What Makes a Woman Beautiful?

May 9, 2004

Arlene Bougher, Lay Speaker

Montgomery United Methodist Church

Happy Mother’s Day! I’m so glad to be standing here in this beautiful sanctuary on this gorgeous morning and on such a very special day.

What makes a woman beautiful? I have a little story to tell you about that. I was running some errands in Princeton a few weeks ago, walking down Nassau Street.

It was one of those rare warm shirtsleeve days in April, when I could see both sides of the street reflected in the shop windows. A display in a religious storefront caught my eye. Suspended above a collection of elegant china, was a huge enlargement of a one page article written by Rick Lipsey for the Christian Science Journal.

It was the title that drew me in: What makes a woman beautiful?

As I read further I saw that Mr. Lipsey is also a writer for Sports Illustrated.    He makes the point that the swimsuit issue of that magazine is “a colossal financial success…the pictures highlight the popular hallmarks of female beauty.”  But when he asks male athletes who their favorite role models are, a number of men name their mothers! Why? Almost always, the answer is the same: ‘Because Mom is the most beautiful woman in the world.’ “I whole-heartedly agree,” he says. “But the beauty that the athletes and I admire isn’t material. It’s spiritual and it’s composed of such qualities as grace, elegance, humility, sweetness, and tenderness. It…includes the innate abilities to inspire, correct, cheer up, and guide in the way that’s particular to women-especially mothers.” 

In my life, my mother was replete with beauty. No she would never grace the pages of a model magazine (people say I look a lot like her) nor would she know anything about fame or fortune. But in her 5 ft., 110 lb. frame, her beauty would shine through her example of love, sacrifice, spirituality and strength.

Strength? Well-anyone with 5 children has to develop a large strength muscle. Whether we walked or rode the 2 miles to church, we were there every Sunday. If we had two feet of snow and six people came to church –that was us.

Each of my siblings remembers spending quality time alone with Mom, from singing nursery rhymes at nap time to the “adult” conversations she would have with us.

It’s hard not to see the beauty of a mother who held this gangly wounded eleven year old in her lap, and yet talked with me as an equal, answering tearful questions, the day after my father died. The words she spoke? I can’t remember. But for me, in that moment, the mystery and fear of death disappeared.

That year her loss doubled when eight months later she lost a son.

Her grief, though overwhelming, was private, and never once did we hear her blame God for her losses. If anything she became stronger.

There’s an illustration of that kind of God-given strength in the April copy of The Upper Room. A man writes that he enjoys running by a lake near his home. There’s one long stretch where he run’s close to the water’s edge. When the cold wind blows across the lake, this part of his run becomes extremely hard. Many times he’s wanted to stop and lie down, but he has learned if he keeps moving, he eventually moves out of the way of the cold wind. 

And my mother kept moving. There was Sunday School teaching, and Bible School crafts. A man came to our little shore village church to preach and raise funds for the education of girls in India. Mom gave more than she could afford, marking her donation for one particular young girl. And years later, while working at our hometown bank, she secured a loan, traveled to India on her own, and met that young woman, satisfied that she had done well.

Yes, there was beauty in her strength, her sacrifices, and in her independence.

My mother has always liked the color red, but my father was bothered by it, so the rooms of our smallish home were painted in pale blues and greens.

After the cold wind of that year of loss subsided, I came home from school one day to find my mother wallpapering the kitchen, a very pretty tiny white print on a background -of Fire Engine Red. I rolled my eyes at her like any new teenager worth her salt, but secretly in my heart I was saying, “Go Mom!”

My mother only had a high school diploma, but she educated us with a precious set of child craft encyclopedias and her fearlessness of insects and tiny crawling things and her knowledge of wild plants. She had an artist’s eye, right down to the nutritional foods she served at the table. She pushed us to learn all we could from nature and nearby colleges. Today, after several strokes robbed her of most of her memory, I hear her in the halls of Manor by the Sea, a Methodist nursing home, correcting someone’s English (usually mine), and if I read any of the Psalms out loud to her, she recites them with me, word for word.

After her years of sacrifice, she found ways to travel to places I’ll probably never go, like China and India and New Zealand. She joined a speaking group in town,  audited classes at the Philadelphia College of Bible, and volunteered many hours for Contact, a telephone help line.

One warm summer day, some years ago, my husband and I drove down to the shore. We love to walk the boardwalk and leave our footprints in the sand. We had parked the car and were walking up one of the many entrances to the crowded mile long boardwalk. A lot of charities and health organizations had set up tables and displays to attract new members or solicit funds.

There before me, up high, on a huge poster, was the silhouette of my mother’s hand. The hand was Contact’s symbol for reaching out to others. No one else has a hand like hers, square palmed, with fingers very nearly the same length. I found her that day among the confusion and throngs of people because her talent let her use the unique beauty of her own handprint to make that poster.

The beauty of her spiritual handprint touches me now as I gather the courage to stand here, the blessing of a mother’s faith handed down to the next generation.

If you will permit me, I would like to read a poem I wrote for the most beautiful woman I know.

            The Gift of A Mother

At the heart of our tiny house was a painter.

With no brush and no oils she painted color

On our walls, our dinner plates and our romantic dreams.

In our minds she painted the colors of courage as we watched

 Lightning through the open doors of summer and

Gathered in wonder under the crown of a rainbow.

She painted spirituality over prejudice and

Education over economic depression.

With no time to develop her own artistic talents

She raised five children and painted them all

The color of her love.

Now, that’s a beautiful woman! Happy Mother’s Day!