Mother’s Day perspectives

In the beginning

Many of us likely grew up in a time when Mother’s Day was already “a thing.” But its meaning is more complex, broader, and deeper than what gift to buy your Mom.

Julia Ward Howe (Battle Hymn of the Republic) penned the original Mother’s Day Proclamation with the idea of a Mother’s Peace Day dedicated to the eradication of war. It is powerful and beautiful—and definitely not commercial. Read it for yourself here.

For all who nurture

Mtr Mary Trainor reflects on expectations of the Church on what is perhaps the most elaborate of the secular holidays: Mother’s Day.

May 9 is the annual cultural celebration of Mother’s Day, which over the years has proven a complication for churches. It’s not a liturgical event, yet somehow because it’s about mothers, churches through the years have made attempts to incorporate it.

As a former parish priest, I knew people sitting in the pews whose lives were negatively shaped by maternal abandonment, not to mention physical and emotional abuse. Further, I previously had worked in programs for parental child abuse victims.  I had learned that not everyone gets a Hallmark mother, and I believe that in order to be authentic about Mother’s Day, we need to acknowledge its complications.

How I addressed it was, during announcements, to talk about Mother’s Day as a day on which we give thanks to God for all who nurture and nourish infants and children, which in some cases is our biological mother and, in other cases, an adoptive mother, a friend—male or female—who cared for us in supportive ways and helped guide us to adulthood.

All such nurturers are gifts from God, to whom we give thanks for them on “Mother’s Day.”

Another perspective

The following was offered by Kurt Wiesner in a contribution picked up by Episcopal Café a few years back:

The high holy day of Hallmark™ is nearly upon us. Amy Young, writing at the Messy Middle, offers some advice for clergy negotiating these dangerous waters:

Dear Pastor,

Tone can be tricky in writing. Picture me popping my head in your office door, smiling and asking if we could talk for five minutes. I’m sipping on my diet coke as I sit down.

A few years ago, I sat across from a woman who told me she doesn’t go to church on Mother’s Day because it is too hurtful. I’m not a mother, but I had never seen the day as hurtful. She had been married, had numerous miscarriages, divorced and was beyond childbearing years. It was like salt in mostly healed wounds to go to church on that day. This made me sad, but I understood.

Fast forward several years to Mother’s Day. A pastor asked all mothers to stand. On my immediate right, my mother stood and on my immediate left, a dear friend stood. I, a woman in her late 30s, sat. I don’t know how others saw me, but I felt dehumanized, gutted as a woman. Real women stood; empty shells sat. I do not normally feel this way. I do not like feeling this way. I want no woman to ever feel this way in church again.

Some of her ideas for Sunday if you are going to include Mothers’ Day in your liturgical planning:

1. Do away with the standing. You mean well, but it’s just awkward. Does the woman who had a miscarriage stand? Does the mom whose children ran away stand? Does the single woman who is pregnant stand? A.w.k.w.a.r.d.

2. Acknowledge the wide continuum of mothering.

3. Commend mothering for the ways it reflects the Imago Dei.