Yesterday was my older daughter Paige’s 8th birthday party. My husband, another mom and I took nine kids to the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland. Paige had said she wanted a NASA party. I think the idea had begun a few months ago. This past year in second grade she had to write a whole book—a long story with illustrations which the teacher later had sent away and hard-bound. It was such a cool assignment. Paige wrote a story called My Calling is NASA. It’s about a girl who has a vision from God when she is little that she is going to work for NASA, and then she grows up and does it. Curiously, the girl in the story has a little sister who grows up to be a princess, which has stirring reverberations with real life.
By the way, Paige is not my older daughter’s real name. I’m going to call my younger daughter, age four, Molly, though that’s not her real name either. I’ve decided to protect their privacy a little bit which also gives me greater freedom to unabashedly tell personal stories about them.
So anyway, Paige has become interested in outer space and NASA, and she planned out the whole party. A couple of weeks ago she and I sat down at the computer and whipped up some home-made invitations with clip art, a NASA logo, and a picture of the Mars lander. I heard later that some of the other girls who received the invitation were not too excited about space. But Paige is. If there is something conceptual and analytical and philosophical to think about, Paige will be fascinated.
Paige is a little unusual. She was born right after the summer solstice in the first year of the new millennium, 2000. Year of the dragon. Cancer sign. I think there must have been something about the alignment of the planets at that time because she and several of her girl classmates are uber-women. Strong, confident, active, self-assured. When she was a baby, she didn’t really fuss to be held. She wasn’t interested in nursing after the first few months. She didn’t cry much when she got shots, she didn’t freak out if she fell down. She never sucked her thumb, had a pacifier or a special blanket or stuffed animal. By age two she was speaking three-syllable words and marching next to me through an airport, pulling her rolling suitcase all by herself. By age four she was reading and adding fractions in preschool. Now, at age eight, she can play Beatles songs by ear on the piano and enjoys talking about quantum physics.
She is stronger than I ever was as a girl, and in some ways more self-assured than I am even now. This has created a huge personal challenge for me to assert myself over her as her mother. I have had to understand that there are times and places where I have to be the mom and she has to be the daughter. Sometimes she has to follow my instructions or requests because I know better than she does. We have had some tough times together, but we’ve been in a good space for a long time now. She has forced me to find my voice, literally. Forever soft-spoken, I have now found a deep and powerful range of my voice that will stop time.
I live in daily fear of her teenage years.
But the thing is that Paige and I love each other fantastically. We are more connected now than I think we ever were before. We delight in each other’s strengths. She knows she can tell me almost any thoughts on her mind, and if she’s contemplating infinity or liking a new outfit, I will hear her. I depend on her too, increasingly. She might help me carry in the groceries or answer the phone or jump out of the stopped car to mail a letter, and I appreciate her competence.
I feel this timeless sense of connection with Paige, as if I can feel what our connection is going to feel like when I am an old lady and she is middle-aged. I feel like I know her essence, what she has been and what she will become. I think it’s likely she will become a scientist for NASA. I also have a sense of what I need to help her learn. She will always need to be reminded to develop her emotional side, her compassion, her empathy and connection with other people.
Anyway, we had a great time at the space museum. I loved watching her with her long blond hair, white tank top, turquoise shorts and long legs, playing and laughing with her friends, and contemplating the universe. Happy Birthday, darlin'.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Saturday, June 28, 2008
How is Parenting Spiritual?
“Spirituality” and “parenting” used to feel like an oxymoron to me. Before having children, the kinds of spiritual practices I explored were the kinds amenable to silence and solitude. And believe me, I liked it that way. Walking through a cathedral in Europe was sublime. Listening to a dharma talk at a Zen Buddhist center was mind-expanding. Practicing silent meditation was deepening. Taking part in spiritual discussion groups at my church was delightful and fascinating. There were no crying babies in any of these places.
After my first child was born I was suddenly shut out of so many of these places and gatherings that are set up for spiritual reflection. At first, I took it to mean that my journey into baby-raising disqualified me from spiritual practice. I started to think that I was looking at a long, long time of being “benched” from spirituality. And I was not happy about this. Managing crying babies, dirty diapers, tantrums, picky feedings and nap schedules did not feel to me like an adequate substitute for deep spiritual connection.
And besides, after three years of seminary, I had never learned that mothering had anything to do with God or spirituality. More on that later.
As time went on, though, I began to question my assumptions. Was I really to believe that spiritual practice can only happen in silence? Was I really to believe that the millions of people on earth in my situation—parents yearning for some kind of spiritual vitality in the midst of a life filled to the brim with caretaking, errands, work and responsibility—were disqualified from being spiritual aspirants? That’s when I realized this was ridiculous. And that’s when I realized I needed to find a new way to define spiritual practice.
