Today is Laetare Sunday, a word which means joy – and the notion anticipates the joy of the Heavenly Jerusalem, our mother. Often we think of this Sunday as a kind of break, or refreshment, during our Lenten fast, and that is not to be dismissed, but it is not really the meaning of the joy we are anticipating. This is because Jerusalem above rejoices chiefly at the culmination of all things in Christ.

Indeed, the reading from Galatians makes the point starkly: we are in fact children of a freeborn Mother, but nonetheless in this age we are persecuted by the one born of the bondwoman’s flesh. The encouragement, the joy that we are to experience today is altogether of a future disposition: and that future disposition is the freedom in Christ because of his obedience on the Cross.

To be even more precise, Jerusalem rejoices because Christ is crucified – and our joy today is the knowledge that the One who has power to free us from slavery will in fact do so. At no point are we promised to be released from persecution – but we are encouraged to live out the freedom even now that we will inherit in Christ.

Our joy is hidden then, just as the gift of the Eucharist was hidden in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. Those who experienced that miracle rejoiced, but their joy should not be that their bellies were full for a day, but rather that Our Lord can give them bread that will satisfy, not for a day, but for eternal life.

Jerusalem as Mother gathers up those fragments and pieces them together for us. She holds those thoughts and reminds us of them when we need consolation, as a loving mother always does. In England, today is Mothering Sunday, so called because it was a day when pilgrimage was made to the Cathedral Church – the Mother Church of the Diocese, or, later on, when many women and girls were in service in big houses, it was a day when they might return to their home church – and their real mother – with a special cake, known as a Simnel cake, brought as a gift.

One of the biggest challenges in 21^st Century Catholicism is to locate our affection for physical church buildings within the context of mission. How do we respect our mother, without becoming infantile? How do we locate our affection for a particular church within the call to make disciples of all nations? The classic response is the “Catholic And” – we are called to have a missionary spirit AND called to respect our mother. We cannot have one without the other – but a more pressing concern is to commit to a given mother – in our case, our dear Oratory Church here in Georgetown – and to help her outward-looking mission grow from this particular place. In short – you can have your (Simnel) cake and eat it, too.