Mamma Mia: Passion for Life

On this Mother's Day, Pastor Joshua takes inspiration from mothers and from the ABBA-inspired musical, Mamma Mia, to talk about strength, positivity, and passion for life.

Transcript

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The reflection today is called Mamma Mia, Passion for Life, as you saw in the program. And today I'm going to do something just a little bit different, but not unusual. If you've ever been to a church before, a more religious church, you've seen this being done. I'm going to undertake what many clergy in more dogmatic faiths do, and that is an exegesis of a text. So an exegesis is the interpretation of a text, focusing on what the author meant and how the message might apply to our lives today. Usually it's a biblical text, a verse, a chapter, verse. So as a Unitarian Universalist, we might also use that. But that's not the text I'm going to use today. What might I use? Well, one possibility comes from our own Unitarian Universalist Association bylaws. Section C2.3 is titled Inspirations. So our inspirations, and I'll read from the bylaws, are direct experiences of transcending mystery and wonder, our primary sources of Unitarian Universalist inspiration. These experiences open our hearts and they renew our spirits and they transform all of our lives. We draw upon and are inspired by sacred and by secular and by scientific understandings that help us make meaning and live into our values. These sources ground us and sustain us in ordinary, difficult, and joyous times. So those are some of our inspirations. Given that, the text I'm using today, not a biblical chapter or verse, but it is sacred to many people. Including my own mother, was sacred to her. The story from which this text comes is set on the fictional Mediterranean island of Kalokai. A place of dazzling blue water, of white buildings, of flower-covered courtyards and winding alleyways bathed in Mediterranean light. Much like Catalina Island, I would imagine. Except not Mediterranean. If you haven't guessed already, the sacred text I'm talking about today is the libretto of the musical Mamma Mia, built around the music of Abba. So there are many lessons to be found in Mamma Mia. It reminds us that family is built not only by blood, but by love and by connection. It encourages us to embrace rather than to erase our pasts. It celebrates friendship and resilience and the courage to define ourselves on our own terms. And ultimately, the characters in Mamma Mia discover joy, not through certainty, but through choosing life fully, even amid uncertainty. So this morning I want to connect those themes, especially the lessons of motherhood and my own mother's life, to one song in Mamma Mia in particular. This is the text. It's called I Have a Dream. The first step in an exegesis is to lay the foundation, which I talked about, the text and the context. The next step is to read it and break down the main themes. So the song lyrics of I Have a Dream start with the following. I have a dream, a song to sing, to help me cope with anything. If you see the wonder of a fairy tale, you can take the future even if you fail. I believe in angels. Something good in everything I see. I believe in angels. When I know the time is right for me, I'll cross the stream. I have a dream. And now I'm gonna sing it. Severin, give me an A minor. I'm just kidding. The central message of the song is remarkably simple. That human beings need something that helps us move through life with hope. A dream. A story, a song, a sense that joy and meaning still exist, even when life is difficult. This song suggests that success is not the absence of failure, but it's the willingness to continue moving toward life anyway, even with failures. And my own mother believed this intensely. And the lyrics of the song continue. I have a dream, a fantasy, to help me through reality. And my destination makes it worth the while. Pushing through the darkness, still another smile. So when my siblings and I were young, my family struggled quite a bit. But even during our own darkest moments, my mother constantly reminded us that there was always joy to be found somewhere. This was her message. She believed in the angels of our better selves. She understood that while we cannot always control what happens to us, we can control how we engaged with life. She believed deeply in finding a figurative and often a literal song to sing through hardship. And she really did sing. She sang loudly all the time and joyfully, whenever inspiration struck, she would sing. The ironic thing is that she absolutely could not hold a tune. That's I think I inherited her sense of tone. Anyway, the ironic thing, oh, I'm sorry, but that didn't matter. Didn't matter that she couldn't hold a tune. It made her happy. And because it made her happy, it made the rest of us holding our ears happy too. So the song concludes with the chorus again. I have a dream, a song to sing, to help me cope with anything. If you see the wonder in a fairy tale, you can take the future even if you fail. I believe in angels, something good in everything I see. I believe in angels when I know the time is right for me. I cross the stream, I have a dream. I cross the stream, I have a dream. The lyrics speak to the importance of imagination and hope in surviving reality. The reality that Julia Juliet Warden Howe talked about. Reality is hard. Life includes disappointment and grief and exhaustion and uncertainty and struggle. But my mother always carried some vision of joy with her, and not as a denial of reality, but as resistance against despair. Later in life, my mother went back to school and she built a new career. But career success was never really the center of her dream. The deeper dream was something much more radical. She wanted her children and the people around her to understand that life's darknesses did not get to have the final word. Her goal was to live each moment as fully and joyfully as possible. She used to say to us kids, uh, not that she had much money, but sorry, kids, there may not be any money for you when I die, because I'd rather spend it living with you now. And she meant it. She believed our time on earth was meant to be enjoyed, experienced, not merely endured. The way she practiced that belief was through fun and laughter and adventure and connection and making memories with the people she loved. And that's part of why Mamma Mia mattered so much to her. No, it wasn't random that I chose this musical for today's exegesis. My mother probably saw Mamma Mia, she saw Mamma Mia definitely more times than anyone I've ever known. She was an absolute super fan. She attended productions in cities around the world, often multiple times. She must have seen it in New York, in New York alone, close to 20 times. She loves Meryl Street, but she thought she was too old for the movie, but that's another matter. She did a great job, though. So for my mother, Mamma Mia was more than entertainment. It