatory, would they have been allowed to stay? If he’d been just a bit less beautiful, clever, full of himself, would he have been more tolerable to Sarah? Can you possibly ever wish your child to be less than he is?

Unable to bear the sight of his dying, she placed him a ways (a bow shot) off and wept. It was then that an angel of the Lord opened her eyes and showed her where a spring flowed and their thirst was no more. The angel assured Hagar that they would be safe now and that God had heard the voice of the boy. “God was with the boy and he grew up,” we are told in Genesis. Was this a happy ending?

The theme for Lent at our parish this year was “In the Desert”. Our prayer group held a number of sessions on this theme, one of which was a lectio divina prayer on Hagar’s story. As we prayed with the text, the people in the group (even the men) focused on Hagar’s motherhood -- not on her meeting with the Lord, which is what I wanted them to focus on. They could not turn away from this homeless mother and her unwanted child. They said that motherhood was itself a desert. Even in the midst of a loving family, it can be a lonely job with a world of uncertainty.

Our prayers at the close of the session were said for the mothers we know and had and are, for mothers who wonder about their abilities and about their future. We prayed for children who find themselves out on the street. We prayed for the self-righteous, cold-hearted mothers who turn them away.

Earlier in the story Hagar, taking refuge in the desert from Sarah’s mistreatment, was told that Ishmael would be a “wild ass of a man with his hand against everyone and everyone’s against him.” I had always felt this to be of little comfort to poor Hagar, but my friends in prayer group decided that it meant that Ishmael would not be pushed around and owned as his mother was. He would be his own person and if that meant having his hand raised against everyone, then so be it. Before he’d be a slave, he’d be buried in his grave, to paraphrase the song. *

Hagar and Ishmael are not exactly heroes in the Judeo-Christian tradition.They are written out of the narrative early on. But that day, that mother and that child in that desert spoke to us. They told us that God takes care of even the outcast, even the foreigner, even the trouble-makers --- especially the trouble makers.

Happy Mothers Day.

You can find the story of Hagar in Genesis 16. 17. 21.

* “Oh Freedom” a American folk song, associated with the Civil Rights Movement    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veiJLhXdwn8