A Musing Amma
Lent 4: Mothering Sunday Isaiah 66: 10, 11, 13
Janet Morley in her All Desire’s Known takes me is a different direction this week. In the United Kingdom in some church traditions, Lent 4 is known as Mothering Sunday or Laetare Sunday. It originated as a time midway through Lent to give some respite from the rigors and darkness, expressed in letting servants and others go home to visit family, offering each other treats. It also was a time when penitential purple vestments were exchanged for rose colored ones, to give hope and rest along the 40 day journey. I am ready for this!
God our mother, you hold our life within you, nourish us at your breast, and teach us to walk alone. Help us so to receive your tenderness and respond to your challenge that others may draw life from us, in your name. Amen.
The roses are beginning to bloom in my garden, my Sutter’s Gold rose the first. I am not a gardner by disposition or skill, but I love the roses given to me by a friend, Marianne, as I left a parish. They are a seasonal and constant reminder of God’s tenderness and care. Marianne was a quiet and faithful follower of Christ. When she was widowed, she blossomed into a leader and adventurer. She had spent her whole life nurturing her family, classroom, community. But the kind of caregiving she claimed in this new adventure of life was wild, imaginative and expansive. She spent Holy Week and Easter at a monastery far away. She went on trips that expanded her horizons, met her long time hopes. At the same time she remained close in Spirit to her adult children and her grandchildren who were suffering. She spoke with boldness her truth with a kind of clarity and confidence that had not been in evidence before.
When it came time for me to leave the church that I was serving, Marianne’s creativity came full bloom. Sometime before, we had both read a poem by Marge Piercy which we had loved about the blooming of a Sutter’s Gold rose. As a farewell gift to me. Marianne ordered a Sutter’s Gold rose and three other rose bushes to be sent to my house and planted in my garden as a blessing. Fifteen years later they continue to bloom profusely every year. In the Middle Ages, the popes used to send golden roses to the Catholic kings on Laetare Sunday as a blessing. Each Spring in my garden the golden rose blooms in blessing to remind me of Marianne, saint of God now gone to be with God, who paid extraordinary attention, who lavished an imaginative gift , who offered quiet thoughtfulness. I draw life from the visual and fragrant reminder of God’s loving care demonstrated in her care for me.
So much of Lent has felt so hard this year. I am committed to do each day something that makes for peace. But peace seems so far away, so out of reach. So on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, I come apart to rest in my garden, letting the rose teach me of tenderness and compassionate care. I am reminded of the road that Jesus took to Jerusalem, not manic or unremitting, but spacious and deliberate enough to consider the lilies or roses of the field, open enough to play with children, free enough to drop in at Bethany for supper with the Mary/Martha/Lazarus family. So as I watch my roses bloom this Sunday, I pause to inhale, to small the roses, to let the sweet incense of Grace and Compassion waft through me before getting back on the Lenten road. When we come to the communion table with Jesus, we are often given the words “Bread for the journey, strength for the day!” This Fourth Sunday, Mothering Sunday Laetare Sunday of Lent reminds me that roses can be bread, that remembrance can be strength and that Grace is a constant companion on this inner way.
May this journey continue with the restoration that kindness, replenishment and Presence bring!
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