Mothers of Salem

 The link for this week's live-streamed service is here.

This week we celebrated Mothers' Day, with cake. Yay!

When I was a child, we wore a flower to church on Mother's Day, a coloured one if your mother was living and a white one if your mother had passed away. In northern Ontario, finding flowers in bloom in early May was a challenge. We often resorted to the potted geraniums on a sunny windowsill. Not exactly a fashionable boutonniere but it did the trick. The actual flower wasn't important. What mattered was the symbol of love and respect for mothers. 

Fathers' Day didn't carry the same cachet. And there was no "children's day." Perhaps that is why the church, in her wisdom, has moved to "Christian Family Sunday," so we can celebrate the special kind of love that binds kith and kin together.

As part of the Sunday service we sang, When Mothers of Salem, a favourite with our clerk of session. We use the 1972 Book of Praise at SPPC. The hymn did not make it into the "new" Book of Praise, published in 1997. In fact, many of the hymns I sang as a child are omitted from the latest version of our hymnbook. Anyone remember "When He Cometh?" It's not in the new hymnbook either, yet, while I was pulling weeds in the flower bed and thinking about this blog, I discovered I remembered every word. What we teach children really matters. Those lessons and poems will last a lifetime.

"When Mothers of Salem" was penned by  William Medlen Hutchings, in 1850. It was was written for the anniversary service of St. Paul's Chapel Sunday School, Wigan, in 1850, and was published in a revised form in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine of June 1850. The text is based on the Biblical story told three Gospels, Matthew 19, Mark 10, Luke 18

Although the text is a retelling of the Biblical story, it was seen as a "missionary" hymn, due to these lines in the last verse, "O soon may the people of every land and nation, /Fulfil Thy blessed word, and cast their idols all away;"

The new hymnbook does not have a children's section, but it has an index of "Items for Children and Youth." The index includes everything from Christmas carols to communion. The segment on Mission contains seven suggestions, including "Jesus bids us shine." That's one I recognize from childhood. 

Neither our "old" nor our "new" hymn books list "mothers" in the topical index, but both refer to "family," and both include the hymn, "Happy the home when God is there." That hymn is a great reminder that giving mom a day off and maybe breakfast in bed, is a great way to show her love, but it is God who makes a home truly happy. Another memory from my childhood was that the whole family pleased mom by going with her to church on Mothers' day!

Western culture has secularized many of our holy days, while the church has taken the secular Mothers' Day, and shaped it into a celebration of family with God at the heart of our human relationships. 

I hope everyone had a Happy Mothers' Day and that the children did the dishes. I also hope we all gave prayers of thanks to God for His divine love.