The Goodly Company of “the Good Mrs. Murphy”
Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash
Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, edited by David Rosenberg (1987), is a winsome accessible collection of essays written by well-established leaders and members of Judaism. The essays variously reflect, in quite personal ways, the experiences these writers have had concerning different books of the Hebrew Bible. These writers reflect on the ways in which the biblical text has generated their faith and self-understanding. The particular piece to which I refer here is “Psalms” by John Hollander (pp. 293-312) reflects on his childhood impression of the most familiar, best loved Psalm 23. He reiterates the joke concerning the young child who misheard and misunderstood the familiar final verse of the Psalm. As you know, that verse goes like this:
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long (Psalm 23:6).
But in his mishearing, the child heard instead:
Surely the good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.
In place of “goodness and mercy,” gifts from God, he heard “the good Mrs. Murphy.” This mishearing had led the child to imagine that a Mrs. Murphy would be the one who would follow him through his life, caring for him, nurturing him, and calling him to account, like a good Jewish mother might do. Holland comments on the mishearing:
Good Mrs. Murphy following the child about like a beneficent nurse is a most viable, powerful homiletic reconstruction of what had otherwise faded into abstraction than any primer’s glossing….My own initial childhood contacts with Psalm 23 were full of small good-Mrs.-Murphys (294-295).
It is not difficult to imagine the character and qualities of his “mis-heard” Mrs. Murphy. She is filled with energy and passion for the kids in the neighborhood. She is attentive, demanding, and generous. She is saturated with authority that she does not hesitate to exert for the children, nurturing and challenging and calling to account, like a good Jewish mother might do. Her life for the children concerns “the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”
Having been able to imagine the good Mrs. Murphy has led me to reflect on others in her company who share her qualities and her characteristics. I can readily nominate such persons from my past. First I think of Dorothea Pflug, a childhood educator in St. Louis. She was filled with patience, alertness, good humor, and generosity. Most of all she was one the world’s great listeners who could hear more than we said and give it back in usable form. Her willful positivity worked goodness, life, and possibility for all to whom she listened. She was sweet and gentle, but in her winsome way uncompromising in what she knew and trusted. She was just the kind of adult educator whom you would want for your well-beloved children.
Second, I readily think of Lila Bonner Miller in Atlanta, my erstwhile mother-in-law. She was a force of nature and operated like gang-busters to do good for many persons. At age sixty she completed a residency in psychiatry. Later she was drawn to the mass of indigent people that the state of Georgia had ejected on to the streets of Atlanta, those with great needs and with a complete lack of resources. She mobilized all the resources she could muster in order to provide care and sustenance for this abandoned population. She was tireless in engagement with great generosity and compassion for a host of hopeless persons.
Third, Nan Horstman is a member of our church in Traverse City, Central United Methodist Church. Nan is a person of great energy, deeply grounded in faith, fully invested in church and community. She is able to see and address a host of tasks that need to be completed for the good of the community, and does not hesitate to take bold initiatives, as circumstance requires. She is at every turn in the leadership of our congregation in its missional efforts.
I add one more name to the roster of “the goodly company” of the good Mrs. Murphy, namely, my mother Hilda. Or as she liked to say with a slightly tilted chin, “Hilda Margaurita Christiana.” She was born and grew up in rural Kansas. As with young girls of her place and class, she had only an eighth grade education. She spent her teen years and young adult time keeping house and ironing starchy shirts for her four businessmen brothers. All of that changed for her when, as a young adult, she attended a two-week Leadership Training School sponsored by our church denomination. There she met August, my father-to-be, who was a young pastor and a staff member of the School. In proper order Hilda and August fell in love, got married, and began a family. Their first-born son, Charles William, was born a “blue baby” for whom there was no medical relief in those earlier days. Charles died after nineteen months. Only later did I come to see how his death marked her life with abiding grief.
She nonetheless flourished in her new life with August. She was, in effect, an associate pastor to him, albeit sans stipendium. She led the youth fellowship in his place, worked actively and incessantly in the Church School, and shared in a musical ministry, doing organ, piano, and singing solos. Beyond that she was his “eyes and ears,” alert to pastoral needs in the congregation. She grew in her capacity for leadership.
