You can always tell when Mother’s Day is near: the shops and florists remind us to buy flowers, chocolates and cards for your mother. Restaurants prompt us to give our mothers a break and take them out for a special meal.
Mother’s Day has become an annual ritual where consumerism abounds. But is this all necessary?
While all these gestures, purchases and rituals can be meaningful, Mother’s Day also invites us to pause and reflect more deeply on motherhood, care, love and the communities that nurture life.
Origins of Mother’s Day
The origins of Mother’s Day offer insight into how we should celebrate and spend time on it.
An American author, poet, and abolitionist, Julia Ward Howe, wrote a Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870 for women to unite for peace in the world. Her proclamation laid down the goals for the commemoration.
After that, Mother’s Day in the United States began to be celebrated on the second Sunday of May. It was established in 1908 by Anna Jarvis to honor her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, a social activist and community organizer during the American Civil War. Anna advocated for a day dedicated to recognizing mothers and their activism in the community.
This push led President Woodrow Wilson to declare the first national Mother’s Day in 1914.
As Mother’s Day became formalized, it quickly became commercialized. As a result, Anna Jarvis became disillusioned by the florists and card makers who profited from the celebration. Jarvis protested.
Julia Ward Howe also originally envisioned a Mother’s Day connected to peace and anti-war activism, calling women to resist violence and work toward a more compassionate world. Howe also did not envision it to be a day of commercialization.
These origins of Mother’s Day matter more today than ever. Today, we have the ongoing war in Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, and many other parts of the world.
As we see young children, women, and civilians being slaughtered, we want to create a resistance movement connected to the original Mother’s Day, where women called for peace and an end to war. We need to recall the origin of Mother’s Day and stand in solidarity and cry out for mothers who are losing their unborn babies, young toddlers, teenagers, and young adults to unnecessary wars that are killing innocent lives as well as damaging the Earth and its inhabitants.
So this Mother’s Day, let’s embody love and peace and protest the ongoing wars. Let’s use Mother’s Day as a time of activism and to speak out about the difficulties that mothers face, such as economic hardship, racial injustice, violence, exhaustion, ecological anxiety and inadequate healthcare and childcare.
In such difficult times, we must honor mothers not just on the Second Sunday of May, but every day. This involves asking what kind of world mothers and caregivers are forced to navigate every day.
Call to Action
Mother’s Day reminds us of the sacred work of nurturing life. Mothers, grandmothers, caregivers, mentors and community elders embody radical love, resilience and sacrifice. They teach us how to care for one another, how to survive hardship and how to build community and peace.
Motherhood reflects the heart of justice work itself: feeding, protecting, healing, comforting, peace-making and sustaining life. This is crucial as we face the climate crisis, political polarization, growing social fragmentation and wars and unrest.
Mother’s Day is a caring day, as many mothers are carrying pain and grief, and we need to offer care. Many have lost their mothers, or mothers have lost their children. There are also women who long to become mothers and are unable.
In different situations and contexts, we remember and celebrate mothers in all different walks of life and try to be in solidarity with mothers in grief and suffering.
Mother’s Day should therefore become a call to action and to peace. To celebrate Mother’s Day faithfully and as Jarvis and Howe had envisioned it to be is to affirm that love is not passive sentimentality but action. Love is active care and attention for the flourishing of others.
Perhaps the most meaningful way to honor mothers is not only through gifts, cards, or brunches, but through actively building a world where all people can live with dignity, safety, peace and hope.
Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers who help nurture a loving, peaceful and kind world.
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Grace Ji-Sun Kim (Ph.D. University of St. Michael’s College) was born in Korea, educated in Canada and now teaches in the USA as Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Religion, Richmond, Indiana. She is the author or editor of 26 books, most recently, Earthbound: God at the Intersection of Climate and Justice.
Kim is the host of Madang podcast which is sponsored by the Christian Century. She blogs on her substack: Loving Life: Loving Life and has written for Huffington Post, The Nation, Sojourners, Baptist News Global, Faith and Leadership and TIME. Kim has appeared on MSNBC, PBS and C-Span. She has been a guest on BBC Radio, Soul Search Radio, WBEZ Radio, and Keep Hope Alive Radio. She is an ordained PC(USA) minister and enjoys being a guest preacher on most Sundays.