Toward the end of the first half of the 20th century, in the deeply religious, African-American community, our nation’s capital, into which I was born and began my cultural formation, and in the industrial mid-Atlantic and rural South before my immersion in USVI culture over the last third of the 20th century to the current day, Mother’s Day seemed to be the second most highly observed celebration of the Church Year. Only Easter, the Sunday of the Resurrection, topped Mother’s Day in attendance, in rich personal tradition, and in enthusiasm.
I remember the new Mother’s Day outfits for church, the carnations (red for the living, white for the deceased, or pink or other colors for all), and the trips to wherever the matriarch among the living mothers of one’s family dwelled. I also remember in church seeing the broad smiles and laughs of unremitting love and the tears (yes, and sometimes wails) of joy, of gratitude, of mourning, of grief — and perhaps of some guilt of the neglectful or naughty.
Have I encountered differences here in the USVI’s anthropological salad bowl? Only a few; only some differences manifesting the possibly nonessential, albeit interesting, cultural interplay among the different practices of continental U.S. African Americans, of USVI African Americans, of U.S. Virgin Islanders more attuned culturally to the ways of other Caribbean islands (especially islands that have been or remain in the British Commonwealth) from which they, their forbears or other close relatives emigrated, and of Caucasian Virgin Islanders from the continental U.S., the U.K., Denmark or countries on the European mainland.
And why at Mother’s Day do there appear to be only a few differences? Some cite the ever-growing power of commercial purveyors. However, I believe that those merely conflate in their own, sometimes banal way, what we find at bottom and celebrate on Mother’s Day: a salutary reservoir of common values throughout humanity, values that draw on what I consider to be the common core of our religious belief systems.
I refer, first and foremost, to a special kind of love common to mothers. I refer to what in the Greek of the New Testament era was known as “storge” — powerful (if not inextricable), instinctive, natural affection arising out of close, familial affinity.
Explaining the concept to a class of ministerial aspirants on St. Thomas a few years ago, I spoke of the love of a mother who cannot swim, but who will instantly jump into the deep end of a swimming pool to rescue her drowning child and of the love of one who will run in front of an oncoming bus to rescue her insouciant playing child who is about to be run over. I shall never forget that I was interrupted by an experienced, mature mother who was (and remains) theologically attuned. She said, “No, Father Wes, ‘storge’ love would impel that mother to draw on something overwhelming within her, enabling her to block and pick up the oncoming bus and toss it safely out of the way!”
Who would not wish to honor such?
Furthermore, our shared Mother’s Day practices should definitely honor the undeniable applicability to mothers, especially, of the conclusion of the Apostle Paul’s chapter 13 of the First Letter to the Corinthians, as well as applicability to mothers especially of the famous Hebrew alphabetical acrostic known as the Old Testament Hymn to the Virtuous Wife. (See Proverbs 31:10-31.)
The former at verse 13 bids us to esteem and emulate, above all, “agapé” love — like the love of mothers which, especially but not exclusively regarding their children and other kinfolk, is most often great, caring, nurturing, and indeed “universal” (preferring none over others). Defying logic, the law and common sentiment, this love of mothers uncannily is most often unconditional, no matter what an unruly child may have done.
Meanwhile, the latter, the hymn in Proverbs 31 (possibly written as much as millennium earlier than First Corinthians), bids us honor in a special way the women who fear God and who see to the proper education of their households in that fear.
It should be noted that in the British world, “Mothering Sunday,” for almost a half millennium has been observed as part of the “time-out” refreshment associated with Laetare Sunday, the Fourth Sunday in the Season of Lent. In time, it has come to refer to practices akin to the American Mother’s Day. However, originally it had to do with the appropriateness in Lent of returning for re-creation to one’s “mother church” — that is, the church where one was baptized or otherwise became a member of the Christian fold (Consider the popular Andraé Crouch ballade that seems to refer to this sacred practice of revival: “Take me back … to the place where I first received you.”)
While we note this obviously wise, though possibly accidental association, what I wish to commend and lift up here is simply use, to some extent, of the term, “Mothering Sunday,” referring to the values and their manifestation rather than to their particular human instrumentality.
This last is based on our growing understanding, in the USVI and elsewhere, that the values that we honor on Mother’s Day may under some circumstances have to do with the mother’s role played necessarily by someone other than the biological mother. My personal test polling recently confirmed for me the long dominant mothering role played by grandmothers — like mine, who taught me the wonder of deep faith and unremitting religious practice — and by stepmothers or adoptive mothers, by fathers or stepfathers, occasionally by grandfathers or the “step” version of these last, and by persons of either gender who take on the role wherever the need is apparent.
How common and right it might be nowadays to follow the lead of the “commercial purveyors” and to say, “Thank you, and God bless you! For you have truly been like a mother to me.” Please join me in extending well wishes for a happy and blessed Mothering Sunday, American style. Indeed, “Take me back, dear Lord, to the place … where I first believed!” Amen.
— The Rev. Dr. Wesley S. Williams Jr., K.St.J. is bishop’s sub-dean for St. Thomas and St. John and Vicar of Nazareth by the Sea Episcopal Church in the Diocese of the Virgin Islands (U.S. and U.K.) and chairman of SRMC All Faiths Hospital Chaplaincy
