Autism Sunday
I’ve read a few comments here and there this week about churches who will be celebrating Valentine’s Day in their Sunday Services.
Me? I abhor the tendency to allow liturgy to be dominated by the greetings card industry. It has already turned Mothering Sunday into an icky sentimentality, and now apparently we have to celebrate Lurve as well. The problem is that these are personal issues that have the tendency to become exclusive. The Mothering Church includes everyone. Mother’s Day doesn’t.
Valentine, incidentally, died a horrible death and his efforts on behalf of someone else’s love was the reason for him becoming the patron saint of Love. But if you imagine that celebrating “being in love” is going to be inclusive, spare a thought for all those who are single, divorced, widowed, or – probably worse – married but living in deep loneliness with a spouse who doesn’t love them.
You could either ignore Valentine altogether, or you could talk about the REAL valentine and the challenge of loving against the odds, or you could celebrate Cyril and Methodius, or you could stick to the Transfiguration, which is the reading of the day, or (and this is my top recommendation) you could note that Sunday is also Autism Sunday, and work on celebrating and including those who find demonstrative expressions of love a totally foreign language.
More on Mothering Sunday in my book:
12 Responses to “Autism Sunday”
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author musician theologian
Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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Maggi,
Wholeheartedly agree with you about the awful tendency of the greetings card industry to take over.
When did Mothering Sunday become Mother’s Day anyway?!
Alastair
Maggi, Spot on again. Church should be the place where those who are hurting and don’t fit the social norm come for peace, healing and acceptance and not a place where they are reminded about their hurt.
Alastair – find out in the middle of “Giving it Up” – !!
hit the nail on the head again Maggi. Brilliant – the number of people who stayed away from Mothering Sun day services struck me as a churchwarden and then I was ordained and when I suggested that we should tone things down a bit! The usual ‘uproar’ about change!! i also remember one of the first ones i declined to attend myself followed Jamie Bulger’s murder and the service threatned to become a cross between a memorial for him as well as ‘Mothers’ Day. Boy ami glad to be out of it all. Feb the 14th is my eldest son’s birthday. Happy birthday Tom.
A lot I can relate to here, more than I can really say!
I’ve bought “Giving it Up” from Amazon, but it hasn’t arrived yet, been waiting all week with mounting frustration!
Hooray
So nearly slipped into the “Lurve, lurve, lurve” festal mode but reflected that the chances of getting through such a celebration without having to bolt to the vestry to throw up were pretty minimal – and that actually pretty well NONE of our recently married couples would dream of returning to church anyway….So we’ll keep the Sunday before Lent and pray for greater awareness and welcome towards those on the autism spectrum.
And I’ll see if I can get in touch with an old friend……..;-)
One of the problems of the Church is how to communicate externally – and many ideas just end up communicating internally to church leaders. ‘Valentine’s Day liturgy’ is, mostly, actually about celebrating marriage – something the Church already generates relationships with people through. It’s not just a focus on lurve in general as in the case of Valentine’s Day cards. Please read the small print.
Hi, Howard – I did read the small print! and I wholeheartedly disagree. The church wholeheartedly celebrates marriage, and spends a lot of time and effort preparing people for marriage, marrying them and following up afterwards – and I’m all for that. By all means have a valentines day special for couples. Lots of churches have a “come back to church” service for people who got married in the last year, for instance.
But that’s quite different from devoting a regular sunday service to celebrating couples and marriage. How does that “communicate externally” in a society that has more people living in single-person households than at any other time in history. What are we putting on today for widows, divorcees, single parents, the unattached, the broken hearted, the gay couples whom the church gives a highly ambiguous message? I do not support the idea of devoting a regular Sunday service to something that will exclude half the congregation.
It’s Transfiguration Sunday; it’s the Last SUnday before Lent – there were churches last year who appealed to people to come to CHurch for a free bar of chocolate to celebrate the beginning of Lent (in a subversive kind of way!) – there is so much we can communicate through without making the un-attached feel excluded and less-than.
the Church seems sometimes to believe in various classes of inferior beings – gays, the divorced, women, the unmarried etc – this seems to ignore what Jesus said, what Jesus did, and whom he spent his time with.
In Finland today is Friends’ Day which is a whole lot more appropriate don’t you think? Jn 15:15 springs to mind.