This coming Sunday is Mother’s Day. Facebook and Instagram will be filled with sentimental pictures of mothers. Some churches have special Mother Day services.
This is the origin story from the Encyclopedia Britannica: Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia, whose mother had organized women’s groups to promote friendship and health, originated Mother’s Day. On May 12, 1907, she held a memorial service at her late mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia. Within five years virtually every state was observing the day, and in 1914 U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday. Although Jarvis had promoted the wearing of a white carnation as a tribute to one’s mother, the custom developed of wearing a red or pink carnation to represent a living mother or a white carnation for a mother who was deceased. Over time the day was expanded to include others, such as grandmothers and aunts, who played mothering roles. What had originally been primarily a day of honor became associated with the sending of cards and the giving of gifts, however, and, in protest against its commercialization, Jarvis spent the last years of her life trying to abolish the holiday she had brought into being.
What sounds so positive is also very painful to many. Not everyone has Hallmark card family situations. Not all women make fabulous mothers. And most families really don’t (and never did) look like “Father Knows Best” or June Cleaver. Almost every year of ministry I have been reminded that some very faithful women do not attend worship on Mother’s Day because it triggers sad memories. Some come on Sunday mornings but squirm a bit because their experiencing of parenting (their own childhood, or the dynamics with their own children) make them feel inadequate (especially when the scripture of choice is the picture of idealized woman in Proverbs). For some, Mother’s Day is a reminder of what was not possible for them.
This year I hope you will be kind to one another and to yourself. Mothering is hard and not all manage to do it successfully. Try exchanging disappointment with gratitude for those people who “mothered” you when you needed that love and care.
The qualities of mothering are not limited to gender or place of birth. We can all care for one another, see that people are nourished in body and spirit; provide a zone of protection for those in danger; be a source of lived wisdom.
As a mother comforts her child, so will I [God] comfort you; you will be comforted in Jerusalem. Isaiah 66:13
Yet it was I [God] who taught Ephraim to walk, I who took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.
May we all take the example of God’s Own Self and carry on the ministry of mothering.
Rev. Clara
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