As one who has a passion for words, I like to take note of those that go in and out of favor or that take on some different connotation or significance. One that I have been seeing much more frequently of late than I ever did before is transparency. I'm not sure how the phenomenon occurs, but I suppose one person uses it in a certain context and it seems to fit so well that others pick it up. It's always been a useful word when applied to glass or complexions or emotions, but nowadays you hardly see it anywhere else than to describe the intentions of a board, committee or bureaucracy. Well, it's certainly a worthwhile goal, so in the interest of transparency, I decided to talk about why I am always out of the pulpit on the second Sunday in May. Unless meetings or other obligations intervene, I can choose which Sunday I prefer to turn over to the music and worship committee to fill, and therefore I've decided to let them deal with Mother's Day. Or not, as they choose. I would not, myself, feel free to ignore it, yet it is my least favorite of the Hallmark Holidays. It was the year that I talked about what I really thought about it that a parishioner had brought a huge bouquet to present to her mother in church, and I decided that it would be best that I express my attitude toward it and its sentimentality on another occasion. When I say that I consider sentimentality a deadly sin people are often shocked and even hurt, assuming that therefore I am cold and unfeeling. I would argue instead that there is little relationship between sentimentality and genuine feeling -- that sentimentality almost precludes real and honest feeling.
Some years ago I was given the Meyers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, a shortened and far less meaningful version of which I have given to church boards at their orientation meetings through the years. It is a fascinating psychological test which has recently gained a great deal of popularity in certain organizations for leadership training. It has four pairs of characteristics for which it tests, giving people places on a continuum from one to the other. The testers were as interested as I was at my scores on the thinking/feeling continuum. I was almost smack in the middle with a tiny bias toward feeling, which was not terribly unusual, but the way that came about seemed strange indeed. In taking the test, you choose your preference of two words or phrases. It seemed that I chose nearly all the feeling phrases and nearly all the thinking words. I suspect that had I not been immediately turned off by what I perceived as the sentimentality of the words that I did not choose, my place on the continuum might have been considerably farther over toward feeling.
When I talk so negatively about sentimentality I do not mean that we should feel less, or even that we should do away with the romantic. To be truthful, I'm very fond of hearts and flowers, and I believe in love -- all kinds of love: romantic love, motherly love, (parental love), religious love. I am not truly a cynic. Though I am aware that love can die, I do not believe that it is necessarily mortal, nor that it is killed by the shortcomings of its object, (all of us having shortcomings), nor even the romanticism of its subject, but I do believe that it can be killed by sentimentality; that sentimentality can do other terrible damage, and therefore to some people I may seem a cynic.
The difference between sentimentality and feeling is the difference between gold and tinsel. Feeling is the reality, sentimentality the meretricious copy. That's with emphasis on the meretriciousness. Copies are not by themselves valueless. It seems to me possible that we can copy feelings with honest motivations and intent, not overlaying them with sentimentality, and those copies can be as gold as the original, and even become just as real. Sometimes to act as you wish to feel can create the desired feelings. It is, after all, not our feelings for which we are ultimately responsible, but the actions that we choose.
Sentimentality, rather than a true copy of the feelings that we have or would like to have, is a cartoon of them instead -- one that impels immediate surface emotional reaction which may be of little real value in guiding our behavior and may even mislead us. There is a story I heard, admittedly third-hand, but one that I immediately believed because it illustrates the kind of sentimentality which makes our general resolutions at General Assembly so utterly predictable and so useless even to point out the errors of our ways, much less re-direct them. The director of social action at the UUA announced a boycott of the Calgary Olympics because of the treatment of one of the Canadian native Indian tribes by the Canadian government. They were withholding funds from them that were available to and earmarked for other tribes. Sounds like a good boycott from the sentimental point of view unless you might be a little concerned that the Olympic athletes had little to do with the Canadian government. However, the minister of the Calgary church pointed out that in fact the reason that the Canadian government was withholding money was that that particular tribe treated its women members like slaves. They were the property of the men, and the Canadian government felt that it could not give a subsidy to a group which mistreated Canadian citizens whatever their gender. A little thought, a little investigation, instead of the immediate sentimental response might have avoided an embarrassing situation.
