[This is an edit of a message I originally gave at DUUC in 2013. See that post for links to information.]
A Message Delivered to High Street
Unitarian Universalist Church
May 10, 2026
The dandelion
is the cockroach of flora. It existed
long before our species rose up from the proverbial swamp and after we return
to the dust they will continue to be here.
The name “dandelion,” which I’d
always assumed referred to the yellow mane of the flower and its seeming
vanity, actually comes from the French dents
de lion, “teeth of the lion,” and refers instead to the deeply serrated
rosette of leaves that poke up from billions of lawns, in abandoned lots,
between the cracks in concrete, in the clefts of mountain crags and
skyscrapers, and sometimes tufting out of the useless chimneys of houses where
no hearths have burned in decades. They
are perennial and rely on bees and flies to pollinate, and when they’re ready,
the wind carries their seeds on tiny parachutes to new places. Sometimes they fly as much as several hundred
meters. They do not need us at all.
Dandelions are
often used as a medicine, usually involved with blood, the liver, and gall
bladder. Its juices aids detoxification
and bile flow, promotes lactation and the immune system, and helps reduce
eczema and cough and asthma. The root
can be dried and ground up and added to coffee, like its close relative
chicory, and the leaves are often delicious in salads (although I’ll admit I
have to add a lot of butter to make them palatable). And most of us are of an age when we have had
dandelion wine.
Had Jesus been
born in, say, Kansas rather than in the Middle East, the Sermon on the Mount
might have included the following:
Consider the [dandelions,] how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Now don’t
mistake all this information for anything like love for the dandelion. There is a deep, satisfying,
bottom-of-the-gut joy that comes with yanking a 3 foot long dandelion root from
my gardens. Few things are as
pleasurable as watching the beasts disappear under the deck of my
lawnmower. I do not love the
dandelion. I tolerate the dandelion.
Because, try
as I might to eradicate it, the dandelion remains as much a part of my life as
a part of my landscape. I cannot escape
its existence. I mow and weed and have
even sprayed the lawns, and still they come back up. That is their unique power.
A story now, a contemporary one,
about motherhood that serves to relate how people are like dandelions. Our relationships with our mothers, with
either parent actually, can be pleasant and problematic at best. I had what I think was a pretty good
relationship with my late mother and with my dad, secure at all times in the
knowledge that, no matter what, they loved me and wanted nothing but the best
for me. Those among us who are mothers
or parents I hope have that same assurance that they, too, love their children
no matter what.
This is a newsstory from over a decade ago that adds a different, more complex concept to
this topic. This is a story of three
girls, now three women, in Cleveland, the first of them abducted in 2001, the
last of them in 2004, all three found alive and relatively healthy in the home
of their kidnapper, Ariel Castro.
We can have
only the barest inkling what Melissa Knight, Amanda Barry, and Gina DeJesus
experienced in their decade of captivity.
We should be thankful for that.
Worse perhaps, we are even less capable of imagining what the now 19
year old daughter of Amanda Barry and Castro has experienced. If she is fortunate she herself retains
little memory of what her life to now has been.
There are so
many things to be said about this situation, about Castro’s activities and what
he hoped to accomplish; about the women’s years in captivity and in physical,
emotional and sexual abuse; about how this situation happened in a neighborhood
of a major American city and not in some Hills
Have Eyes outback; about the unwillingness of police, despite multiple
reports by neighbors, to investigate beyond the front door of Castro’s home;
and most especially, there are things yet to say about his neighbor CharlesRamsay and his willingness to expose his own past—because in this brave new
networked world there are no past sins that can’t be found—in order to do the
right thing.
But what I’d
like to talk about is Amanda Berry and her daughter. And how what little we know suggests about
motherhood and resilience. The story as
it’s come to us is that Ariel Castro, who worked as a bus driver for Cleveland
Metro School District, left his home to eat at a local McDonald’s. He did this regularly but this day was
different. Castro had failed to
lock the "big inside door", although the exterior storm door was
bolted. Berry did not attempt to break through the outer door because.
previously, he had tested the women by leaving the house partially unlocked and
exits unsecured. If they attempted to escape, he beat them. But enough was
different that Amanda Berry took the opportunity to scream as near the
door as she could until someone responded.
Charles Ramsay did, and it’s a testament to his heroism that this man,
who had partied with Castro, eaten BBQ with him, played music with him, didn’t
say “It’s a domestic matter” and turn around. After listening to her story that
she was being held against her will Ramsey kicked the bottom panel out of the
door. Berry, carrying her child,
squeezed through the broken panel, hugged Ramsay, begged him to take her to his
house to use his phone, and then called police.
Some of us
might routinely play a mental game with ourselves in which, if we were caught
in a disaster and could save only one thing, what would it be. To make it more interesting we often presume
that there are no people or animals involved, to make it a specifically
material question. What thing would we
save? Amanda Berry did not have the
luxury of pretending or of there being no person involved. The material object she left with was her
daughter.
To put this decision in perspective, consider
what myriad complications must have been involved over the past six years. Berry was just under seventeen when she was
abducted. After years of sex with her
abductor she is pregnant at twenty and delivers a daughter into the dark,
airless, sunless existence she’s come to figure will be her future. We don’t know if she wanted this girl or
feared for her existence, born into the same situation she’d been held captive
in, and it’s likely it was a combination of both sensations and any number of
others. She may have wanted to abort the
fetus, although we have heard suggestions from DeJesus and Knight that Castro
beat them when they were pregnant to spontaneously abort their
pregnancies. So what we are left to
guess at is that either Amanda fought vigorously to have this child or that
Ariel had a change of heart over this pregnancy and allowed it to be brought to
term.
This girl,
born into a situation her mother was abducted into, and raised only in the
company of the other two abducted women and Castro—what can be going through
her head? At the time of her rescue she
is six years old, she has known only these 4 people in her life. Two of them are her parents. One of them carried her out of her world into
the unknown, into what she couldn’t possibly know. So while we can’t know what Michelle, Gina or
Amanda has gone through we can, with some certainty, know what Amanda’s
daughter was experiencing: Absolute, unqualified, quaking fear.
It seems to me, as an outsider looking in on
parenthood, that this is one extreme part of what it means to be a mother: To deliver your child into great uncertainty
and, when the time comes, to help her escape into greater uncertainty. But that is what you must do. As a coda to this story, Jocelyn Berry, as
near as I can find, is doing well for someone with this experience. Ariel
Castro completed suicide a little over a month into his own captivity.
It’s well
known that among lions it’s the female, the lioness, who hunts and who is
really the fiercer of the species so it may be that the distinctive feature
about dandelions—their serrated leaves, the dents
de lion—may more accurately be termed the dents de lioness. Perhaps
the natural reaction as mothers, as parents, even as proponents of religious
liberalism, is to emulate the dandelion—stubbornly resistive to any attempt to
root us out, to burn us out, and even to the natural tendency by entropy to
crumble us from within.
Our message,
the message of religious liberalism, the message of people who see great
complexity to parenthood—that it is better to be alive than to be dead, that to
treat anyone as less than the glorious being that he or she is is itself an
evil, that children and the people we’re responsible for need safe food and
safe water and safe places to live, and that these are not starry-eyed ideals
but necessities—must be heard. We must
endure for these messages to be heard.
We must become ubiquitous and obnoxious, unwilling to be pressed from
our perch. We must be willing to grow
quietly beside the more beautiful and cozened strawberry and rose and lily so
to suck up some of their excess nutrient and water until we can elbow those
more popular petals aside to take the place we’ve earned. To endure as a faith and as a people we need
to be as tough, as resilient, and as uncompromising as the common dandelion.
