Mothering Sunday falls on the Fourth Sunday of Lent each year and churches across the country will hold special services for families. Here we look at the history of the Mothering Sunday hymn, and the origins of one of its greatest writers, Henry Williams Baker.
Mothering Sunday, the mid-Lent festival is celebrated in various ways. In the Roman Catholic Church it is traditional for the Pope to bless the Golden Rose and children feast on mothering cakes and simnel cakes. In the Anglican faith it is customary for children to present small gifts to their mothers and in times past when they were more readily available, a small bunch of violets was emblematic of the day.
It is said that Mothering Sunday derives from the pre-Reformation custom of visiting Mother Church on that day, and children away from home, especially daughters in service, would return to the family home to be with their family, and especially with their Mother on that special Sunday.
The hymns chosen for services on Mothering Sunday, not surprisingly are of mother-love and usually in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. ‘Virgin Born, we Bow Before Thee’ and ‘Sing we of the Blessed Mother’ are just two that come to mind as does that hymn of the Annunciation, ‘For Mary, Mother of the Lord’. One hymn that may not be quite so well known which speaks so eloquently of the ‘wondrous depth of love divine’ and the ‘joy to be Mother of the Lord’ is the one that starts ‘Shall we not love thee, Mother dear, whom Jesus loves so well?’. It was written by Sir Henry Williams Baker who has many fine hymns to his credit including ‘Lord, Thy Word Abideth’, ‘O Praise Ye the Lord’, and ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is’.
Henry Baker was born in 1821, the eldest son of a Vice-Admiral, and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and ordained in 1844. Seven years later he became Vicar of Monkland near Leominster on the English-Welsh border where he remained for the rest of his life. In the same year he succeeded to his father’s baronetcy. The duties of his small rural parish were far from onerous and left him considerable time to devote to hymn writing. But his contribution to the English hymnody was far greater than the dozens of hymns he wrote, for Baker can take the credit for the preparation and compilation of Hymns Ancient and Modern which did so much to promote the practice of hymn-singing in the Church of England.
A member of the Anglo-Catholic wing, Baker was anxious to restore to the church the treasures of early Latin hymns. One of his successes in that direction was to secure the many fine translations of that great hymnwriter, J M Neale. There are many writers of hymns who are better known than Sir Henry Baker, but few who can rival his contribution to the Church’s hymnody, and it is a loss to that hymnody that he died at the relatively young age of 56.
