… to all those who celebrate it as such, and even those who don’t.
In the spirit of conciliation, I must point out that you don’t have to be a Christian to call this day by its traditional name. Nor do you have to know it’s celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter.
But you do have to be what our American friends call a ‘liberal’ (meaning illiberal) to refer to this holiday as Mother’s Day. And you must be what my Texan friends used to call a ‘pinko prevert’ to celebrate the ludicrous Women’s Day on 8 March.
The problem with Mother’s Day is that it’s a new-fangled modern, secular term that should set any conservative’s teeth on edge. And Women’s Day isn’t just modern and secular but out-and-out socialist, which ought to cause revulsion in any conservative heart.
None of these attitudes involve any rationalisation, only the post-rationalisation of something sensed intuitively. This is a reliable test of conservatism – if your knee jerks at the right moment, you are one of us. If it doesn’t, more work is required.
Should you need my help, it’s always at your disposal, usually every day. But if you want real help, drop into your local apostolic church next Sunday. Perhaps asking the priests about the meaning of Christian holidays wouldn’t go amiss either. And you don’t even have to tell him I sent you (if it’s a her, you’re in the wrong place).
Meanwhile, once again, Happy Mothering Sunday!
Happy Laetare Sunday…actually
Even better.
It was Laetare Sunday for Bach, though he wrote no Cantatas for it. “Refreshment Sunday” is also good.
I’m sorry to report that even fifty years ago I never heard the day called anything other than Mothers’ Day (probably plural, not singular), or had any reason to suspect that it had a Christian significance. Fathers’ Day was also universally observed. Being an intolerably selfish little boy, I always wondered why there wasn’t a Sons’ Day.
I like the icon. I wish I could make out more of the text than the abbreviations for “Matēr Theou” and “Iēsous Khristos”, but those four words summarise the doctrine of the Incarnation perfectly.
Mothering Sunday refers to the mother church, a metaphor for all motherhood. I’m surprised you never heard this term fifty years ago – I think it was common currency then, certainly in the Anglican and Catholic confessions.
I don’t recall that either my mother (1929-2015) or my maternal grandmother (1898-1994) was aware of the meaning of Mothering Sunday, and they were both educated by nuns. And my father (1924-2003) was brought up in the Church of Scotland, where even Christmas and Easter used to be regarded as potentially idolatrous.
I give my ancestors’ dates because, according to Wikipedia, the modern revival of Mothering Sunday dates only from 1913, and may therefore have been too modern and progressive to make a good impression on the admirably instinctive conservatives among whom I grew up.
I regretfully repudiate some of the feasts of the Western Church, but Mothering Sunday is such a good idea that it seems to me to be worth introducing to Orthodoxy. But too many Western converts to Orthodoxy have thrown the baby away with the bathwater for there to be much hope of that.
We celebrated Laetare Sunday at our Latin Mass (when the vestments and my tie change from violet to pink). I did not learn of Mothering Sunday until I started reading this blog. I must have been born a conservative, as I always had an aversion to the U.S. versions of Mothers Day (though I loved my mother) and Fathers Day (though I am a father). I always felt they were invented by the greeting card companies.
For those who like the icon, I can recommend monasteryicons.com. They have many beautiful pieces and a large selection of icons of the Saints, feast days, Christ, and the Virgin Mary. I have purchased a few items there and have never been disappointed. My wife and I have 11″x14″ icons of our Confirmation Saints (Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint John Chrysostom).
Cultural convergence may be a necessary preparation for theological convergence, so I’m delighted to see Roman Catholic icons in Orthodox style. But where’s my beloved John Henry Newman?
I actually love Orthodox icons in Orthodox style. We even have a dozen of them hanging on the wall, or rather walls. But you are right: if our church is consecrated to St Thomas More, why aren’t any churches consecrated to St John Henry Newman? Perhaps because he was canonised too recently? Anyway, I love him too. And we have a biographical quirk in common. He realised he was a Catholic when writing his Development of Christian Doctrine. I realised I was a Christian when writing my first book. That’s where, alas, my similarities with that giant end.
But I thought Newman would be way too modern for you.
A man whose life-changing decision was based on his study of the Donatist Schism of the early Fourth Century isn’t too modern for me. I read such modern Christian authors as G K Chesterton, C S Lewis, and T S Eliot with interest and admiration, but I delight in Newman as a fellow-inhabitant of remote antiquity.
Have our bishops today ever heard of the Donatists? And have our politicians ever heard of Thucydides? If we forget the lessons of remote antiquity, is there any hope for us?
You could see me wipe my brow even as we speak. Turns out you are a conservative after all, not an obscurantist. But I agree with you about antiquity, while regretting that I don’t know it as well as I should. (But yes, I’ve read Thucydides — in a language where he is known as Fukidid.) Whitehead actually said that all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato, and actually Greek Platonists look down on Aristotle.
I don’t know if I’m an obscurantist or a conservative, but I call myself a High Tory, and if you added the adjectives “reactionary” and “die-hard” I’d take them as compliments.
The problem with Aristotle is that he writes the ugliest Greek before St Paul, and it’s tiresome to read it. But (as I’ve probably said here before) his political ideas are both sane and attractive, while Plato’s are both mad and odious.
Which syllable of “Fukidid” is stressed? If it’s the last, the name probably came directly from Byzantine Greek, which would be interesting. (If Russia had been blessed with an equivalent of the Real Academia Española, it would be unnecessary to ask, because unusual accents would be indicated in the spelling.)
Yes, it’s the last syllable that’s stressed. When Greek names go into Russian, they change. Plato becomes Platon, Sophocles is Sofokl, Euripides is Evripid, Aristophanes is Aristofan and so forth. Also, symbol becomes simvol, barbarian is varvar — and even Barbara has to make do with Varvara. There is a linguistic term for this, but it escapes me now.
As for Aristotle’s Greek, I’ll have to take your word for it. My own Greek is several notches below non-existent. And on the subject of political nomenclature, my opponent in a debate once called me a fascist, a communist and a reactionary — all in the space of five minutes. I suggested he choose one and stick with it. And once, on a radio show in the US, my left-wing opponent described himself as a social liberal but fiscal conservative. I said, “I’m just a poor boy from downtown Russia, so I’m not sure what you mean. But it sounds to me like you love blacks but hate to give them any money.” These days I’d be doing porridge for a little quip like that.
Celtic philologists would call it lenition. I’m at best only a Germanic philologist myself, so I don’t know what the more general term is.
Platon is Greek: Plato is the Latin version (in Greek, the nominative ending o is always feminine, as in Clio and Sappho). All those Russian changes seem perfectly logical to me. The change of B to V already existed in Greek before the days of SS. Cyril and Methodius, and is exhibited in modern Demotic pronunciation.
It’s likely that you and I will both be banged up soon, but on the bright side the latest plan to euthanise us has encountered some setbacks in Parliament.