Sheri Hostetler shares how a dream about her deceased mother reminded her about our need to care for Earth, just as her mother took care of the household.
This blog is part of the ongoing Learn, Pray, Join: Undoing Patriarchy series.
Sheri Hostetler Photo by Scott Hester.
Sheri Hostetler has been pastoring at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco for 25 years. She also co-founded the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. A graduate of Bluffton (Ohio) College, she is a poet and spiritual director. She comes from a long line of Amish settler farmers.
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The day before I was going to write this piece, I had a dream about my mother. I took it as a sign.
In the dream, my mother and father were lying together in a coffin. My father looked as one would expect a dead body to look — on his back, eyes shut. My mother, however, was lying on her back, with her head turned. She was looking right at me. It was a look I remember well: She was beholding me, communicating to me with her soft, grey-blue eyes. My mother died in 2014, and this was the first time she has appeared in my dream life.
I always identified more with my father. A gentle, funny, intelligent man, he was a leader — something I aspired to be. He loved me dearly and respected me just as much. He wanted to hear my opinions, my take on life. He encouraged my voice. Even though I grew up in a patriarchal Amish-Mennonite culture, his respect helped me overcome the limits my community placed on girls and women.
My mother was a traditional homemaker, something I did not aspire to be. She was amazing at household management: She grew most of our food, canned or froze it, cooked the meals, sewed clothes, cleaned the house, kept the household budget, wasted nothing. She made sure our home ran smoothly in a myriad of ways. Her work was invisible to me growing up. It formed the backdrop of my ordered life, the stability that allowed me to expand and grow. As I became an adult, and especially when I had a child, I began to appreciate how much labor it took to effect this order and stability.
Why did my mother appear to me now?
Humanity is at a crossroads. Our capitalist economic system is based on continuous growth and expansion, which means that we are extracting and consuming Earth’s resources at an ever-increasing pace. This system is now threatening the survival of all life on this planet. As I wrote in the book Sarah Augustine’s and I wrote, “So We and Our Children May Live: Following Jesus in Confronting the Climate Crisis”:
“Climate change … is only one symptom of the real threat, which is ecological overshoot. Ecological overshoot occurs when our demands on the planet are greater than what Earth’s ecosystems can renew. Extraction and the pollution it causes are now pushing us past several planetary boundaries, including carbon dioxide emission in the atmosphere.”[1]
In short, we are destroying the life-support systems of our planet.
The word economy comes from a Greek word, “oikonomia,” which literally means “household management.” In a just and sustainable economy, we would be managing the scarce and precious resources of Earth with the kind of conscientiousness my mother brought to our household. We would live within our planetary budget; we would waste nothing; we would manage the household, so that all life could benefit from Earth’s order and stability. We would live as most Indigenous people have for centuries.
Instead, we have the chaos and instability of climate change, heat waves, out-of-control wildfires, depleted soils, forever chemicals.
I am now someone who loves homemaking. I love gardening, cooking, canning, ordering. I wish I had learned more from my mother, while she was still alive — about how to manage a household with wisdom and skill. But that is not really what my mother seemed to be saying to me with her eyes, indeed to all of us women who have been economists — household managers — for millennia:
Your household is all of Earth now, not just your home. It is imperiled, and this imperils all life. Use all your skills, all your wisdom, all your fierce desire to protect life, to stop this machine of death. Follow those who still remember how to justly and sustainably manage the household of Earth. You may have forgotten some of that wisdom and skill, but you can learn from them. Wake people up. Wake them from the dead.
[1] Pages 14 and 15.
“Learn, Pray, Join: Undoing Patriarchy” draws attention to the ways in which the current systems in our world and churches create spaces that perpetuate patriarchal norms and do harm to those who fall outside of those norms. This initiative provides tools and resources to help MC USA church communities work toward a more equitable world, in which everyone is treated with the care and respect they deserve, regardless of gender.
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The views and opinions expressed in this blog belong to the author and are not intended to represent the views of the MC USA Executive Board or staff.