How a Breastfeeding God Gives us a Pink Sunday in Lent

Notes on Laetare Sunday from a Pink Priest

An (almost) Blessed Laetare Sunday, beloved babes of God!

Tomorrow (March 30th) is my favorite Lenten Sunday: Laetare! 

The “sister Sunday” to Gaudete, the fabulously pink and joyous “Joy” Sunday in Advent (and the feast day of my church, Jubilee) you might spy some pink or rose colored vestments (clothes for leading worship) tomorrow. 

My beloved home-made Gaudete chasuble, up cycled from my mother’s old chasuble and bedazzled for gaudy joy!

While some feast days in the Christian calendar are very old – see, for example, the Triduum, the three holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter – some are more recent. Laetare dates back to the medieval period, so it’s not as recent as “Christ the King” which was born in the 20th century to combat the rise of fascism, but it’s also not amongst the most ancient holy days. 

However, Laetare Sunday is arguably one root celebration for our modern observance of Mother’s Day, because it was a Mothering Sunday in the Church. 

Let me explain:

In the medieval period, in a time when most people were illiterate and needed other ways to

(1) keep track of the calendar, and,

(2) remember what specific liturgical Sunday it was,

the Sundays were referred to by the first words said in the Mass. This part of the service is also called the introit.

So the fourth Sunday in Lent comes when we have officially crossed the midway point of this season of penitence and fasting, and even in the most dour of Lenten observances, Sunday is still a feast of resurrection. (**She is banging on pots and pans and hollering: EASTERTIDE IS LONGER THAN LENT BY TEN DAYS! Why don’t we have resurrection practices in addition to Lenten disciplines?!**)

So Laetare was a reprieve in the components of the service, not least of which was the opening line of the Mass: 

Laetare Hierusalem et conuentum facite omnes qui diligitis eam; gaudete cum laetitia, qui in tristitia fuistis, ut exsultetis et satiemini ab uberibus consolationis uestrae.

Rejoice, Jerusalem, and come together, all you that love her; rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow, that you may exult and be satisfied from the breasts of your consolation.¹

Notice: rejoice and be satisfied from the breasts of your consolation.

The spirituality of all the people is represented in the joy of breastfeeding, and really, being breastfed.

The religiously sanctioned, liturgically-spoken elation is articulated through the universal experience of being children – and being children nursed by a mother. 

Who is the mother? Who are the children? The mother is God, the children are the children of Jerusalem and, by poetry and Christ … us. 

Pay attention: God here is nursing us from her body. This is not insignificant in any way, but especially given that the rest of the readings in the Middle Ages in this rite would have included the feeding of the 5,000 [men, 15,000 people] there is some potent feminine imagery of God here. 

And me sharing this is not some newfangled, 21st century weirdo-liberal nonsense. This is a 12th century Latin recitation of the Holy Bible.

In many ways, the ancient world was far more comfortable with women’s power than we acknowledge, and in the reality that the means of sustenance and life and reproduction were held in the hands of women’s bodies. I’m not syaing women had full autonomy and credit cards, I’m saying: dislocate, for a moment, from a world where convenience is in every store. Consider the need a child has to be fed, the power a lactating woman has to feed that child. Babies needed breastmilk to survive, full stop. Someone had to feed every human being with her body.²

As I say in my book, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, “All of us— all of us—only got here because we feasted on someone else’s blood. Whether we know her or not, our birth mother’s body sustained us. Fed us. From her own body. And after birth, if the birthing person can and chooses to do so, babies are sustained by breastmilk. For centuries before the genuine miracle of formula, the human population only survived because people fed babies with their bodies.” (McManus-Dail, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, p. 144).

We underestimate this power in femme bodies, and we underestimate the power of this image of God, to our peril. Both matter.

As Carol Meyers says, speaking of ancient Israelite women and religion:

“Insofar as household religious culture dealing. with reproduction was almost exclusively female, it meant that women controlled vital socioreligious functions. Such functions are deemed marginal only when seen from the top down, from the perspective of elite, male-dominated, formal structures [emphasis mine]. But they are central to a society when seen from the bottom up, from the informal household setting in which virtually all Israelites lived. Thus, women's religious culture would have empowered them as major religious actors in their households. Indeed, in their access to the supernatural in the religious culture of the house-holds, women may have experienced power that countered other, male-specific, cultural forms.”(Carol Meyers, Households of Holiness, p. 68)

Meyers is not talking about Laetare here – she’s talking about fertility and the ancient near East – but the point she makes is still applicable.

We only devalue women’s power when we look at power with a male-power gaze.

We only think of breastfeeding and birthing imagery as ancillary to God’s self-disclosure about Godself when we look at God as, mostly, a dude in the sky.

It’s not an accident that a medieval observance of a Lenten Sunday led to the modern day celebration of mothers, and this history is a key I want us to employ when we unlock patriarchal practices around mother’s day today. We don’t wake up, in and of only ourselves, and decide to be free. There are ancestors here. There is precedent here. 

Laetare was not only the precursor to modern Mothering Sunday for this church-y chat about boobs and God nursing us. Laetare was sometime called Mothering Sunday because people would make pilgrimage to “the Mother Church” (aka, the cathedral). And, like all children, there is evidence of squabbles over who got to carry the banners and what parish got to go first in line.

Bless our hearts. Truly. 

So in the UK, Laetare is always “Mothering Sunday” (aka, Mother’s Day) because a lady named Constance Adelaide Smith both knew her history and was inspired by the work of Mother’s Day in the US (which is a story for another time … but suffice to say, it was not all hallmark cards and consumerism). 

And for us? It’s a reminder that living in the duality of God’s grace, and our sinfulness, is perhaps best articulated as gratitude for the God who nurses us. Who feeds us with her flesh and blood. Lent maybe makes the most sense to me now as a mom because I know deeply the goodness of people — and my complete inability to meet all needs at all times, thus leading to inevitable disappointment, hurt, and chagrin. Motherhood has taught me my humanity. My goodness. My failure.

What grace it is to know, then, that even I, a mother, serve a Mother who knows and loves me, and my children, and my enemies, perfectly.

…

God, who wraps us in Your care,

Clasping us to Your breast,

Giving us what we long for most—

Thank You for feeding us with the spiritual food of

Your body and blood.

Thank You for knowing what we need before

we can ever utter a word.

Thank You for being there in the stark ache of

our souls,

in the gnaw of our hunger

Thank You for loving us so completely.

We ask that You soothe us where we are struggling,

fill us where we feel empty,

and remind us:

we are small

and held

in Your eternal, loving palms.

Amen.

(from “God’s Own Body,” in God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, p. 151).

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1. For this, and much of this piece, I am indebted to The British Library’s fantastic piece from 26 March 2017, “The medieval origins of Mothering Sunday.”

2. (This comment is not side-eyeing formula, team. I use formula with my babies. We can contain multitudes! And one woman need not exemplar all women in her singular choices. I’m just pointing out the historical embodied gift and sacrifice of lactating women and people.)