A Worthy Sentiment
Atlanta, GA
May 9, 2021
If we say anything is Woodrow Wilson’s fault, we are almost certain to be right. It’s a useful heuristic, if not a guaranteed one.
In 1914, Wilson signed a proclamation setting aside the second Sunday in May for Americans to remember their mothers. The idea came from Anna Jarvis, a Methodist “social activist” of a type all-too common to the Progressive era. While Jarvis was the public face of the notion, behind the scenes other forces, with whom she would later become well acquainted, were also at work.
Regardless, the sentiment was worthy…even if it didn’t require reinforcement from a president who would soon send 100,000 mothers’ sons to die on the far-flung fields of France.
For millennia, men have admired their mothers…and motherhood…without Woodrow Wilson telling them to do it.
In Nazareth…at the dawn of our own era…Mary, betrothed of Joseph, accepted the will of God, bore Christ, and was assumed to Heaven as guide and gift to Holy Mother Church. But for centuries before Gabriel came to Galilee, the Greeks groped for the maternal ideal.
Anthropologists surmise that sixty centuries before Christ, the cult of Cybele originated in Anatolia. From Phrygia it spread to Hellas, where it mingled with that of Gaea and Rhea.
Gaea, by Chaos, was mother and wife of Uranus. From her came the Giants, the Cyclopes, and the Titans…one of whom, Cronus, by Rhea, fathered Zeus. Ancient Greece celebrated Gaea as the maternal goddess of the Aegean, and more recent environmentalists hail her as the personification of the planet.
The Great Mother was later conflated with Demeter, goddess of the harvest and mother and savior of Persephone. The Magna Mater eventually descended to rising Rome…a spiritual token of how the defeated Greeks had captured their conquerors.
Meanwhile, on the other side the Mediterranean, Isis resurrected her husband Osiris, and by him bore Horus. She was worshipped by the Egyptians as a mother deity who helped the dead to the after-life, and who preserved the living in this one.
From the celestial to the terrestrial, these innate maternal tendencies persist.
In Tampa, five decades ago, a young woman carried her newborn son home from the hospital. Barely twenty, she was almost as helpless as he was. Perhaps more so. Of the two of them, he at least had the advantage of not knowing how hapless the other one was.
But had he thought his mother couldn’t acclimate to her new challenge, he’d have been wrong. Having a child…and then another…she put away childish things, and got to work.
Her considerable efforts allowed her to sons graduate college, grow into men, and raise their own families. And they have her to thank for it.
Such are the nurturing impulse and protective power of the maternal instinct, the honor of which cannot be confined to a single day. Nor should it be.
Even Anna Jarvis came to regret her advocacy. She despised the eventual commercialization of Mother’s Day, which was rampant by her later years. The woman who led the effort to establish the holiday would eventually organize petitions to rescind it. But before her campaign gained ground, Jarvis was institutionalized, and confined to the bin.
Her efforts to repeal the day for which she was famous caused Jarvis considerable financial difficulty. But economic hardship was no barrier to her remaining safely in her sanitarium. By her elderly endeavors, she had earned many willing benefactors.
To keep her contained, the floral and greeting card industries were more than happy to foot the bill. And they did so for several years, till she died, quietly in her asylum.
She never had any children.
JD
