At Swanvale Halt, Mothering Sunday, the middle Sunday of
Lent, is always marked with a Family Service rather than a eucharist, a title I
find awful but which we use because none of the alternatives are any clearly
better. The children from the infants school come and sing, usually a song
about Spring and one about mums, and posies of flowers are blessed, and
distributed by the children present not just to mums but – in theory – whoever
they think may want them. They go wider than the congregation, and find their
way into homes, and care homes, around the parish. The service always attracts a big
gate, though of course this year I was absent, laid up on my bed of pain (or my
desk chair of moderate discomfort).
I know that despite the cute contribution of small children singing,
there are regular members of the congregation who absent themselves for
Mothering Sunday. Not everyone has had positive relationships with their
families, and the unquestioned imagery of family togetherness which tends to
characterise most modern forms of Christianity can really stick in the throat
if that wasn’t your experience, and yet have a faith. It wasn’t really there
before the 19th century, and sits strangely with a Saviour who once
said, albeit rhetorically, that unless someone hated their parents and siblings
they couldn’t be his disciple. Every year at the liturgical planning group we
debate how we can signal inclusion on this day to people who aren’t part of
families, or who’ve lost their mothers or their children, or have reasons not
to think fondly of them.
If you check the Wikipedia article on Mothering Sunday the
sources it quotes for the festival’s history range from something someone read
on the BBC to Cross & Livingstone’s 1974 Oxford Dictionary of the Christian
Church – but no further. We know about Mid-Lent Sunday, of course, the day when
the severity of the Lenten fast is lifted, the liturgical colour changes from
violet to pink, and the Introit at the start of the old Mass began 'Laetare
Ierusalem', ‘Rejoice, O Jerusalem, and gather round, all you who love her’. It
is supposed that this was traditionally the day when people who had moved away
from the place of their baptism returned to that church, and took the
opportunity to visit such of their relatives (often parents) who might remain
there; servants might be given the day off for this purpose. So far from Cross
& Livingstone, who quote no sources either.
As you will find very readily, the modern observance of
Mothering Sunday derives solely from the work of Constance Adelaide Smith, an
Anglican priest’s daughter from Coddington in Nottinghamshire, who in 1913 read
about the parallel campaign of Anna Jarvis in the USA to have a day dedicated
to the remembrance and celebration of the nation’s mothers, and decided to
begin her own efforts in the same direction. But, as she was a High Church
Anglican (so described), she wanted the British version to be a religious
rather than a secular occasion, and the pamphlet she wrote about the subject –
The Revival of Mothering Sunday – promoted this. Miss Smith took the very
clearly attested folklore surrounding Mid-Lent Sunday, its Simnel Cakes and
customs, and the Church liturgy, and argued that this made it the ideal moment
to celebrate motherhood. Even the Epistle set for the Communion that day, which
Archbishop Cranmer had taken across from the old Mass when compiling the Prayer
Book liturgy, was from Galatians 4, and included the line ‘Jerusalem which is
above is free: which is the mother of us all’ (though in that text Blessed St Paul
also goes on to say, ambiguously, ‘the desolate hath many more children than
she which hath an husband’). It all seemed to make perfect sense. Queen Mary
and the Mothers’ Union took up the cudgels and by 1938 it was stated that ‘Mothering
Sunday was celebrated in every parish in Britain and every country in the
Empire’.
I haven’t read Miss Smith’s original pamphlet, but I smell a
High Church rat. You’d’ve thought that, as a daughter of the manse, she’d’ve
been in a position to know what domestic servants got up to, and that picture
she paints of girls in service going back to see their old mums on Mothering
Sunday and picking posies of flowers along the country lanes to give them is
terribly romantic and compelling. That doesn’t mean it’s true, as my encounters
with High Church romancers writing about the world of folklore around exactly
the same time have taught me. Why does no actual folklorist ever quote any
example of this happening? Why does it never crop up in diaries or oral history?
I quickly scanned relevant bits of Parson Woodforde’s Diary the other day, as that late 18th-century
cleric regularly mentions the doings of the servants as well as folk customs
such as the village children turning up on his doorstep every St Valentine’s
Day to beg for coppers. James Woodforde never hints that there’s anything
unusual about the middle Sunday of Lent, still less that the servants got the
day off. Who would have cooked his dinner? The story goes back, apparently, no
further than Constance Smith herself. Clearly she was no liar; but she may well have blown up some stray remark from a parlourmaid about what she planned to do on Mid-Lent Sunday into an entire social custom which never in fact existed.
In some moods I would like to jettison the whole thing, and
the more I find out about the true Imperialist background to it the more I am
inclined to argue we do so. But among the people with whom it’s popular, it’s
terribly popular, and there’s no doubt that it brings into the church and
exposes to the Gospel souls who would otherwise avoid it. Would abandoning
Mothering Sunday stand more starkly for truth and love than maintaining it?
If it is your convalescent state that provides time for you to write such interesting posts (I'm now busy re-evaluating Mothering Sunday) then there's the silver lining in your chair of moderate discomfort! Miss Smith got her timing right - the turmoil and disruption of the world war might well have added to the drive for a nostalgic view of old certainties and comforts, which never actually existed. cf Victorians (rapid social and economic change) and Maypole dancing?
ReplyDeleteHope the discomfort gets rapidly more moderate, to vanishing point.