A Sermon for Mothering Sunday
By Russell Stannard
Mothering Sunday is an opportunity to reflect on what it is to be a mother, and to be grateful to God for our own mothers. There are different kinds of motherhood, and I want to illustrate that by describing three mothers. Very different mothers but, as we shall see, all sharing one particular characteristic
I begin with my own mother. She was everything anyone could want a mother to be: gentle, loving, fun, hard-working – she was a conductor on the London buses. All went well until I was 8years old and my brother 6. That’s when World War II broke out and my parents were faced with a terrible choice. Living in London there was the threat of bombing. My parents obviously did not want to be separated from their children, but the safety of the children had to come first. So they agreed that my brother and I should be evacuated to somewhere safer. And so it was that my mother had to live for 5 long years without her children. She was not to see them grow up over all that time. What an awful sacrifice to ask of any mother.
Even at the end of the war after my brother and I came home my parents still faced hardship. While both of them had had to leave school at age 14 to get a job and help out with the family finances, they recognized the importance of their children getting a good education. So they skimped and saved in order that I could stay on at school and get the equivalent of A level, then a further three years while I went to university and got a degree, and then yet another three years while I got my doctorate. I was 24 years old before I got my first fulltime job and so could at last stop living off my parents. I have so much reason to be grateful to my mother (and my Dad). That was mother number 1
Mother number 2 was very different. She couldn’t have been more different. She was my mother’s mother, in other words my grandmother. It was to my grandmother that we were evacuated. It was she who took the place of my mother for much of the war time. She lived in a tiny cottage in a Staffordshire village. She had been the villagers’ midwife. Unlike my mother she was a strict Victorian disciplinarian. She had a reputation in the village for being fearsome. On going to the local village school, our new classmates were utterly aghast to learn that we actually lived with this dragon. ‘What?!’ they would declare. ‘You live with Old Ma Birkin!!!’
She ruled the house with a rod of iron. There were all these rules that had to be obeyed to the letter. For example, we had to turn up on time for meals. If we were late she would bellow ‘On the mangle board!’ This meant we had to take our meal out of the house to the scullery where she did the washing. There was this old fashioned mangle with wooden rollers for pressing the water out of the washed clothes, and in front of the rollers was a board. It was off this board we had to eat standing up shivering in the freezing cold weather.
She used to beat us, thumping us hard on the back with her fists. Is it any wonder we were so relieved when the war ended and we could go back to the gentler handling of our actual mother.
Now I know what you are thinking: What a terrible person. Why wasn’t she reported to the police for child abuse? But no. Don’t be hasty. Looking back over the years I myself came to see things very differently as I learned of all that my grandmother had herself had to go through in life. In the fullness of time I came to see that her own distinctive way of mothering young children had to be the way it was.
You see, when she was a young mother she gave birth to no less than ten children. Two tragically died young. But she had to bring up eight. And this she did in the cottage where she still lived when we were evacuated to be with her. It was a TWO bedroomed cottage. A husband, wife, and 8 children in two bedrooms! There was no bathroom. The only tap was in the small kitchen. Bathing and washing the clothes all had to be done in a tin bath filled by a kettle. The toilet was outside at the far end of the backyard. It was under those circumstances she had to be a mother to 8 children. Of course she had to lay down rules. If she was to survive, everyone had to follow to the letter the worked out, laid down routine. How else was she to get them all washed dressed and ready for school on time? How else to ensure that meals were prepared and promptly eaten on time so as to make space for the next sitting because all could not sit down and eat in the tiny kitchen at the same time. And so on.
Then to crown it all, after she was widowed and in her 70’s she gets lumbered with having to bring up my brother and me for several years. This she did out of the kindness of her heart. Yes her mothering was very different from that of our mother. It had to be that way. It was what we today would call ‘tough love’.
And did it work? Of course it did. None of the children who had been in her rough care ended up any the worse for it. After all she produced my lovely mother. She produced seven aunts and uncles for me who were all perfectly lovely and OK. And she produced my brother and myself, (and, dare I say, we also turned out lovely and OK!)
Mother number 3: the mother of Jesus. Just think of what she had to go through. A teenage girl, pregnant before her marriage, at a time when that was just about the worst thing that could happen to any girl. She was forced onto a long journey on the back of a donkey in the very last stages of that pregnancy; compelled to flee with her betrothed and the baby as refugees to a foreign land – like the refugees in our own time fleeing for their lives in Syria. Only a few short weeks ago we celebrated Candlemas and heard the old prophet Simeon, while welcoming Jesus as the long awaited Messiah, nevertheless had to tell Mary that a sword would pierce her heart too, a prophecy tragically fulfilled on that first Good Friday as Mary waited at the foot of the Cross and watched the awful agony of her dying son.
So there we have it: three stories of three very different motherhoods, each adapted to the particular circumstances prevailing. And I know that the good people of St Barnabas Church could tell many other such individual stories of their own mothers. But as I said at the beginning, all these stories have a common theme: They are stories of self-sacrifice. The making of sacrifices in order to give children the best possible start in life. It can be tough being a mother. God bless them.
