As a vicar, people sometimes share experiences with me. These can be times of joy but sometimes they are much bleaker moments. I have recently had a number of those. It can be hard to know what to say, perhaps no words can be said; it is just enough to listen and be with the person in the pain. An equal challenge is what I then say to myself afterwards, as I reflect on what I have heard and hold it against my faith in a God who is love, a God who is trustworthy and in whom there is nothing but love. This tension is as old as religious experience. The Bible and Christian thought give no easy answers. However, I can draw some pointers from those passages, especially in the Old Testament, where writers wrestle with the same dilemma that I face and throw the problem and their anger back to God, with a recognition that God also somehow feels their pain. This reaches its conclusion in the New Testament with Jesus, God who takes human form and suffers pain and death in our human world. This Sunday is Passion Sunday, when the church especially remembers this. Much scholarly energy has been spent on discussing what it means to say that God shares in suffering and if, how that helps; all I can say is that I stand alongside the mother I heard reflecting on the death of her handicapped daughter and who said “I can only worship a god who shares in suffering”.
This Sunday is Mothering Sunday. It is a strange mixture of religious and secular; a Sunday that has its origins in the Middle Ages as a celebration of the Church as a mother to all her had been admitted to her by baptism. More specifically, it was a time to visit the church in which the individual had been baptised; this was a person’s mother church. It was celebrated half-way through Lent, an excuse for some festivities and eating during a period when most would be expected to fast. By the seventeenth century the focus had shifted, now it was a day when those in service, either in houses or on farms, were given a day off to visit their mothers. The tradition of simnel cake and savoury buns comes from the Gospel reading for this day, where Jesus feeds the 5000 with a few loaves and fish. Mothering Sunday may have passed into the backwaters where we now find Rogation and Lammas tide, if it were not for developments in the United States, where Anna Jarvis had campaigned for a day to celebrate mothers. This inspired Constance Penswick Smith in this country to re-establish Mothering Sunday as a specifically Christian (initially Anglican) celebration of the role of mothers in Christian families. Thus in our very secular world, we still buy cards and flowers to send on what was once “Refreshment Sunday” in Lent. On Sunday, I will be at Glazeley, where my mother was baptised; in my prayers I will give thanks for the love that I had from both Mum and Dad, the people from whom I learnt what love is. In our environmentally conscious times some now also see the day as a time to give thanks for fruitfulness of “mother” earth; Mothering Sunday is wonderfully adaptable. And I will join with others in celebrating all those who are mothers or act as mothers, through good times and bad; the times as children we love them, the times we find that less easy. They remain our mothers, the people who brought us into the world.