How much do you know about the origin of Mothers Day? As I began writing this talk I realized I knew nothing about it, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered that Mother’s Day was first suggested by Anna M. Jarvis as the national observance of an annual day honoring all mothers. She did so because she had loved her own mother so dearly. It has a rather controversial history and Anna Jarvis spent much of her life fighting to keep it a pure celebration of Motherhood and not commercialized as other holidays have been. But to a large extent she failed at this and suffered some serious consequences in hr later life as a result. I will explain as we go along.
One thing I noticed while writing and then correcting the bulletin for this morning is that I wasn’t sure how to spell Mother’s Day. It turns out I’m not the only one. There are many sites online that explain what the standard form is and why. It was Anna Jarvis herself who insisted that Mother’s Day have an apostrophe before the “s”. That has become the standard way to write it, and this applies also to other holidays like Father’s Day, St. Patrick’s day, Valentine’s Day, and so forth.
I also wondered if Mother’s Day is celebrated in other countries. Actually it is in quite a few including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Australia, Mexico, Canada, China, Japan, and Belgium, but many of them do so on a different Sunday than the second Sunday in May.
Anna Jarvis was influenced a great deal by her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, a woman who worked as a social activist and taught Sunday School at their local Methodist Episcopal Church in Webster, West Virginia. Ann Jarvis had 11 children, Anna being her seventh and one of only four who lived past childhood.
As an adult Anna Jarvis finished two years of college and became a teacher. Later, despite her mother's urging to return to her childhood home in West Virginia, she moved to Philadelphia, taking a position at Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company, where she became the agency's first female literary and advertising editor.
At a memorial service for her mother on May 10, 1908, Miss Jarvis gave a carnation, her mother's favorite flower, to each person who attended. Within the next few years, the idea of a day to honor mothers gained popularity, and Mother's Day was observed in a number of large cities in the U.S.
On May 9, 1914, by an act of Congress, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day. He established the day as a time for ''public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.''
By the 1920s, Anna Jarvis' original symbols had been appropriated by the floral industry promoting the use of white carnations and then introducing red carnations also. The red carnation represented living mothers and the white carnation honoring deceased mothers.
As the floral companies steadily increased the price of carnations Anna Jarvis attempted to counter these commercial forces, creating a badge with a Mother's Day emblem as a longer lasting alternative to the carnations. Her negative opinion of these commercial forces was evident in her commentary. She wrote:
“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.”
However, as the years passed, Anna Jarvis grew more and more disenchanted with the growing commercialization of Mothers Day. Her efforts to hold on to the day's original meaning led to her own economic hardship. While others profited from the day, Jarvis did not, and eventually was no longer able to support herself. Her circumstances forced her to spend the later years of her life living with her sister Lillie.
But she remained active in attempting to reform the celebration of Mothers Day. In 1943, at the age of 79, she began organizing a petition to rescind Mother's Day. However, these efforts resulted in her being placed in the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I could not find any information about the details of how this came about but it was people connected with the floral, confection and greeting card industries that paid the bills to keep her in the sanitarium until her death on November 24, 1948, at the age of 84. It isn’t hard to imagine why these industry leaders were so generous, but I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Mother’s Day is kind of an exception among secular holidays because there is so much overlap between the secular and the religious involved in giving birth and nurturing children.
For one thing, among the many nurturing things a mother does, teaching about the religious beliefs of her faith is certainly one of them. Of course, the main tenet of the Swedenborgian faith after love for the Lord is charity or love for one's neighbor. The first encounter children have with charitable activity is the caretaking they receive from their primary caregiver, and that is usually their mother.
But whether it is a woman or a man providing this nurturing it is clear that it takes a lot of concerted effort and perseverance to do a good job of raising kids. It is perhaps the fundamental form of charity among human beings, and in this way it spans the gap between the secular and spiritual life.
This is reflected in scripture when we examine how the word “mother” is used in the inner meaning. In the inner meaning of the Word, the term "mother" means the love of the church. Eve, the fictional first mother, presented in Genesis as the matriarch of the human species, really stands for the love or will of the Most Ancient Church. "Eve" refers to the will or love in the church that preceded all the ensuing churches presented as her descendants, beginning with Abel and descending all the way to Lamech and Noah.
These sons of Eve symbolize the various doctrines that developed in the course of the church's history. Doctrinal differences foster new churches and so the generations following Eve symbolize new churches formed from differences in people's beliefs based on what they desired.
In the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life, we find that the relationship between Jesus and his mother appears somewhat problematical. Although the Gospel writers refer to Mary as Jesus' mother, Jesus himself is never quoted as calling her mother. In fact, in the Bible when he does refer to his mother, he always calls her "woman." To the casual reader this seems rather rude, coarse, and impersonal of Jesus. But being so would be so uncharacteristic of Jesus that we must assume there must be more to it. And there is.
At the wedding in Capernaum when she approached him about the lack of wine for the wedding, the Lord said to his mother, "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not come yet". What does he mean? I believe she is asking him to do something she knows he can do, but that he is not yet really prepared to reveal to others.
Here Mary is "woman" not "mother" because the child she bore is the Lord God the incarnate Savior. In His spirit he is God and God has no mother.
When he was on the cross, his mother and the disciple whom he loved stood before him. Jesus said to them, "Woman, behold, your son!" And then he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!"
What Jesus is telling them is that the church he is founding is the "mother" of the religion he is bringing us. That church is based on charity. Charity is good works and the disciple Jesus loved symbolizes love expressed in good works.
In the inner meaning of the Word, the disciples each represent some aspect of faith, and the disciple referred to as the one Jesus loved is the disciple who represents the works of charity, or spiritually good works. This, of course, refers to the second great commandment, the one we are to live by, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” which lies at the heart of the doctrine of the Christian church.
So motherhood carries a meaning for us from a spiritual perspective far beyond that of the bearing and nursing of children.
What "child" is it that our mother the church produces and raises up? We are born in a purely natural state. We have a spirit in which the Lord plants life, but as we develop on the earth we are predominantly natural beings.
Our natural father and mother conceive us and nurture our natural self as it grows. We also receive remnants of spiritual truth implanted in us by the Lord. These come to us internally and in the teachings we hear from our parents, the church, and in reading the Word.
When love of and concern for the Lord becomes our predominant love it is the church that becomes our mother. Spiritual conscience is developed within us from ideas that come to us from the Lord.
So we have two mothers. We have our earthly mother through whom we are brought into these physical bodies and by whom we are nurtured physically, and hopefully also spiritually, and we have our spiritual mother, the church within the regenerated person.
What we need to realize is that we can all act as spiritual mothers to each other and to those outside the church. Everyone who has the church within also has the mother within.
So on this mother's day, let's remember our earthly mothers and show them the love we have for them. But let us also remember the Lord and his church, the mother we can experience within bringing us to the Lord and to eternal life.
READINGS
Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 66:13
As one whom his mother comforts so shall I come for you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.
New Testament Reading: Ephesians 6:1-3
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. "Honor your father and mother" (this is the Lirst commandment with a promise), that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the Earth.
Reading from Swedenborg: True Christianity 102.3
Here I will add something previously unknown. On one occasion I was given an opportunity to talk to Mother Mary. She happened past, and I saw her in heaven over my head in white clothing apparently made of silk. Then, stopping for a while, she said that she had been the Lord's mother in the sense that he was born from her, but by the time he became God he had put off everything human that came from her. Therefore she adores him as her God and does not want anyone to see him as her son, because everything in him is divine.
