Mother’s Day Celebration and Its Significance

Today we have gathered together to celebrate Mother’s Day, a fitting culmination of the Navaratri festival. Not knowing the true significance of these festivals, now-a-days people play loud film music and enjoy cinema shows in the name of celebration. This is quite contrary to the basis concept of a religious festival. Just as the physical body needs rest when exhausted, the mind needs diversion from its routine activity – manoranjan or entertainment for the mind. Today’s entertainment video shows, disco music and movies – leave the mind more agitated and full of desires, than rested and refreshed. Religious festivals, if understood in their true perspective, not only rest the mind, but also stimulate the intellect and hence reorient our personality.

Prakriti or nature has its own laws. Animals are governed by their own instincts. A carnivore will hunt only when he is hungry. He will not kill unnecessarily. When an animal is sick, it does not eat. But man, with his superior intellect, has turned praktiti into vikriti- perversion. He sleeps more than his body needs; he eat or overeats just because it is breakfast time or lunch time! He over-indulges in every sensual pleasure. Acquisition of money, instead of being a means for living, has become an end in itself, no matter how devious the means. To bring our values into their right perspective, we need samskriti- culture. Our intellect can grasp the higher values of life, but immediately the mind tells us to compromise with these for our immediate material gains!

The word samskriti is derived from sanskara – an act of purification. Samskaras are instilled into us from birth onwards, even from our previous lives. Values have to be inculcated in children not only in school, but also at home, not by mere precept, but also by practice.

Today the need for value based education is being stressed. Spiritual talks are organized even in management courses. But these values have to be practiced in the homes also. For a child, his mother is the ideal to follow. Hence the celebration of Mother’s Day!

We are slaves of our own minds. All religious festivals celebrate the victory of good over evil, the good tendencies in our hearts over the evil and baser values of life. Vijayadasami celebrates such a victory – the victory of Rama over Ravana, over our own minds. After all the anger, greed etc. have been vanquished, the mind becomes pure and full of love.

Navaratri celebrates the worship of Goddess Durga, destroyer of the demon Mahishasura who represents the dark forces of delusion, anger, greed and pride in our subjective personality. We find that we are unable to win over these on our own and so we invoke the help of Goddess Durga. Similarly, we invoke Goddess Lakshmi to guard our wealth, so that we may not dissipate it in wasteful channels. We pray to her to give us the wealth of virtues.

When impurities of the mind have been removed and love has entered, the mind has become a little purer. Then we invoke Mother Saraswati, the goddess of learning, to bless us with knowledge. Only a pure, serene mind is a fit receptacle for knowledge. Good samskaras cannot be enforced by physical discipline. I have to value them and practice them to master my mind and personality. A mother alone can instill these samskaras in a child.

A mother represents all the three aspects – Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati- for the child and hence the importance of Matru Puja. A child cannot grasp the concept of God, but can see the mother. Through the mother, the child invokes the higher. Matru Puja has a two-fold benefit. The mother also feels that she has to live up to her image and be worthy of the worship!

*This is the summary of the talk delivered by Pujya Swami Tejomayananda, world wide head, Chinmaya Mission. Children perform Matru Puja, worshipping their mothers by washing their feet and wiping them, applying sandal paste, garlanding them and doing arati amidst the chanting of Matrustavanam, composed by Pujya Guruji Swami Tejomayananda. The article is published in Tapovan Prasad, a CCMT publication.