Midweek Faith Lift
May 14, 2025
The Audacity of Zeal & Mother’s Day!
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
May 5, 2025
Some people think of Mother’s Day as a Hallmark holiday, a time for brunches, flowers, and frantic last-minute cards. But its roots are deeply spiritual and fiercely activist. The original vision wasn’t just about celebrating moms. It was about empowering them. Anna Jarvis, who founded the modern U.S. Mother’s Day in 1908, was inspired by her own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, a Civil War-era peace activist who organized "Mothers’ Day Work Clubs" to improve sanitary conditions and lower infant mortality. After the war, she hosted “Mothers’ Friendship Days” to promote reconciliation between Union and Confederate soldiers. Mother’s Day, in its original intention, was a moral call to action, not just a sentimental gesture. Even earlier, Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist and author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, issued a Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, a radical pacifist appeal for women to unite and demand an end to war. She urged mothers everywhere to rise up in the name of peace.
So much for mom being a pushover….for a bit of humor we read:
A police recruit was asked during the exam, "What would you do if you had to arrest your own mother?" He said, "Call for backup."
Affirmative Prayer for Today: Mother God we acknowledge your very breath flowing through our entire being, filling us with the audacity to do what is ours to do, to speak up and act in love whenever and wherever needed! Amen.
Wow, I did not realize what the full energy behind the origins of Mother’s Day truly encompassed! The audacity of zeal and Mother’s Day are a good fit! How’s that for Divine Order? Mother’s Day is not really to honor mothers but a day for mothers to come together and sound “a moral call to action.” Wow! Who knew?? Now that is true audacity and boldness for you. It makes me wonder how it got translated into the sappy, “sweetsie” Hallmark event it is today. Probably in the same way that the Aramaic word “queendom” got translated into “kingdom” in the third line of the Lord’s prayer. Don’t ask too many questions, or your audacity becomes too much, pushy and over the line!
Well, let’s go over the line, shall we, and call for peace, compassion, love, kindness, honesty, integrity, honor, respect, and true worthiness in all our elected officials and leaders this Mother’s Day. Let’s boldly call for that in EVERYONE so that just like a good mom, we all model the behavior we want to see in our kids. If we do that, we are very much in alignment with what Charles Fillmore taught about Zeal. In Atom Smashing Power of Mind, Fillmore wrote on p. 26:“….zeal is the great universal force impelling humankind to spring forward in a field of endeavor and accomplish the seemingly miraculous.” This is our power for moving past the bounds of seeming limitations and in the direction of the fulfillment of our dreams to “see them happen.”
Audacity is a strong attribute, necessary so that we, in our human experience do not crumble under the weight of the kinds of troubles that befall us. Audacity is, in the words of John Lewis, creating “Good Trouble!” It is the energy that moves us forward in the direction of positive change even in the face of all that is negative, that is not love. Without audacity, Lewis and others would have never marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In his book, Carry On, on p. 22, Lewis writes:
There is a light inside of you that will turn on when you get into good trouble. You will feel emboldened and freed. You will realize that unjust laws cannot stop you. These laws cannot stop the truth that is in your heart and soul.
That light is the fire of audacity that is the energy of zeal! Keep going, hold the light and spread the light of truth and justice for all people, no exceptions.
Audacity is a powerful energy, one that needs to be anchored in love, in Goodness, or God. It is possible, in our human experience and expression of zeal to be over-zealous and misguided. When the energy of boldness is fueled by fear or other negative emotions, then it is not aligned with Spirit, with a higher purpose. Like love, the spiritual energy of Zeal leaves no one out and moves forward in the face of fear, in the face of those who would perpetrate and create fear. It does not succumb to fear, it emboldens love and strength in the face of fear. That is the true energy of the Audacity of Zeal.
Audacity is a positively charged energy that provides the impetus to move us forward. It is the “I can” of the third line of the Lord’s Prayer that we explored last week. The words we usually read are “Thy Kingdom come” but in Aramaic they read teyte malkutakh, which has a distinctly different energy. What Neil Douglas Klotz says is that when he is confronted with a seemingly impossible problem, he returns to this line of the Lord’s Prayer. If there is a lack of self-confidence which would impede the energy of audacity for sure, he has to recalibrate his naphsha, or small self, individual energy with the energy of ruha, or the larger breath that is the energy of the soul, of greater Reality, alahah. This happens through the energy of the heart and allows the releases and transforms the old voices and past memories that might be saying “I can’t” when the energy of Light, of the fire of zeal, says “I can!”
This is the energy of teyte malkutakh which has a clear and profound impact on us when we open to it. As noted, malkutakh is feminine, so just like the mothers who organized for Mother’s Day , this energy clears our hearts so that we can say a divinely energized “YES! WE CAN!” On page 36, of The Aramaic Jesus: Book of Days, Klotz describes it this way:
Yeshua counsels that just as we can allow Reality’s light-life energy-love (shem) to clear our heart, we can also allow it to say “I can” in the voice of our soul, the always on Big Breath (ruha).
What do we do with all the “stuff” that clouds our heart, paralyzing our ability to act when the time is ripe? In this line of the prayer, he says, “ Burn it!” The KU in malkutakh is a fiery power that burns away that which is no longer needed, that which is dead. It creates room for the new growth of spring to emerge and is as necessary for life to continue.
Friends, on this Mother’s Day, we are in a time of teyte malkutakh, of holy audacity to speak of what no longer serves us and what needs to burn away. We do so boldly as we hold the light for all that is to come. As Yeshua said through John Lewis, “unjust laws cannot stop the truth that is in your soul.” And then we say, “come, come” to all the new growth in consciousness that is asking to emerge through us, and we say that with audacity! Life is perhaps call us all to a larger vision, one that not only stretches our small sense of self but shatters it completely! That is truly the audacity of zeal.
So take a moment right now, and hold in your heart whoever it was in your life that helped you grab onto and hold tight to the possibilities that were there for you. Who was it that held the light for your personal “I Can!” and kept it burning until you believed it and could hold that light for yourself? That is who truly “mothered” you in the very best sense of the word mother. And then quietly say a heartfelt thank you of appreciation for the audacity present in them as they believed in you. My own mother did not give me much, but she gave me a belief in my intelligence and the audacity to pursue learning and education in a way she never enjoyed. Thank you, mom!
As we, together, birth a greater reality and burn away the doubt and fears holding us back, we are bringing the “queendom” that we all can imagine together. It is an age of fairness, justice, courage, fearlessness, peace, kindness, compassion, kindness, honesty and integrity. It is a time for all of us to “play large” and fully feel the zeal, the audacity of our dreams. I want to leave you with the words of Marianne Williamson which ring even more true today:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.”
- Marianne Williamson
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb