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By Melissa Lauber

A sweater, it?s been said, is a garment worn by a child when his mother is feeling chilly.

I know this to be true. Middle-aged, I still judge probably far too many situations on my mother?s scales.

I suppose it stems from when I was younger. Instead of seeing God as an old man with a large white beard ruling on heaven?s throne, I saw my mother, daring to conquer any obstacle as she freely shared with me an unconditional kind of love.

I still have very little room in my life for ancient, bearded men. God, to this day, in my mind likes to sunbathe by the oceanside; wears sensible red blazers; appreciates a good cup of coffee and the scent of sheets fresh from a clothesline; and with one glance can deliver improbable amounts of guilt-inducing disapproval or heart-stirring encouragement within me.

As Mother?s Day approaches, I?ve stumbled across several proverbs about mothers.

From the English tradition: 'All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That?s his.'

From the Moors: 'Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother.'

And my favorite, from Spain: 'An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.'

I know John Wesley believed that. His mother, Susanna, is preserved in history?s pages only because of her relationship to her son, the founder of Methodism. But her story still intrigues.

The mother of 19 children, 10 of whom lived, she was a woman of astounding resourcefulness and conviction. At one point in her marriage, she was abandoned by her husband for six months when she refused to say 'Amen' to his prayer for King William.

Susanna taught each of her children to read when they were five years old. When her husband traveled on preaching trips, she preached to her family and to others, sometimes drawing a crowd of 200. Throughout her lifetime, she also wrote letters to her children, urging them to take the responsibility of their spiritual lives seriously and to know God through experience.

Susanna Wesley, because she was not a member of the Church of England, was buried, at age 73, in unconsecrated ground at Bunhill Fields in London. It is a nonconformist cemetery. William Blake, Daniel Defoe, Isaac Watts and John Bunyan also lay nearby.

I like the image of her being a nonconformist. I think most mothers, when it?s really important, tend to be so.

Although they lived worlds apart, it?s not a large jump from the life of Susanna Wesley in the 18th century, to the Rev. Emma P. Burrell. Recently, Linda Worthington was doing research and stumbled across Burrell?s memoir from the 1989 Baltimore Conference Journal.

She shared it with us because this is the 50th anniversary of full clergy rights for women. Burrell was 'the first woman to obtain full clerical rights on the level with men with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto: Washington and Baltimore conferences,' the Journal noted.

Burrell was educated in Washington, D.C., schools and went on to receive an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree. Along the way she attended Morgan State College, American University, the University of Maryland and studied at St. Elizabeth Hospital School of Psychiatric Training.

After working as a principal of the Fauquier High School in Virginia, she was ordained a Deacon in 1953, admitted into the racially segregated Washington Conference in 1956 and was ordained Elder in 1959.

In 1981, she retired with 26 years of service in nine churches.

Her?s was a memoir of a pioneer, but the item that most touched my heart was the brief mention that her only son drowned while on expedition with the Boy Scouts.

Because she was a mother, a mother with a broken heart, she moved beyond historic icon and became someone my heart reached out to. I don?t know any more than the barest facts of her biography, yet she has become a woman I admire.

I think, in some ways, the same can be said of Mary, the mother of Jesus. She?s only mentioned a handful of times in the New Testament, yet we know her because we are aware of who she was as a mother - a mother who also had her heart broken.

At the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, there is an ivory statue of Mary. Mary?s robes open into two side panels to reveal scenes from the life of Christ carved on the inside. When the triptych is open, you can peek into her interior and find the life of her divine child unfolding.

This type of statue is rare. But in Vienna there is a triptych of Mary that is believed to be even more special. In this statue, created in 1420, Mary carries the people of the world in the side panels of her skirts and a carving of God inside her.

The curator of the Dom Und Diozesanmuseum marvels at how this could be - how presumptuous of a mortal, mourning mother to claim to carry the Creator of the Universe, that ancient, bearded deity within her.

However, it makes me want to crow and jump a bit for joy - isn?t that the point? God dwells within us as we each dare to give birth to lives with sacred meaning. We are each midwives, we are each mothers, being Christ to and for each other.

It?s not only biology. There are mother-disciples in each of our churches, in all of our lives. And it?s appropriate on Mother?s Day to say thank you to them, to say bless you for all you have given and done.

The writer Zora Neale Hurston remembered her mother as a sacred force. She wrote: 'Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ?jump at de sun.? We might not land on the sun, but as least we would get off the ground.'

And so this Mother?s Day, to my mother and to God, just in case I get the two confused again, I say thank you for helping me to jump, and to believe the sun, moon and stars are all in my reach.