Mothering Sunday

Mothering Sunday is a perfect day and a true challenge in the heart of Lent.  Often it is called Laetare Sunday and it is the day to stop penitence and rejoice in the goodness of God and the world around us. The introit to the Mass reads:

"Rejoice, O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her: rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow: that you may exult and be filled from the breasts of your consolation.

Rejoice.... Laetare! 

This was the Sunday when, traditionally, Christians would go ‘a’mothering’, that is, return to the church they were baptized in, or the nearest cathedral, their mother church. As a person who experiences more harm than good and more boredom than both inside of churches, how I go a’mothering has become an important question.

In a way, this is an important question for every witch. Most witches are women and even if you are not biologically female, you are participating in the female by being a witch. In a world that is currently so violent, so orphaned and so often unsafe, a good question for those of us who draw near to the Great Mother is how to join ourselves to her and bring more of her charity, her confidence, her love and her grace into this world. A friend of mine messaged me the other day and said her heart was hurting, and I told her I had just ended a relationship with an unloving and sort of wretched person. We spoke of how hot and scarred our hearts can become in a world where people who do not believe they are lovable pass on their lovelessness. Regardless if we are calling her Isis or Freya or Mary or even Mother Jesus as Hildegard of Bingen referred to her vision of the fullness of God, it is a necessary challenge to over and over again return to the heart of this Mother who is so often forgotten or denied.

 For me, returning to the Mother has been the hard work of letting go of unloving relationships and emotions that weren’t very healthy, accepting rejection (what mother doesn’t do that?) and intensifying practices I’d dropped. Returning to the Mother also means dealing with my own fragility, and surrendering to a Lady who is greater than this little and often angry me. I also think that we can simply begin to ask ourselves,

In the time we have spoken of the Labyrinth, very often we have likened the Spiral Castle to a tower, a sacrifice, a Cross, a Stang, the World Tree, all symbols which are at least a little male, and all about the bloodshed of killing something. These are symbols which at least begin to pretend that life giving sacrifice is the realm of men, which is deceptive to say the very least. It is good to remember that originally the Spiral and the Labyrinth, endlessly round, the deceptively simple path leading into a twisted and turning maze which ends in the central chamber, was originally a symbol of the Goddess, and of the body of the Great Mother and all Mothers. 

The Hanged Man in his endless variations has been a symbol of this Nexus, but these male motifs are after and beside, not before another type of necessary suffering exemplified in the Weeping Isis, the Sorrowful Virgin and that most provocative image of the 1970’s, Christa.

This is a stinging, merciless world, often loveless and untrusting. But of course that is only part of the story. We dance in love and joy and are constantly surprised not only be the beauty of the natural world, but the kindness of strangers. The momentary assaults of lovelessness shock us because, often we have already known so much love. While, in these times we may experience ourselves as living in a place that is not only unkind to women, but unkind in general, where gentleness is pushed out and rage built up, we also know that is only part of the story. This Sunday maybe we can begin to return to the Mother, even if we do not entirely understand what this means, and set our faces toward her, even when so many haven’t seen her in a long while. This is not an impossible task, but a joyful one. Nurturing is our inheritance, and She is our home. The road is joy. Laetare!