Mothering

My friend Cylene let it be known on another social media platform with some force and eloquence that Mothering Sunday is not her favourite time of the year. ‘If you have a bad mother, please don’t feel bad if today you didn’t celebrate it, you didn’t choose whom to come out of and anyone would understand if you didn’t feel like putting one of the people who inflicted suffering on you on a pedestal. So ignore the propaganda because it doesn’t apply to us. Birthing accomplishment doesn’t grant you automatic goddess status if you’re actually a monster.’

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 19^th 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 18^th-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?