The Gold-Orange Goblet

"For I have known them all," wrote T.S. Eliot, and King Lemuel says "Many women have done excellently." There is in this, in each of these statements, a sense of having surveyed what is to be had, of choosing just one thing (like picking a single goblet from a shelf of Venetian glassware) and saying of it, "You surpass them all." It is a weighted selection, an experienced and discerning evaluation, which ascribes worth without hurry, and recognizes value without exaggerating it.

I have known many women. I have nine aunts and three grandmothers, eleven girl cousins and many girl friends. I have observed the woman at Starbucks, the woman at Giant, the woman who sits two rows behind us in church. I know college girls and high school girls, who are just beginning to realize their womanhood. I know mothers of friends, mothers of small children, and mothers of grown children. Moreover, I know many women who have done excellently. Two of my high school teachers leap instantly to mind as women and mothers of beautiful character and high accomplishment. I know pastors' wives and caregroup leaders' wives who display a gentle and quiet spirit, wisdom, discretion, kindness, compassion.

In short, I live in a room like the showroom I once saw in Venice, full of blown and colored glass. Every color in creation was represented there: vermillion, saffron, cobalt, amethyst, sapphire and vivid green. But though the row of flare-rimmed goblets which you see on that lower shelf are beautiful, my eyes immediately turn upward to the one on the top shelf, that is all gold-orange and big as a water lily in full sail. That cup is the queen; it holds more than all the others, both of pain and joy. It has a rim more stretched, thinner, wider, pressed to the limits and transparently lovely. It has a deeper color, a warmth and richness which the others lack. Its stature, too, is greater; it is tall in character and strong as the Tower of David. The others are lovely, but it surpasses them all.

The gold-orange goblet is like my mother. I always think of her as orange and green and wine-red and gold, the colors of autumn and fruitful harvests. Her eyes are green as a forest pool and gold-flecked warm as summer. She looks like a queen in red velvet. She is smaller than most women, but tall in strength and wisdom. We joke that she "towers beneath." Her capacity is enormous, to endure, to stand firm, to pour herself out in love for those who raise their fists against her (oh foolish, ungrateful fists!). Many beat the tower walls, but no one can quench the light. I should know; I beat those walls for years, and she never stopped loving me.

Walls. Light. My mother is a lighthouse, uprooted from her native New England shores but still guiding my little bark home on the stormy waves of young womanhood. Her warm rays shoot across all the vastwetness; I know that whenever I run to that tower, I will be warm and safe and well-counselled. It shows in the smallest things. If I am sad, she knows it. Her tender mother-heart aches for me. If there is hard work to be done, it is she who rolls up her sleeves first. If we are all weary, she livens the table with jokes and laughter. No beat of the family's heart goes by without her knowledge and care; no event is unprovided for, no desire unnoticed, no sin escapes her concern, and no hurt evades her awareness. She is the gold-orange light, the heartbeat itself, the tower for all of us. And I think, looking at her laughing across the table, or dressed up for church with her purse and shoes all matching, and a cap perched on her little, aristocratic, cheerful head, that there is nothing so beautiful as gold-orange, and no one in the world as lovely as my mother.

Many women have done excellently. I honor them with sincerity and sobriety. But you, my mother, surpass them all. I honor you with tears and humility, and bless the name of God, who gave me my heart's desire, the one of all that I needed most, from a shelf that I could never have reached: the gold-orange goblet.