By Russell Stannard
Mothering Sunday is an opportunity to reflect on what it is to be a mother, and to be grateful to God for our own mothers. There are different kinds of motherhood, and I want to illustrate that by describing three mothers. Very different mothers but, as we shall see, all sharing one particular characteristic
I begin with my own mother. She was everything anyone could want a mother to be: gentle, loving, fun, hard-working – she was a conductor on the London buses. All went well until I was 8years old and my brother 6. That’s when World War II broke out and my parents were faced with a terrible choice. Living in London there was the threat of bombing. My parents obviously did not want to be separated from their children, but the safety of the children had to come first. So they agreed that my brother and I should be evacuated to somewhere safer. And so it was that my mother had to live for 5 long years without her children. She was not to see them grow up over all that time. What an awful sacrifice to ask of any mother.
Even at the end of the war after my brother and I came home my parents still faced hardship. While both of them had had to leave school at age 14 to get a job and help out with the family finances, they recognized the importance of their children getting a good education. So they skimped and saved in order that I could stay on at school and get the equivalent of A level, then a further three years while I went to university and got a degree, and then yet another three years while I got my doctorate. I was 24 years old before I got my first fulltime job and so could at last stop living off my parents. I have so much reason to be grateful to my mother (and my Dad). That was mother number 1
Mother number 2 was very different. She couldn’t have been more different. She was my mother’s mother, in other words my grandmother. It was to my grandmother that we were evacuated. It was she who took the place of my mother for much of the war time. She lived in a tiny cottage in a Staffordshire village. She had been the villagers’ midwife. Unlike my mother she was a strict Victorian disciplinarian. She had a reputation in the village for being fearsome. On going to the local village school, our new classmates were utterly aghast to learn that we actually lived with this dragon. ‘What?!’ they would declare. ‘You live with Old Ma Birkin!!!’
She ruled the house with a rod of iron. There were all these rules that had to be obeyed to the letter. For example, we had to turn up on time for meals. If we were late she would bellow ‘On the mangle board!’ This meant we had to take our meal out of the house to the scullery where she did the washing. There was this old fashioned mangle with wooden rollers for pressing the water out of the washed clothes, and in front of the rollers was a board. It was off this board we had to eat standing up shivering in the freezing cold weather.
She used to beat us, thumping us hard on the back with her fists. Is it any wonder we were so relieved when the war ended and we could go back to the gentler handling of our actual mother.
Now I know what you are thinking: What a terrible person. Why wasn’t she reported to the police for child abuse? But no. Don’t be hasty. Looking back over the years I myself came to see things very differently as I learned of all that my grandmother had herself had to go through in life. In the fullness of time I came to see that her own distinctive way of mothering young children had to be the way it was.
You see, when she was a young mother she gave birth to no less than ten children. Two tragically died young. But she had to bring up eight. And this she did in the cottage where she still lived when we were evacuated to be with her. It was a TWO bedroomed cottage. A husband, wife, and 8 children in two bedrooms! There was no bathroom. The only tap was in the small kitchen. Bathing and washing the clothes all had to be done in a tin bath filled by a kettle. The toilet was outside at the far end of the backyard. It was under those circumstances she had to be a mother to 8 children. Of course she had to lay down rules. If she was to survive, everyone had to follow to the letter the worked out, laid down routine. How else was she to get them all washed dressed and ready for school on time? How else to ensure that meals were prepared and promptly eaten on time so as to make space for the next sitting because all could not sit down and eat in the tiny kitchen at the same time. And so on.
Then to crown it all, after she was widowed and in her 70’s she gets lumbered with having to bring up my brother and me for several years. This she did out of the kindness of her heart. Yes her mothering was very different from that of our mother. It had to be that way. It was what we today would call ‘tough love’.
And did it work? Of course it did. None of the children who had been in her rough care ended up any the worse for it. After all she produced my lovely mother. She produced seven aunts and uncles for me who were all perfectly lovely and OK. And she produced my brother and myself, (and, dare I say, we also turned out lovely and OK!)
Mother number 3: the mother of Jesus. Just think of what she had to go through. A teenage girl, pregnant before her marriage, at a time when that was just about the worst thing that could happen to any girl. She was forced onto a long journey on the back of a donkey in the very last stages of that pregnancy; compelled to flee with her betrothed and the baby as refugees to a foreign land – like the refugees in our own time fleeing for their lives in Syria. Only a few short weeks ago we celebrated Candlemas and heard the old prophet Simeon, while welcoming Jesus as the long awaited Messiah, nevertheless had to tell Mary that a sword would pierce her heart too, a prophecy tragically fulfilled on that first Good Friday as Mary waited at the foot of the Cross and watched the awful agony of her dying son.
So there we have it: three stories of three very different motherhoods, each adapted to the particular circumstances prevailing. And I know that the good people of St Barnabas Church could tell many other such individual stories of their own mothers. But as I said at the beginning, all these stories have a common theme: They are stories of self-sacrifice. The making of sacrifices in order to give children the best possible start in life. It can be tough being a mother. God bless them.