Mothers' Night: Celebrating the Divine Feminine at Yule

During Advent it is customary in most Christian traditions to honour Mary, mother of Jesus. It is no coincidence that the Christian Church chose the time of the winter solstice for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, light of the world. Many pagan traditions honoured a mother goddess who gave birth to a child of light, representing the sun, as the sun is reborn at the winter solstice.

Since the end of the last ice age, Northern European hunter-gatherers have followed the reindeer migrations for their meat, milk, and skins, which provide food, clothing and shelter.  When the male reindeer sheds his antlers, the larger and stronger doe retains hers and leads the herds in winter.

The Sami, the indigenous reindeer herding people of the Nordic countries, honoured the goddess Beaivi by smearing warm butter, yellow like the sun, on door-posts at the winter solstice. Beaivi, the sun goddess, associated with fertility, motherhood and regeneration, flew through the sky as a reindeer, carrying the life-giving light of the sun in her antlers on the night of the winter solstice.  The offerings of the people helped her gain strength and fly higher and higher into the sky to return fertility to the land.  Saule, the Lithuanian and Latvian goddess of the sun, also flew across the sky in a sleigh pulled by antlered reindeer, throwing pebbles of amber into chimneys to symbolise the sun.  So next time you see Santa, spare a thought for the forgotten Mother Christmas!

I have never given birth to a child in the physical realm, but I feel very connected to the energy of gestation at this time of year. I am heavily pregnant with ideas and plans, straining to come forth into the light in the new year! What is waiting in the solstice stillness to be reborn in you, to move from the darkness into the light?

According to the Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxon pagans“… began the year on the 8th calends of January [25 December], when we celebrate the birth of the Lord. That very night, which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is, “mothers’ night”, because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night”.  (Wallis, Faith (Trans.) Bede: The Reckoning of Time, 1999.)

Many modern heathens celebrate Mother’s Night on the night before Yule, the Winter Solstice, as a celebration of the Dísir, protective female ancestral spirits, and mother goddesses, such as Frigga, goddess of hearth, home and family, and mother of Baldr, the Scandinavian Child of Light.

As part of my observance of Yule and Christmas I like to honour my female ancestors by lighting candles and spending some quiet time remembering them with gratitude. Many family relationships can be complex and difficult, and my family certainly has its fair share of those relationships.  Nevertheless, I am deeply grateful for the sacrifices my ancestors made to give me the precious gift of life.  In the Christmas story, Mary Mother of Jesus struggles through many hardships to give him birth. Just two or three generations ago, many of my female ancestors died in childbirth or were widowed early.

At Yule I think of women like my great-grandmothers.  On my mother's side were Elsie Maud Healey, who worked in a bicycle pump factory, which made ammunition in the First World War, and Ethel Ellen Higgs, who spent her teenage years in service. On my father's side were Lizzie Moore, a blacksmith's daughter, who married a farmer aged 20 and died of pneumonia aged 34, after having six children, and Nellie Crewe, who ran the family farm and brought up her five children alone when her husband Frank died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1919.  I honour my female ancestors by sharing their stories and their favourite festive foods at our family gatherings. Perhaps you do something similar. However you celebrate, may your Yuletide be blessed.

Holy Anarchy and the Song of Mary

Luke 1:46 – 55 (The Magnificat)
And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour,
for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has gone great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm,
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
he has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent empty away.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his posterity for ever.”

Perhaps you grew up, as I did, in a Protestant church where Mary was mostly ignored, but when she was acknowledged, it was as Mary, meek and mild, submitting passively to God's will. I believe this does her a terrible mis-service, because there is nothing meek and mild about the Magnificat. It is a courageous and subversive song of praise.

In the time of Jesus, Mary's homeland was occupied by the Roman empire, a brutal military regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. Both the Roman and Jewish culture were deeply patriarchal.  Women were not full citizens.  A poor Jewish woman was considered the lowest of the low. This world was not a safe place for Mary or her baby, even within her own community. Under Jewish law, Mary, as an unwed expectant mother, could be stoned to death for adultery. It must have taken great courage for Mary to say yes to what God asked of her.

Mary, lowest of the low, was chosen by God to bear the Messiah. Through her son, she hoped and expected, that God would continue this reversal, this subversion of the empire of domination.  For the Jewish people, the central events of salvation history were their liberation from slavery in Egypt and from exile in Babylon.  The concept of reversal is central to Luke's Gospel, which portrays Jesus as a prophet of the God who is on the side of the poor and oppressed.  Time and time again Luke shows Jesus speaking up in solidarity with the poor and marginalised.

When Jesus begins his ministry after his forty days in the wilderness, the first words Luke records him speaking are from the book of the prophet Isaiah, ““The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”” Luke 4:18 – 21

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who was killed by the Nazis in 1945, preached a sermon on the Magnificat during Advent in 1933, whilst ministering to a congregation in East London. 1933 was the year Hitler came to power.  The sermon begins, “This song of Mary's is the oldest Advent hymn. It is the most passionate, most vehement, one might almost say, most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. It is not the gentle, sweet, dreamy Mary that we so often see portrayed in pictures, but the passionate, powerful, proud, enthusiastic Mary, who speaks here. None of the sweet, sugary, or childish tones that we find so often in our Christmas hymns, but a hard, strong, uncompromising song of bringing down rulers from their thrones and humbling the lords of this world, of God's power and of the powerlessness of men.”

Mary's words were considered so subversive that they were banned by at least three oppressive regimes in the last two hundred years. During the British occupation of India, the authorities banned the recitation of the Magnificat at Evensong. In 1970s Argentina, the 'mothers of the disappeared' put the words of Mary's song up on posters in the capital plaza, prompting the military junta to ban its public display. In 1980s Guatemala, Mary's song inspired the poor to believe that change was possible through non-violent resistance and their government banned its public recitation.

Mary's song calls us to resist the forces of oppression in our own time. The Magnificat is a call to social justice. Social justice begins with compassion – com meaning with, passion meaning suffering. In the Gospels, we find Mary, holding Jesus, with compassion, at the start and the end of his life, swaddling him in the manger and suffering with him at the foot of the cross.

It takes courage to open our hearts to compassion, to make ourselves vulnerable enough to feel the pain of another. It takes courage to transform that compassion into action. It takes courage to stand up to the powerful on behalf of the exploited, the marginalised, the homeless, the asylum seekers. It takes courage to stand with those in our communities whose daily lives are adversely affected by unjust systems and institutions.

It takes courage to envision a new world order, the world turned upside down, to join with Mary in building the kingdom of God or as contemporary theologian Andrew Shanks calls it, the holy anarchy. It takes courage to embody the beloved community, sustained by love and compassion for all. It takes courage to say yes to God, to let love in, to be transformed by it. Mary's life is turned upside down by God's love. May we have the courage to embrace holy anarchy and let love turns our lives upside down this Christmas.