Cathedral Mothering Sunday 2024
This morning in the Mother Church of our diocese we celebrate Mothering Sunday, and Mother’s Day. It comes as a welcome interlude in our Lenten progress towards the Passion of our Lord and the Risen Christ of Easter. It provides an opportunity to reflect on our beginning and upbringing. To reflect on our experiences of family and relationships.
In these days of woke, gender and identity arguments, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day have not yet become Birth-parenting Days.
Of course, Mothering Sunday can be as difficult for some of us, as it is a happy time for others. Many do experience good times and memories of their mothers. Some have never known their birth mothers. While others real sadness at not having children.
The story of the birth of Moses is a tale of women whose mothering instincts challenge power and powerlessness. The Hebrew midwives and Pharoah’s daughter choose life and wellbeing over fear and infanticide. The birth waters of the river and the safety of the reed basket deliver new life. The uncertain destination is an image of hope. The fostering and eventual adoption of Moses are confirmation that love conquers all.
The story of baby Jesus echoes that of Moses. The straw manger, Herod’s wrathful slaughter of innocent children. The kindness of the inn keeper, the parenting of Mary and Joseph, and the blessing of elderly Simeon.
Like many I am a big fan of Call the Midwife, the acclaimed and long-running BBC TV drama following a group of Religious Sisters and Midwives living in St Natas House in London’s East End. Beginning just after the Second World War and moving through the Baby Boom of the 1950s, the drama has now reached the iconic Moon Landing in 1969. The final episode of the latest series was screened last Sunday but you can watch all 13 series on catch-up channels.
As I was born in 1951 and grew up in London, the events and experiences resonate with me quite deeply. The delivery of babies and care of mothers, children and the elderly, the personalities and household circumstances illustrate the truth that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’.
The social issues of post-War austerity were overwhelming. Poverty and ignorance, slum landlords and precarious employment; Windrush racism, sexism, and homophobia; informal fostering and bureaucratic adoption; abuse and complex family discord. Call the Midwife follows historical events and political changes, scientific advances, and the early years of the NHS and free medical care for all. No difficult story line is fudged, and many episodes are intense.
Call the Midwife reminds me why I followed a vocation as a priest. Ordained in 1976, my parish ministry immersed me first in the tenements and vast housing estates of Dundee, and later in multi-racial inner-city Nottingham with its poverty, single parenting and mental health crises, prostitution, and gun crime.
The rich tapestry of the Midwife storylines was alive and well (or not so well) in the 1980s and 1990s, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that, ‘there is no such thing as society’. Yet there is no ‘me’ without ‘us’. For Jesus, our neighbour is found in the story of the Good Samaritan.
As cathedral worshippers, and wherever we live, we know this to be true and we strive for better things for those around us. Problems have not disappeared. In the forthcoming General Election, uppermost issues for people are the cost of living, the NHS, immigration, housing, the affordability of early years care of children and the social care of the elderly and cutbacks in local authority services.
Call the Midwife is centred on the often-neglected experiences of women – mothers and daughters, sisters and grandmothers, aunties and many more. On Mothering Sunday, we celebrate this richness.
The crucial thread which runs through Call the Midwife is Christian hope in caring. In childbirth the thin membrane between new life and mortality, the care of baby and mother, and the determination to make all things well are carried in the timeless prayers of the Religious Sisters.
Our faith is enriched by the courage and skills of individuals, the enduring spirit of community, and the simple goodness of people supporting each other day by day.