As she matured, she continued her strong strand of moralism based, I think, more in anxiety than in virtue. She was easily intimidated by those whom she experienced as “uppity.” but given her quite circumscribed orbit (who among us does not live in a “circumscribed orbit?”) she prospered. She was good-humored, generous, and capable of great empathy toward those around her. I include her in this roster because, like the good Mrs. Murphy, she followed me all the days of my life. She died in 1991, but she has continued to follow me all the days of my life. She has followed me with her streak of moralism. She followed me with her propensity to be intimidated by the “uppity.” She has followed me with her great moral passion. She has followed me with her good humor and her capacity for empathy. Because of her early loss of Charles William, she was utterly devoted to the safety, health, and wellbeing of her two surviving sons, my brother Edward and me. In her steady insistent ways, she empowered me, as the last line of the Psalm affirms, to “dwell in the house of the Lord,” that is, to live my life deeply grounded in the claims of gospel faith. Her faith, like her life, was not complex. It was quite straight-forward, and my debts to her are abiding and immense. If we accept the mis-hearing of verse 6 noted by Hollander, we can trace quite directly the relationship of the force of the first line to the abiding faith of the second line. I am glad that my mother, given her limitations, stands in the company of Dorothea, Lila and Nan who live alongside the good Mrs. Murphy.
No doubt concerning Dorothea Pflug, Lila Bonner Miller, Nan Horstman, and Hilda Hallman Brueggemann, there are a host of grateful people who can easily affirm, “Surely she will follow me all the days of my life.” The second line of that verse in the Psalm is that “I may dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” But in lieu of such specificity of piety, it might also be rendered, “that I may dwell in wellbeing, dignity, and security all the days of my life.” These several cognates of Mrs. Murphy have had a life-changing capacity and have worked at it with zeal, passion, patience, and energy. Each of them is deeply grounded in covenantal faith. In this way they are easy mates on befall of the “goodness and mercy” of God that may follow us all our days.
In both the guild and the church, we have been slow to appreciate fully that maternal marking of the God of the Gospel. The dominant Western theological tradition has been mesmerized by the muscular adjectives of sovereignty—omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience—that we have until most recently failed to discern the force of another set of divine characteristics, namely, “goodness and mercy.” Or to be more comprehensive, we may mention the entire catalogue of neighborly markings—righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, faithfulness (on which see Hosea 2:19-20). Thus the great hymns of the church have accented divine power, majesty, dominion, and sovereignty. But of course, when we have eyes to see, as is now evident in much recent scholarly literature, this alternative articulation of God is everywhere in scripture. Thus in what is likely an early text, Moses can assert that God (and not he!) has birthed Israel into existence:
Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, “Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child” to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors (Numbers 11:12)?
The operational verbs, “conceive” and “birth” readily and bravely assigned to God the mothering features that have made Israel’s life possible. In a late oracle, Isaiah can have God declare:
Before she was in labor she gave birth;
before her pain came on her shed delivered a son.
Who has heard of such a thing?
Who has seen such things?
Shall a land be born in one day?
Shall a nation be delivered in one moment?
Yet as soon as Zion was in labor she delivered her children.
Shall I open the womb and not deliver? says the Lord;
Shall I, the one who delivers, shut the womb? says your God.
Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her,
all you who love her;
rejoice with her in joy, all who mourn over her—
that you may nurse and be satisfied from the consoling breast;
that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious bosom.
For thus says the Lord
I will extend prosperity to her like a river,
And the wealth of nations like an overflowing stream;
and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm,
and dangled on her knees.
As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you;
you shall be comforted in Jerusalem (Isaiah 66:7-13).
The maternal images tumble out. This poetic passage teems with maternal imagery. It concerns labor, birth, opening the womb, nursing, consoling at the breast, carried, dandled, and comfort. This rich vocabulary attests to the role of mothering, a property likely also reflected in the promise of Isaiah 65:24:
Before they call, I will answer,
while they are yet speaking, I will hear.
It turns out that the deliverer of Israel is quite like the good Mrs. Murphy in her capacity for the wellbeing, security, and dignity of all the children in the neighborhood of creation. Thus we may discern a decisive linkage between the mothering capacity of the God of the covenant and the work of the goodly company of the good Mrs. Murphy. It may be that it is the capacity of the mothering of God that dispatches the good Mrs. Murphy to do mothering work among us. Or it may be that the good Mrs. Murphy, in her determined resolve, has modeled for and instructed YHWH into mothering ways. One might indeed imagine that in a text like Hosea 11:1-9 we get to observe the way in which YHWH moved more fully toward a mothering propensity. In the poem YHWH begins with a mothering intimacy toward child Israel (vv. 1-4). But then we get the muscular indignation of verses 5-7 wherein God’s response is one of angry affront. But then, abruptly, God knows better and decides differently (vv. 8-9). Now God settles in “tender, warm compassion,” that is, womb-like mother love.
These maternal markings of God matter in the world, as they mattered to Jesus who did the mothering work of feeding, healing, and forgiving. Beyond that, these maternal markings bespeak another way to be the people of God in the world, a way of vulnerable self-giving, after the church has had a long-running season of Constantinian domination. Being different in the world requires an embrace of mothering among those who frequently “feel like a motherless child.” We do well to begin with the good Mrs. Murphy in order to be in the world differently. In my case, it is always wise to begin with the good mother Hilda.
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles.