was joy incarnate. It was wonder. It was one of her sacred inspirations. It was permission to live vibrantly and unapologetically. It was her reminder that life could still be playful and beautiful even after heartbreak and disappointment, aging, or struggle. And I think that's why the musical resonated so deeply with her. Underneath all the comedy and the music is that profound affirmation of life itself. My mother achieved many outward successes, but I truly believe her greatest achievement was that message, the way she modeled how to love, the way she loved, the way she insisted on living joyfully in each and every moment. And to better illustrate that, I want to conclude by sharing the story that I told at my mother's memorial. I may have shared this with you all before, I'm not sure, but I'm gonna share it again. So I'll can you turn my lavalier up a little bit? We have Nova here with you. Alright, can can people hear me now? Alright. So as many of you may know, my mother uh died last September. Or you may not know. But yeah, I'm gonna put this down. Um so she died last September, and um people talked about her, she was a force of nature. People talked about her at her memorial. Um, they talked about Dr. Mickey Berg, uh, the woman who raised six children, and then after that, went back to school to get her master's degree in her 50s, her PhD in her 60s. They talked about her becoming a speaker and a coach and an author. And they talked about how she taught everyone. Oh, you might want to turn the pulpit down a little. I think there's a little feedback. They talked about how she she taught everyone that not only was it okay, but it was actually it was actually wonderful to be a raggedy an in a Barbie world, as she used to love to say. And all of that amazing stuff was true about my mom, but it wasn't a story I told. I remembered my mom from many, many decades earlier when I was a little boy. I could picture her holding court on our front yard, just outside the outskirts of Detroit. And I remember this vividly. She was regal, she looked regal to me. She had this huge, beautiful mane of curly black hair, and she had this royal, wildly colorful royal gown she used to wear. And she sat on what looked like the most comfortable throne in the world. That was my image. I remember very clearly looking at her when I was a child, sitting there and just thinking, I just remember feeling completely safe looking at her. I remember looking at her and feeling completely loved. There was just no question. And as an adult, I'll translate that image for you. So the the throne was one of those rickety lawn chairs with the woven plastic straps. You remember the half of them snapped and dangling, and the other half were fused to her skin in the Midwest humidity. And the the regal hair was the six kids in no time updo. And and the queenly gown, the wildly colorful gown, was a moo moo, the unofficial uh uniform of the exhausted housewife and mother. We lived in a tiny bungalow back then, uh, eight people in a house barely suited to fit four. Uh and my dad was a teacher, which meant that we were financially imaginative. But interestingly, we were also also what I call wealth adjacent. Because you see, my mom's sister was very wealthy. I mean, Detroit famous wealthy. And we used to visit my Aunt Florine's house on occasion, family gatherings, etc. It was like traveling to another planet from where we lived. I mean, even as a young child, I knew this, that was not our world. We just visited, returned to the real world. On one of those visits, though, to my Aunt Florence mansion, um, I ate something that was like the best thing I ever tasted in my life. The best thing I ever tasted. It was slightly sweet, like the perfect amount of sweetness, and it was like a little the perfect texture. Like I love chewy things, and it had it came with a tangy red sauce. You could dip it in and enhance the flavor even more. And I was obsessed. I could not stop talking about shrimp cocktail. So one day soon thereafter, my mom gets me alone in our in our tiny house in the real world, um, which was a miracle in itself, with a house filled with six kids under 10 years old. To get one of them alone was next to impossible, but she did it. She sits me down on our uh card table that passed for a dinner table, um, and she says, Josh, I have a surprise for you. Uh true story. And she push proceeds to push this colorful bucket in front of me. And I open it up to reveal what appears to be crumbs. And I say, What is it? She looks surprised. Shrimp, she says confidently. No, no, no, it's not shrimp, I replied. She said, sure it is. It's just prepared differently that than at Aunt Florence's house. It wasn't the shrimp cocktail. Um, you know, and and and this this was one of those um. So, anyway, I'll get to that. I took a bite because I figured I was young and I figured, you know, with renewed excitement, okay, this is shrimp. I'll like it. I took a bite and I got mostly breading uh with a few shrimp-like pieces of meat hiding like they were on witness protection. This was one of those buckets from I don't know if you remember the fast food seafood restaurants, which was, you know, a contradictory term if I ever heard one. Anyway, and it was terrible. I mean, it was truly, truly awful. Uh and I like anything. But here's the thing. As I sat there eating it, something struck me. My mom had remembered. In in a house of eight people, complete chaos all the time, no money, no time, my mom had remembered that I said I love shrimp. And she had found a way to miraculously get me alone in her house, and she bought the closest thing she could afford. I ate the entire, you know, and I figured she probably did this for my siblings as well. She probably got like those fake crab sticks instead of king crab claws for my sister, or maybe chicken fried steak instead of Chateaubriand for my brother. You know, she did it for all of us, translating all of our little moments of joy into just the best version that she could manage. So I ate every last bite, every overfried shrimp adjacent piece. And I remember as an adult, I think back on that meal as the best meal I have ever had to this day. Because it represented my mother, who she was, relentlessly loving. Sure, she became Dr. Mickey Bird, and she changed lives and she influenced people. But many, many, many years before that, when the six of us were young, she was a young, overwhelmed mother of six sitting in a broken lawn chair in front of a too small house on the outskirts of Detroit, making sure her kids felt seen. And if I ever forget how to live joyously in the moment, if I ever forget how to love people well, I just have to think about that bucket of nasty ass shrimp. And and I remember. And that's the story I told at my mother's funeral. So I don't believe in angels literally, but after my mother died uh last September, the line in the song has new meaning for me. I believe in angels. Something good in everything I see. Thank you.