Thread by @sometimesalight

Per previous thread about Mother's Day:

Some good comments on it about how the larger rhetoric around biological mothering affects one's ability to access & engage in Mother's Day celebration.

I think these fall under "how we celebrate" critique. ISTM that a church & culture built on personal experience will unintentionally personalize other features of worship & life. In such spaces, motherhood loses its power as a *category* & becomes a matter of personal identity.

So we often DO end up celebrating Mother's Day as a kind of personalized day which cuts out those who aren't mothers or who experience pain in this their personal experience of motherhood.

Instead of inviting us into a celebration of the concept of motherhood--one that every human being has a vested interest in--it becomes a celebration of the individual mother.

This results in (at least) two harms:

1)The alienation of those who aren't mothers & thus don't have a personalized experience of it to celebrate.

2) The loss of a really beautiful category that we need to understand all kinds of other things beyond biological parentage.

When individual mothering replaces the category of motherhood, it reduces it & strips it of its power b/c it can only ever be expressed through the limits of the individual's experience of it.

Correspondingly, when individuals are invited into a larger reality--one that transcends human biology--it grants access to all & allows us to celebrate the people & institutions that have birthed in so many different ways.

All that to say, Mother's Day itself isn't the problem so much as what's happening underneath it. What categories are our celebrations built upon?