Mothering Sunday may be a major revenue source for card manufacturers and flower arrangers but the custom has a curious history. Some have pointed out that the reading given for the fourth Sunday in Lent in the book of common prayer is Galatians 4.26

But Jerusalem which is above, is free, which is the mother of us all…

and thats how this date came to be associated with mothering

the idea of Jerusalem as the mystical visionary city, the utopian Golden city, a mother to the motherless, of orphan Israel – longing to be re-united with this lost home, is a powerful one…

Lent has been a period of reflection on the individual life with the church, at the end of which period the individual would re-affirm her commitment to the body of the church. Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, was the day on which every member was supposed to return for a visit to their original or ‘Mother’ church – where  they had worshipped when they were a child – and folklore suggests that it was on the walk home from this visit that people would gather flowers, which we remember by customarily giving flowers to our Mothers on this Sunday.

I love this idea, however idealised, because it connects the mystical ‘Jerusalem’ with the everyday and familial. In Celtic spirituality the everyday is part of the divine and homely events like sweeping the hearth are moments of sacrament.

Mothering Sunday today is close to International Women’s day (on the 8th) and so I wanted to draw out the links between these strands; of mystic idealism and everyday mysticism, of spirituality and bravery that confronts the order of the world – and can topple institutions, no matter how big.

To my mind the supreme example of this is that act of quiet but determined rebellion on 1st December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus and sparked a civil revolt that transforms and still challenges American society to this day. . .

Our Christian scripture has lent us an image of the suffering of humanity through Mary the mother of Jesus, an image that takes on resonances in many cultures where Catholicism is the main acknowledged religion, countries like Mexico which recognises in Mary a mirror for the grieving of many mothers who are bereaved, and in the figure of the Lady of Sorrows provides a powerful image of the dignity and strength of women despite losses which can seem to many of us un endurable.

We instinctively feel that the loss of a child is the worst of griefs and the Greek myths show us the Goddess Demeter’s loss of her daughter Persephone who, in the story is taken to Hades, the King of the Underworld. The grieving Demeter plunges the world into perpetual winter until her daughter is returned to her for part of the year.

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Demeter which we heard Ann read, takes that myth and explores the resurrection of Persephone, the return of spring, as a symbol for the way life returns after even the deepest of grief.

Under military rule in Argentina 1976 to 1983, the brutal totalitarian regime “disappeared” thousands of dissenters. The dictatorship realised that their orphans could in time turn out to be dangerous political opponents when they grew up and so the orphans of the disappeared were often stolen and smuggled by the Juntas secret police, either to be fostered far away, adopted by foreigners or otherwise ‘lost’.

Imagine for a moment how impossible it would have been for any one to protest in this atmosphere. Who could be brave enough to raise a challenge in such a toxic and terrifying context?

A group of Grandmothers, ‘Abuelas’, gathered one Sunday in the Plaza de Mayo in Buena Aires. The stood in silent vigil clutching portraits of their vanished children. And the state stood off, secret police and city police abashed and shamed out of moving to arrest them.

On Mother’s Day 1977, 237 grandmothers and mothers included their names and identity card numbers on a half-page advertisement in the national newspaper La Prensa calling for  “the Truth” regarding the disappearance of their children and grandchildren.

The bravery of the Abuelas of The Plaza de Mayo (who were also sometimes called “The Mothers of the Disappeared”) fatally undermined the authority of the law. Support for the regime began to erode. Their dignified protest, a demonstration of grief, of the power of the powerless,  became the midwife to emerging change in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America.

[the following information is from wikipedia] By 1998 the Abuelas had discovered more than 10 percent of the estimated 500 children kidnapped or born in detention during the military era and illegally adopted, with their identities hidden.
By 1998 the identities of 256 missing children had been documented. Of those, 56 children have been located, and seven others had died. Aided by recent breakthroughs in genetic testing, the Grandmothers succeeded in returning 31 children to their biological families. In 13 other cases, adoptive and biological families agreed on jointly raising the children after they had been identified. The remaining cases are bogged down in court custody battles between families.[2] As of 2008, their efforts have resulted in finding 97 grandchildren.

…She came from a long, long way,
but I saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,

In bare feet, bringing all spring’s flowers
to her mother’s house. I swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,

the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon.’

[From ‘Demeter’ by Carol Ann Duffy in The Worlds Wife published by Picador]

This is a real resurrection, hope, in the gathered flowers of another spring, hope returning to a mother’s heart, bringing flowers, despite the most painful seemingly unbearable  of losses, and a new moon shining us towards a new cycle.