Mother’s Day: From the Church to a flourishing business

New Delhi: In ancient India, parents were given the stature of gods & gurus and people have been worshipping their mothers since or even before the Vedic period. Scriptures and history books are full of inspiring stories about the sacrifices that mothers made for their children. India’s ancient traditions even worshipped the forces of nature as ‘divine mother’, and people here still consider the land as mother, she is referred to as ‘matra bhoomi’, (the motherland). For this motherland, lakhs of proud Indians laid their life during the British Raj, so that ‘mother India’ could get freed from the grips of colonial masters. Thousands of great freedom fighters happily accepted the gruesome tortures & deaths by numerous foreign invaders, and in the end, their love & devotion for their motherland won. Centuries-old slavery was thrown out and precious freedom was gained.

Today on Mother’s Day, it is very important that we understand our Indic culture and also history of the current version of the Mother’s Day celebration.

Mother’s Day was originally started as a Christian festival in the United Kingdom and parts of Europe as ‘Mothering Sunday’. The idea was to honour and visit the ‘mother church’ where one was baptised and became a ‘child of the church’. People were moving around for work and wars in those days, so it became an important Christian festival for the faithful Christians to return to their ‘mother church’ to offer their service on this day. They decided fourth Sunday of a particular month to celebrate this.

Slowly, this tradition of ‘mothering Sunday’ started fading, and around the early 1900s it got merged with an American version of ‘Mother’s Day’.

There is an interesting story behind this American Mother’s Day. There was a lady named Anna Jarvis, whose mother Ann Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, after her death her daughter decided to dedicate a special day to honour the sacrifice every mother makes for her children. In 1908, she organized the first Mother’s Day at a Methodist church in West Virginia. This event was a huge success and slowly, her movement started gaining traction and thousands of people started celebrating Mother’s Day around the country. She wanted to get this added to the list of national holidays in America. Anna Jarvis started many campaigns to get this done and finally in 1914, the then President Woodrow Wilson gave a go-ahead to this and the second Sunday of May was officially declared as Mother’s Day.

But the story didn’t end there, over a period of time, the popularity of this day started growing and many businesses saw an opportunity in this. New products started emerging in the markets ranging from special Mother’s Day chocolates, cards, candles, etc. Actually, everything that one can think of started getting the tag of a ‘special Mother’s Day gift’. It became a commercial festival.

Anna Jarvis, who was seeing this commercial trend was very upset with these new developments. Now she started many campaigns to end this festival. She never wanted to make it into a profitable opportunity for businesses. She wanted to keep it authentic. But that didn’t happen. The commerce had taken over and in due course of time, it became an international business.

Today, social media and business advertisements have brought ‘Mother’s Day’ to everybody’s notice, a huge number of people actively participate in it. They buy products for their mothers, take them out for dinner, buy all kinds of gifts for her etc. But by the next day, it is all gone. Life comes to the usual daily activity and the love, care & gratitude that the mothers deserve is soon forgotten. The inner mind says, “Since I have paid respect to my mother and have treated her well on Mother’s Day, I am a good child and my job is done and the responsibility is over”.

Mothers are very special; they are the foundation of not just future generations but future civilizations also. Human understanding must expand, the definition of the mother must not just include the biological mother (she is really important, without her no one can exist), but at the same time, the definition of a mother must also include mother earth, rivers, and all of nature, because that too give birth, nurture & sustain life. It must also include the ‘mother land’, this great nation we call Bharat. And the definition must expand even more, it should also include the highest mother, ‘the Devi’, mother of all, who is the source of all forms of life on earth.

In India, there are dedicated festivals to celebrate this motherly aspect of divinity. As Navratri pooja, Kali pooja, Durga pooja and so many other forms of worshipping the divine mother. These Indic festivals are a constant reminder that without this feminine energy, life is not possible. They also act as a regular reinforcement that every human must inculcate deep respect, gratitude & prayerfulness towards ‘the mother’. Now, something as profound as this, cannot be done on just one Sunday of a year, and that too under the influence of commercial industry or as a FOMO (fear of missing out), this pure inner ‘bhav’ (emotion) towards ‘the mother’ must be maintained every day, 24×7.

In our culture, bowing down to one’s mother every morning before leaving for work was a regular practice. But in these times of modernity, people tend to run towards the new fashion & buzz and leave the old traditions behind, no matter how significant, deep & impactful those traditions are.

Mothers are not demanding; they just need a caring hug. It is every child’s Dharma (duty) to offer their mothers undivided time & attention, to take care of her in every possible way, and if she is away, then try to speak to her at least once a day. This will be the authentic expression of love, respect and care that the mothers need and not the expensive gifts or dining out once a year.

It is time that the current generation revive India’s great ancient culture and forgotten practices and treat each day as ‘Mother’s Day’.

About Sri Anish

Sri Anish is an ex-corporate CEO & a successful entrepreneur. In 2006, he moved to the Himalayas & spent over a decade for his deeper spiritual quest. After this sadhana period, he was guided to move back into public life to bringing spiritual awakening to the world through his talks, writings, retreats, programs and works of seva.