Sermon for Mothering Sunday - 30 March 2025

I wonder if you managed to see Luxmuralis here in the cathedral this week? If you didn’t, and are not sure what it is, it’s a partnership between two artists – a visual artist, and a sound artist – and together they create light and sound installations for large buildings in particular for cathedrals. 

The effect is to step into a building you know and love and to see it in a new way – as the images and ideas in the projection, and the sounds and speech in the sound scape, bounce off the walls, creating curious juxtapositions.

The theme of the particular installation we hosted this week was Space – and we saw images of the planets, the stars, of colourful nebulae, of mathematical formulae swooping over the stone-work of the cathedral, lighting up the ceilings and the arches.

In the Lady Chapel, footage of the Apollo moon landings was projected onto the wall behind the altar, and the particular image in this sequence that struck me was a view of earth seen by the astronauts through the window of their command module, their space-ship. You can see the image on the front of your order of service.

This picture of the earth from space overlays the Icon of Mary which you can see shining through underneath. And it struck me, looking at these images together, that both have something to say to us about the origins of life, about the source of life. Mary and planet earth are types of mother. Mary of course is the mother of God, and also the ultimate mother figure in the Christian tradition – and then there is Mother Earth – our planet – another kind of source and origin from which we come.

When the astronauts in those Apollo missions left the earth’s orbit for the first time and saw planet earth in its entirety – as a globe – they were struck by the immense beauty of their homeland. Michael Collins, who orbited the moon whilst Neil Armstong and Buzz Aldrin landed on it, commented, ‘I had a feeling the earth was tiny, it's shiny, it's beautiful, and it is my home’. And we know from the stories of those who have been into space that looking back at earth is what they want to do all of the time – to gaze, and to wonder, at this place we call home.

So, the earth is our mother-land, the source of our life, our home territory in a vast sea of stars.

There’s been long tradition in Christian theology to think similarly about God – to think of God as a mother – God as our home land, the one in whom we live and move and have our being.  

And the purpose in particular of our Lenten pilgrimage is to be recalled to this homeland – during Lent we create space to allow ourselves to be drawn back home by God – to be gathered in, as a mother hen gathers her chicks, to learn to be God’s people once again.

Augustine put this so well when he prayed – O Lord, our hearts are restless until they find their home, their rest, in you.  He was convinced that all of us have somewhere, buried deep within us, a memory of our homeland, the land where we were once at one with God.  And that our earthly pilgrimage is a journey back to that home territory of God. He didn’t necessarily mean that we can only reach that place after death, but that the distractions of this world are sometimes so great, and our sense of God so buried, that it is a lifetime’s work to find God again.

Looking at that image of the earth from space – through the window of the space-ship – I am reminded of the way in which similarly, we catch glimpses of God throughout our lives. We wonder at God’s beauty from afar and like the astronauts, who felt such a longing for home when they saw the glorious fragility of the earth from a distance, so in life, we’re very often aware of a desire for something we can’t quite put our finger on – something we call God and suppose is God – a homeland that we yearn for.

One of the things we might notice in this season of Lent – when we try to have a more concentrated focus on God – or we perhaps take up some Bible study, or commit to a particular discipline of prayer or fasting – is how wayward our hearts and minds can be – how much we struggle to maintain a habit, or keep up a new discipline, We really are restless beings. We long for all sorts of things. Part of the fruit of this season is not that we overcome this, but that we notice it.

Augustine thought that the desires we feel as human beings – all this longing that we experience – and which we so often try and satisfy with quick fixes – is really the presence of God buried deep within us – the memory of God, if you like – stirring and reaching out for our homeland.  Ou desires are not so much distractions but the genesis of something deeper.

And this desire is what makes us pray. Or at least makes us want to pray. Our prayer, is the memory of God awakening in us. And so the more we become alert to that stirring, that movement of the spirit inside ourselves, the more we discover God is there already in our human awareness.

The more the vision of God dominates our view through the window of our space-ship, the more we want to orientate our whole lives towards God rather than fulfilling our desires with things that are less than God.

St Paul puts it a slightly different way when he instructs the Colossians to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly. Let the word of Christ take root, he says – let it live and grow and direct your thoughts and words and actions. Let it lead you home.

The word of Christ is like a built in sat-nav that guides us to God. A homing device to keeps us on track, to help bring our wayward desires and longings into focus on the goal we truly long for. But we have to listen that word – to give space and time for our hearts to become really attuned to it. That is the work of Lent. Time to give attention to the word planted deep within us, and to notice the beauty, and truth, and goodness in our human experience, so that we can know the source and fulfilment of our longing and let our lives be shaped by it.

To end – a prayer of St Augustine:

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the things you have made I rushed headlong, I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being, were they not in you. You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, you touched me, and I burned for your peace.