Sentimentality is what triggers knee-jerk, unthinking, predictable responses on a personal or even political level to certain ideas and concepts. Some of those words are obvious, as Ogden Nash so cogently reminded us, like children and home. If you doubt its danger, let's talk about the latest Supreme Court decision on abortion. They said that a certain procedure for late-term abortions could be made illegal. Just as with all abortion, the procedure is not pretty, but it is used very seldom and only in emergencies. The anti-abortion activists gave it the name of partial-birth abortion in their usual successful campaign to frame issues in ways that trigger the sentimental response. The most successful method for keeping people from having abortions up to then was parental notification laws. We all really want to believe in the responsibility and goodwill of mothers and fathers -- why the very words reek of goodness! -- yet one very strong reason for choosing to have an abortion in the first place is to keep it from the ears of one's parents. It is sometimes extremely dangerous to let them know about it. Girls have been beaten and even killed by parents under those conditions. There are usually provisions for the pregnant girl to get a waiver from a judge in extreme circumstances, but facing the red tape involved would probably be more difficult for most girls in those circumstances than risking a back-alley abortion with no questions asked. The language used in the argument precludes rational thought. How can anyone condone killing babies? The fact that those "babies" are usually simply a mass of undifferentiated cells at the time of most abortions becomes irrelevant. That the woman's health and life, mental or physical, might be in danger is a bagatelle.
Someone brought up the issue of Terry Schiavo again in the newspaper the other day. That the activists could get the governor of the state and even Congress involved in the issue of whether a brain-dead woman could be taken off life support was an incredible triumph of sentimentality. There was no other argument on behalf of such evil.
Mother's Day is an occasion for my topic, though not the topic itself. It's beginning was actually quite noble, when Julia Ward Howe, a feminist, realizing that the dedication and effort that women put into the rearing of children beyond the mere biological fact of bearing them was not given true respect -- although motherhood was certainly sentimentalized even then -- thought that to establish a day honoring mothers might begin to rectify the omission. It has not; it has merely increased the level of acceptable sentimentality and the size of merchants' purses. There are good mothers, bad mothers, mediocre mothers, but whatever the relationship you have with your mother, to ignore or forget Mother's Day is to brand you forever as an ingrate, if not with your mother, certainly with anyone else who knew that you didn't celebrate it. Not that it is likely that you will be able to forget it. The ads begin at least a month previous to it, and if you should for some reason not wish to prepare lunch that day, you'd better be able to be satisfied with Wendy's or Burger King, because you'll not find a table anywhere else. Not, mind you, that I have any aversion to treating one's mother to lunch, I just think it might be easier and more fun if there weren't such crowds of others doing it at the same time. And that really is the problem that I see. The sentimentality of Mother's Day allows us a binge of emotion that we seem to feel can get us off the hook of an honest relationship the rest of the year.
It may be because our relationships with the primary caretakers in childhood are by their nature somewhat complex that Mother's Day so clearly out-ranks the celebration of Father's Day despite the efforts of the merchants. A sentimental salute to mothers in general allows us to ignore the reality of the woman who gave us birth, her strengths and weaknesses, her needs and desires, her self-hood, the recognition of the existence of which, separate from our own reality, may force us to look more deeply into the values of our own lives than we may wish to do, and perhaps even take responsibility on ourselves for what we have become. Mother does not mean an individual but a sentimental notion. My own mother actually was a pretty good hand at cookies and apple pie and she read me poetry, but she was a very complex human being who deserved a real understanding of who she was.
There is a section of one of my favorite poetry textbooks, Sound and Sense, called "Bad Poetry and Good" which takes a critical look at certain poems, sometimes comparing them to others on the same topics. There are several characteristics which the authors point to in bad poetry, but one of the most common is sentimentality. "It takes a heap o' livin' in a house to make it home." These are easy, surface, popular feelings which keep you from having to deal with what is real, as Ogden Nash points out so vividly. My grandmother's religious poetry, which I hate to admit was of the worst greeting card, newspaper, or tract variety, was full of sentimental expressions which kept her from having to confront the hard questions of religion.
The consequences of sentimentality may affect all of in terrible ways, like the continuing of an unjust war because America must never admit defeat, or they may be purely personal, impoverishing our lives. People like to call those who avoid sentimentality cynics, but there are realists and even romantics who are not sentimental. Oscar Wilde said that the cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The sentimentalist also does not know the value, but will both demand and pay grossly inflated prices to avoid confronting the meretriciousness of their valuing. The realist knows both the value and the price, while the romantic may pay higher than true value, but knows it, and will only pay for what has intrinsic worth. The romantic who is not a sentimentalist will not settle for tinsel.
Religion, all religion, is an exercise in valuing. What is worthy, what is not? Religious experience is connection with what is found to be of worth. It is necessary, though, not to fall into a morass of sentimentality because of the desire for such connection. Feeling is our response to the true gold of reality. Sentimentality insulates us from reality and keeps us from the recognition of what is truly of worth.