Easter 6
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
On Thursday night I went to the WICA “Youth in Arts” concert – as many of you know we had a goodly number of our youth choir singing, and Patsy Colton playing drums. It was a grand evening – many proud fathers and mothers, and some really good music.
The closing set was from a group of middle-schoolers who simply wanted to sing contemporary music together, and one of their choices was a great 20th Century anthem, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. If you haven’t heard Cohen I find the easiest way to describe what he does is write poetry and then put it to music – it’s beautiful, deeply reflective, ironic, bittersweet, often sad, and also, surprisingly, joyful.
Cohen has different versions of “Hallelujah” – different verses – one of which seems to be reflective of his struggle with how some people have sought to interpret what he meant in the original version of the song. Here’s what he says:
“There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah “
There’s a complexity to that metaphor because there’s a complexity to life – we can hear, experience, engage with the same event or moment or person differently. But, Cohen seems to be saying, whether the Hallelujah we hear is holy or broken there’s still, no matter what, a blaze of light in it. “Hallelujah” is still present, available, capable of being restored, redeemed.
Meaning resides in our lives. Sometimes our encounter with it brings us to the place of the Holy, which sanctifies us. Sometimes, in the way that we live, we can break those things that bring the most profound meaning to us, we can break our “Hallelujahs”.
But not the blaze of light – that remains.
All of this brings us to Mothers’ Day.
This is a officially not a liturgical feast day for mothers. secular feast day – the Sunday liturgical calendar doesn’t have one – no, not one! .
That’s not to say there aren’t feast days when we could celebrate mothers – every time we celebrate the events of the life of Jesus’ mother Mary we are, by extension, celebrating mothers.
But today is not – officially – one of those days. But sometimes, though, it doesn’t matter what the Church might want to say, it’s members will, in the words of Captaim Jean-Luke Picard of the Starship Enterprise, “Make It So”! And so it is!
How did we get here?
Some scholars are of the opinion that this day emerged from a custom of mother worship in ancient Greece seen especially in the festival of Cybele, a great mother of Greek gods. The Romans also had a similar festival, of Juno, when the custom was to give mothers gifts.
Hmmm! My mother the goddess! Doesn’t work for me! Works for Hallmark though!
In this country the origin is with devout Christian Julia Ward Howe, the author the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Howe was appalled by the carnage of the Civil War. In the face of the war, and of slavery that was, at least in part, it’s cause, she came to believe that women had a special responsibility to seek to shape their society for good. God demanded no less. So in 1870 she wrote a “Mother’s Day Proclamation”, in which she implored all women everywhere to form a union committed to seeking peaceful resolutions to world conflicts. In it she said this:
“Arise, then, women of this day! As men have often forsaken the plough 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.”
It didn’t work. But her vision of mothers working together for peace was picked up by another woman, a West Virginia mother named Anna Jarvis, Jarvis persuaded her Church to celebrate a “Mother’s Day” on Sunday May 12, 1907 – the 2nd Sunday of May, you’ll notice .The next year she persuaded them to designate every second Sunday in May as a local holiday to commemorate all mothers.
The movement spread like wildfire to every state of the Union. Seven years later President Woodrow Wilson signed the congressional resolution that established a national Mother's Day on the second Sunday of May – today.
Does that sound like Mothers’ Day to you? Hallmark has made pretty darn sure that “Mother as Goddess” is what we’re thinking about today. “Mother as Agent of Social Change” and “Mother as Worker for Peace” just doesn’t sell greeting cards – it’s a little too, well, “political”, isn’t it!?
But it’s more sober, and much more real, than all that stuff about Greek or Roman goddesses. And, I would suggest, Howe’s and Jarvis’ vision is a holy one, an echo from the words and work of the Prince of Peace, “The holy” not “the broken Hallelujah”.
Now all of this is not to say that any of you who are, today, celebrating your mothers as goddesses are wrong (I know which side of my bread is buttered)! Remember Cohen’s metaphor? There’s “a blaze of light in every word”? We sons and daughters do well to honor our mothers for many and varied reasons. Go forth this day and celebrate!
But the true origin of this day on this Continent leads to the inevitable conclusion that today is not only a day for the rest of us to celebrate our mothers, it’s a challenge to all of you mothers out there not to rest on your laurels and be worshiped as goddesses! Work for peace. Work for “the holy not the broken Hallelujah”. Work for God to bring an end to all war, and then you will be honoring the vision of this day, that we can beat our swords into pruning hooks, that the lion can lie down with the lamb, peace is possible. But it has to begin somewhere. May here, and in you, be one of those places. Amen.
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