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Leader comment: Mothering Sunday: a sensitive subject

by
17 March 2023

TRINITY SUNDAY is often regarded as presenting the theme most likely to trip up the preacher; but Mothering Sunday now comes a close second. There are signs, too, that the pulpit pitfalls of the Fourth Sunday of Lent are multiplying. The patristic Church expended quantities of intellectual energy and odium on Trinitarian doctrine, seeking to avoid dangerous wrong turns. Although today’s preacher may have a heresy-hunter or two to contend with, the stakes are lower, at least in personal terms. The tendency of wise preachers is, however, to reticence, in the awareness that God-talk has its limitations, and all is mystery.

Mothering Sunday, on the other hand, has evolved from custom rather than councils and creeds. No one has yet been burnt for it, but that is not to be relied on: in our day, the awareness of mystery has been transferred with vehemence on to categories of sex and gender, questions that mothering raises, and it has been widely, but not uncontentiously, concluded that complexity was in the past wrongly neglected. This is to say nothing of the reality that remarks about mothers based on experience not universally shared may not get the hoped-for reception.

It is a Sunday more in need than most of a rethink and a return to tradition, not least because the emphasis on human motherhood is a creature of the century that lies behind us, however much it may, or may not, be distantly rooted in the custom of apprentices’ visiting their mothers with gifts. The initiative several years ago to make more, religiously, of Father’s Day, a kind of Fathering Sunday, has not really caught on, unsurprisingly, although it was a brave bid for recognition that fatherhood was a subject that required thoughtful attention after a period of social change.

Yet the historic liturgical provision for Lent 4 has something different from all this at its core, which is refreshment (hence another traditional name for this Sunday). This is, perhaps, a safer theme than our Mother the Church, unless painful contemporary scandals are to be addressed. As for “Jerusalem . . . the mother of us all”, that passage about the two covenants re­­quires some care after historical developments that Paul’s generation could not have imagined. The emphasis on the divine relief of human hunger for both sustenance and mercy is, however, one that places God at the centre and presents an opportunity to celebrate the household of faith in a way that dodges some of the nerve endings of a prickly generation. It may even involve a simnel cake, however strongly individuals object to marzipan.

The emphasis on the divine relief of human hunger for both sustenance and mercy is, however, one that places God at the centre and presents an opportunity to celebrate the household of faith in a way that dodges some of the nerve endings of a prickly generation. It may even involve a simnel cake, however strongly individuals object to marzipan.

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