In Honor of Godly Mothers

Brent Nelson
May 8, 2009

Mother's Day was first initiated by a mother grieved over the carnage of war, after having visited a Union army camp during the "War Between the States." Her name was Julia Ward Howe. Howe was so struck by the incomprehensible contrast between the rightness of the cause: unity of the states and abolition of slavery and the unrighteousness of violence against those bearing the image of God, that she penned these lines:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the wine press, where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He hath loosed the fateful lightnings of his terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.

I have seen him in the watchfires of an hundred circling camps
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps,
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps,
His day is marching on.

I have read a burning Gospel writ in fiery rows of steel,
As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal,
Let the hero born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Our God is marching on.

He has sounded out the trumpet that shall never call retreat,
He has waked the earth's dull sorrow with a high ecstatic beat,
Oh! be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the whiteness of the lilies he was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that shines out on you and me,
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
Our God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, he is succour to the brave,
So the world shall be his footstool, and the soul of Time his slave,
Our God is marching on.

(published as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in 1862 in the Atlantic Monthly).

Ward Howe, among others, some years later in 1870, called the nation to observe a day of peace and honor for mothers bereft by war of their sons and husbands. A tradition that continues today and many will observe this Sunday.

What struck me in the poem, was the interpretation of the carnage she witnessed in the war: it was the coming of the glory of the Lord, barefoot and trampling. Bodies are grapes. What stark and faithful terms to describe true reality behind a smokey, corpse-strewn battlefield.

Few believers take Howe as an exemplar. But no matter her divergencies theologically (Howe was a Unitarian), the poem attributed to her echoes the truth of Scripture as she raises her bereaved mother's voice with Naomi: "Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the Lord has brought be back empty. Why call me Naomi, when the Lord has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?" (Ruth 1:20-21).

Naomi, and all mothers who follow in her footsteps, know well that God rules over war and peace, life and death and in it all, he pursues his own glory supremely (Isaiah 45:6-7).

Once our nation did well to listen to the voice of such strong, God-saturated mothers with Naomi's character and faith. We would do well to hear the same God-enthralled mothers among us again. Far from mere nostalgia, godly mothers are a treasure always. Because God remains the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8).