Refreshment Sunday

Lent is broken up by feast days. This coming Sunday is popularly known as Mothering Sunday, but traditionally was called Refreshment Sunday - the middle Sunday of Lent, which originally was simply a half-way break in the Fast.

When the Industrial Revolution led to people increasingly working and living a significant distance from home and family, Refreshment Sunday was appointed as a day when everyone would return to the Church of their home community to worship. Mothering Sunday was established in the 19^th century in order to allow people who were in domestic service to return to their own communities, as they would not be at home for Easter. The Simnel Cake was baked and taken home as a gift for the  servant's own mother and family.

When did Mothering Sunday become Mother's Day?  Only very recently - in the last 40 years.  I have no problem with celebrating mothers - being one myself, I'm entirely receptive to celebrating motherhood any old time!  I do remember, though, before I was a Mother, how profoundly excluded one could feel when Church celebrations of Mother's Day tended to give out subliminal messages that one wasn't a "real" woman if you weren't a mother. I think Church should endeavour to celebrate motherhood in a wider sense - focusing on, perhaps, the Community of church, the mothering of God, the support of mothers by the whole church. We also need to take care, in celebrating motherhood, to wave a pastoral antenna for those who long to be mothers but can't, those who have suffered miscarriages and stillbirths, those whose mothers have died recently, or who for any other reason struggle with "Mother's day".   

Comments

[brodie]

Thanks for this Maggi - I love the idea of Refreshment Sunday, and hear your words of wisdom about how we do the whole Mothering Sunday thing.
Once again thanks.

[Kathryn]

Mmn
just putting our MS service together, majoring on the different ways that we experience love and care, but with flowers for everyone there and an opportunity to light candles to remember missing mothers or missing children.
Praying this will hit the spot...
And looking forward hugely to a gin and some chocolate (though not simultaneously!) :-)

[Caroline]

I will avoid church on Mother's day ... in part because of the pain of being seperated from my children and in part because it seems to reduce womanhood to motherhood and we wonder why women's leadership is so difficult to accept in other areas of the church.

[John Cooper]

Well done on another stonkingly good blog, I am just glad your a vicar to be able to impliment your cracking thoughts!

Warm regards Ever
John

[Amanda]

Its also painful for those whose mothers, or substitute mothers, did not offer loving care in one way or another.

I always avoid Mothering Sunday even though I am now a mother myself.

[Stefan Fraczek]

I have enough trouble deciding whether it's Mother's Day or Mothers' Day...

Also - surely Sundays in Lent aren't fasting days in the first place...

[Ken Brown]

Is the painful stereotype inherent in the church or something we import from the rest of the world?

Today in we read the second part of 1 Samuel 2, which we almost never read in church. That's the one where Eli's sons steal food from the worshippers and sleep with the women "who serve outside the door of the Tent of Meeting" (whoever they were). These people were not living stereotypical 1950s suburban lifestyles. There are children who aren't living with their parents. Hannah sees her own son once a year. Sends him things. If they had had parks to walk in in those days would she have taken him for a walk in the park on Sunday afternoons? Elkanah has two wives, Eli seems to have none. He's a single parent and he seems to have made bad job of it.

And (as it is in the story) these people are more or less contemporary with and living down the road from Ruth and Naomi and Boaz and the Levite and the concubine who is raped in Judges 29 - a story you *never* hear read in church.

Whatever all that is about it is not the sentimental mothering of Mother's Day cards , or nuclear families of parents who stay together, or sentimental nostalgia for a lifestyle that our grandparents & great-grandparents generations probably never really lived anyway.

[Kat]

Ughhh Mother's day (or is it Mothers' day?). I'm glad I'm studying Feee-ology at the moment and am not 'obliged' to go to church on Sundays as we have church on Thursday evenings as a college community. And we didn't do Mother's' day. HOW I'm going to do it once I have to be 'up there' I truly don't know.