Happy Mother's Day

Today is Mother’s day in case you didn’t remember or hadn’t noticed all the advertising to buy Mom something......anything... jewelry, appliances, cards, books, flowers.

 I have to confess.... I don’t really like Mother’s Day all that much.  My own Mother died shortly before Mother’s Day when I was in my early twenties and my oldest daughter was just 5 years old... we went to Disneyland that year for Mother’s Day ......... and avoidance of this holiday has been my pattern ever since....   

And there’s the thing, talking about Mothers or Mothers day isn’t always as a easy as it sounds anyway.....  When you mention Mother’s day people will start to tell their stories about abusive relationships, or non-existent relationships...….or the mother whose son was doing drugs again and she is so angry at him and feeling guilty because she is so angry...  these women were not looking forward to Mother’s Day either.  

So I decided I needed to adjust my attitude a little bit by finding out about what Mother's Day is all about.  After a bit of research I found out that the practice of honoring mothers’ has been around for a very long time and typically was a celebration of mythological deities and other symbols of motherhood…...mother nature, mother earth….  With the rise of Christianity in Europe and England the focus of celebrating mothers became a day to honor the Virgin Mary…the Mother of Jesus…… over time, all mothers came to be included …….And that celebration became known as Mothering Sunday………..  a compassionate holiday that was focused on the working classes of England. 

Here in the US, mothering Sunday was never  celebrated and Mother’s Day as we know it did not become an official holiday until 1914 when Woodrow Wilson signed it into national observance, declaring the 2^nd Sunday in May as Mother’s day. 

And we have embraced Mother’s Day ever since… this year alone we will spend 18.6 billion dollars on our Mothers and those who have been mother’s to us…… 671 million dollars will be spent on Mother’s Day cards and over 1.9 billion dollars on flowers.  

But before Hallmark, bouquets of flowers and mother’s day brunches…this day was to have be a day of peace, to honor and support mothers’ who had lost husbands and sons in the carnage of the Civil War.  Julia Ward Howe who was an abolitionist, feminist, poet, and the author of the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, nursed and tended the wounded and the dying during the Civil War… the devastation that she witnessed inspired her to call out to women to “rise up through the ashes of devastation” urging a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace and justice.  

“Arise then women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of fears … say firmly, we will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies…..Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession…….  As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel…... Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. …. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace…… each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar……………but of God”.

Her basic conviction was that though the world may be divided by war and conflict, there is something in the experience of childbirth that binds the mothers of the world together into one family.

The struggle to gain voting rights for women, the cause of peace among the nations of the world, the fight against poverty and the abuse of children, these were the central concerns of those who established Mother's Day. Mothers’ day was a day not simply to remember one's own mother, but to find lessons that apply to all, lessons about the essential meaning of life for us all.

Julia Ward Howe and the others who called for a “mother’s day” recognized that we are all bound together by our common humanity. That it’s not enough to just recognize our own mother’s, Mother's Day is also about justice and peace for Mother's everywhere, wherever they may live; whether it is right here in Phoenix, or in the Sudan, Afghanistan or Nigeria.  

"Let [us] then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace…… each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar……………but of God”.