The Mother of All Sundays

aka Laetare Sunday or Refreshment Sunday

Let’s be clear about this: Mothering Sunday is not Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day is an American festival first conceived by Miss Anna Jarvis, a school teacher in Philadelphia in 1907. She wanted to commemorate her mother and, like a classic school teacher, decided that everyone should join in. She lobbied Congress to recognise the day, which they eventually did in 1913. The date was set for the Second Sunday in May.

I was astonished to read in The English Year by Steve Roud that there was an attempt to have the same celebration in the UK in 1916. This had the backing of The Queen, the Bishop of London and Lady Haig. The reason is obvious. Lady Haig’s husband, General Haig (promoted to Field Marshal in 1917), was prosecuting the war on the Western Front and mothers were losing their sons by the thousand. The official day came to nothing, but the American festival had become forever entangled in the older British forerunner, Mothering Sunday.

You may have heard that Mothering Sunday was the time for unmarried men and women, particularly those in service in big country houses, to return to their home, or ‘mother’, church. It all feels reassuringly Downton Abbey-ish, doesn’t it? Well done, kind Lord Grantham. The Church of England in the Edwardian period would have liked you to believe this tradition was as old as the hills. But it’s not quite the case. Or it is, at least, not the whole story.

Hold my baby. The Virgin Mary hands off baby Jesus to an angel while she wrestles the devil to the ground, putting him in some kind of headlock. From the ‘Taymouth Hours’, c.1325–40. Not strictly relevant but I thought you’d enjoy this one.

Homogenised Mother’s Milk

As always, the truth around these traditions is far more layered and lumpy than we care to realise. We live in a highly centralised nation where political dictats and culture emanate from London. Moreover, living through our phones and streaming services, we feel like we’re in a global village. Festivals, like Halloween, become homogenised.

This appeals to our modern desire that everything be standardised, partly so it can be taxed (read Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott). But also we then avoid the most dreadful all of injustices, the postcode Lottery which I wrote about here. It’s all rather sad.

To be fair, the Church of England is complicit in this flattening out of regional variations. We wanted to avoid heresy and false teaching by stamping out wild variations in liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer, enforced by the Act of Uniformity in 1549, was an attempt to standardise worship. Old prayer books with the Mass had to be put to one side or buried.

Getting Medieval on Mothering Sunday

The most popular pre-reformation prayer book was the Sarum Rite. There is a reference to mothering on the fourth Sunday in Lent, also known as ‘Laetare Sunday’ or ‘Refreshment Sunday’. It being the middle Sunday of the season of fasting and penitence, there was a relaxation of the rule against playing the organ. Let your hair down. On that Sunday, the Sarum Rite says:

“Rejoice, Jerusalem, and come together, all you that love her; rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow, that you may exult and be satisfied from the breasts of your consolation.” (Translated from the Latin)

There is plenty of evidence of going back to your mother church, but not as we understand it from the late Victorian era. The custom that developed during the Middle Ages was that smaller outlying parishes would process to one’s ‘mother church’, being the local cathedral – or larger town church. In the 13^th century, Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln (1235-1253) wrote about locals processing to their cathedral (and tallest building in the world, at the time), warning about the potential for undignified chaos:

“In each and every church you should strictly prohibit one parish from fighting with another over whose banners should come first in processions at the time of the annual visitation and veneration of the mother church… Those who dishonour their spiritual mother should not at all escape punishment, when those who dishonour their fleshly mothers are, in accordance with God’s law, cursed and punished with death.” (Letters of Robert Grosseteste, trans. by Manello and Goering, p. 107).¹

Is there cake involved?

Of course there is. But again, I was surprised by what I read. The traditional Mothering Sunday treat is the Simnel cake, which is also associated with Easter which celebrates the faithful eleven apostles with balls of marzipan on the top. But maybe that should be called an Apostles’ Cake.

Again, there is much regional variation. In Devizes, not too far from me in the West Country, it was traditional for the Mothering Sunday Simnel cake to be in the shape of a star. I have no idea why.

This is a painting of St Lawrence’s, Rode in Somerset from c. 1850 by WW Wheatley - and yes, it is a little creepy, isn’t it? Plus they’re all men. Is this clipping?

What about some bizarre dance or public displays of weirdness?

Yep. In some places, ‘clipping the church’ takes place on Mothering Sunday, including at St Lawrence’s Church in Rode (pic above), very near the church where I was baptised in Beckington in Somerset.

In other places clipping takes place at the beginning of Lent. Clipping involves standing around the outside of the church, holding hands to form a circle and going in and out. If you think that sounds a lot like the hokey-cokey, then yes, I think you’ve understood it. And before you wonder if the ‘hokey-cokey’ originates in the Middle Ages, and possibly refers to Hocktide (we’ll get there after Easter), then you’ll be disappointed. The Hokey Cokey seems to be have been invented by three different people in the 1940s.

Anyway, according to Common Worship, Mothering Sunday is a thing. There’s a collect and everything. Although the collect is very Christ-centred (see below). I suspect our Anglo-Catholic brothers and sisters with more reverence for Mary use other prayers.

So that’s Mothering Sunday. Make of it what you will. Enjoy your regional variations. Don’t cause a riot in Lincoln Cathedral. But whatever you do or don’t do, make sure you do one thing: call your mum.

The Collect for Mothering Sunday

God of compassion,

whose Son Jesus Christ, the child of Mary,

shared the life of a home in Nazareth,

and on the cross drew the whole human family to himself:

strengthen us in our daily living

that in joy and in sorrow

we may know the power of your presence

to bind together and to heal;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

That’s great. But the Sarum Rite’s pretty good too, right?

1. Source: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2017/03/the-medieval-origins-of-mothering-sunday.html