Parental Love

Lent Book Club: 28th March 2022

After the pastoral minefield that is Mothering Sunday, this week’s theme is parental love.

If you have been listening to the Archer’s recently (BBC Radio 4, 27/03/22) you may be aware of Sunday’s episode in which a Mothering Sunday service culminates with a row concerning a vicar, his daughter, her friend and accusations of hypocrisy. The friend’s mother was mean and the vicar lost his cool and shouted at her to get out. Meanwhile the estranged husband’s mother comforts the vicar’s daughter and asserts that she would prefer her (vicar’s daughter and earswhile best friend to her daughter in law) to be with her son. It’s all really the fault of the son/son-in-law/estranged husband in my humble opinion. Meanwhile on twitter there is a thread about the tradition of giving out flowers at church on Mothering Sunday – it can be quite hurtful if done insensitively and one solution is not to hand them out at all.

This is the backdrop for me reading today’s suggested poem!

Well, “Oh antic God” is a poem of rememberance and wishful thinking. The poet, Lucille Clifton, remembers her mother with affection. She would like to hear her late mother’s voice and asks if God could reutrn it to her. Incidentally, I do not read it quite as Bishop Richard does. She is not asking God to return to her in order to hear her mother again. The sense of it is “O Lord of then and now, return my mother’s calling to me.”

We may wish for things to go back, or perhaps come forward, to the way we remember them: just the comforting bits. But it is not going to happen, is it, much as we may want them to. Mothering Sunday, for all my good intentions, can be a traumatic occasion for some. No amount of wishful thinking is going to change that, either.

Sorry that this does not end on a cheerful note. Maybe tomorrow.

This year #LentBookClub are reading “Hearing God in Poetry. Fifty poems for Lent and Easter” by Richard Harries published by SPCK. In this book Bishop Harries introduces us to a number of poets and poems. Some may be familiar, some are old and some are new. You may follow the # on Twitter or find us on Facebook.