I needed to stop thinking that I had to set parenting aside in order to have a spiritual life. I needed to embrace a spiritual practice that was in motion. A practice that is loud and messy and has no boundaries or rules. A practice that is all about people and skin and togetherness and heart and a not necessarily focused mind. A practice that was broadly accepting of the entire dimension of my life.
So I started to look at parenting itself—even with all its volatility and mundane physicality—as a locus of my spiritual practice. And what I was then able to see is that raising human beings is an enormously potent pathway to God. It is actually one of the richest vehicles for doing so! Being fully present and engaged with the development of another human being simply cannot fail to lead us into expansive realms of understanding.
The mysterious force that makes this happen is love. As parents, we enter into a dynamic love relationship with our children that has the capacity to be transformative. We love them, and our love shapes who they are and how they grow, while at the same time their love for us puts us in touch with what is deep and true and vital. Loving them calls us into being better people, and so calls us to look within ourselves and to grow.
What’s more, if we’re awake, we might begin to realize that the quality of open-hearted love is actually who we are. It is the foundational nature of humans, as our little children will demonstrate to us on a daily basis.
And what’s more than that, if we really sit with this quality of love and let it sink in to us and notice how its dynamic, reciprocal nature transforms us and calls us forward into being bigger, fuller people… we realize that this kind of love is the nature of God. God itself is love. God is relational, conscious, alive, and calling us forth into our fullest selves.
In this way parenting is a spiritual practice that is multi-dimensional, embodied, fluid, and fully improvisational. What I realized later is that actually, religious communities throughout history have realized that community is central to living a spiritual life. Monasteries and convents were places to live one’s spiritual commitment in community—to work out the foibles and joys of human living with other people. The nun’s cell and the silent prayer were brief counterpoints to a daily schedule spent working and eating and having fellowship with a group to whom one had made a life-long commitment.
So I would like to invite us to consider how our families can be our monasteries. How can we approach our home and the people we are committed to as precisely the place where our spiritual growth needs to happen? God is right there in the middle of all of it. No incense required.
After my first child was born I was suddenly shut out of so many of these places and gatherings that are set up for spiritual reflection. At first, I took it to mean that my journey into baby-raising disqualified me from spiritual practice. I started to think that I was looking at a long, long time of being “benched” from spirituality. And I was not happy about this. Managing crying babies, dirty diapers, tantrums, picky feedings and nap schedules did not feel to me like an adequate substitute for deep spiritual connection.
And besides, after three years of seminary, I had never learned that mothering had anything to do with God or spirituality. More on that later.
As time went on, though, I began to question my assumptions. Was I really to believe that spiritual practice can only happen in silence? Was I really to believe that the millions of people on earth in my situation—parents yearning for some kind of spiritual vitality in the midst of a life filled to the brim with caretaking, errands, work and responsibility—were disqualified from being spiritual aspirants? That’s when I realized this was ridiculous. And that’s when I realized I needed to find a new way to define spiritual practice.
I needed to stop thinking that I had to set parenting aside in order to have a spiritual life. I needed to embrace a spiritual practice that was in motion. A practice that is loud and messy and has no boundaries or rules. A practice that is all about people and skin and togetherness and heart and a not necessarily focused mind. A practice that was broadly accepting of the entire dimension of my life.
So I started to look at parenting itself—even with all its volatility and mundane physicality—as a locus of my spiritual practice. And what I was then able to see is that raising human beings is an enormously potent pathway to God. It is actually one of the richest vehicles for doing so! Being fully present and engaged with the development of another human being simply cannot fail to lead us into expansive realms of understanding.
The mysterious force that makes this happen is love. As parents, we enter into a dynamic love relationship with our children that has the capacity to be transformative. We love them, and our love shapes who they are and how they grow, while at the same time their love for us puts us in touch with what is deep and true and vital. Loving them calls us into being better people, and so calls us to look within ourselves and to grow.
What’s more, if we’re awake, we might begin to realize that the quality of open-hearted love is actually who we are. It is the foundational nature of humans, as our little children will demonstrate to us on a daily basis.
And what’s more than that, if we really sit with this quality of love and let it sink in to us and notice how its dynamic, reciprocal nature transforms us and calls us forward into being bigger, fuller people… we realize that this kind of love is the nature of God. God itself is love. God is relational, conscious, alive, and calling us forth into our fullest selves.
In this way parenting is a spiritual practice that is multi-dimensional, embodied, fluid, and fully improvisational. What I realized later is that actually, religious communities throughout history have realized that community is central to living a spiritual life. Monasteries and convents were places to live one’s spiritual commitment in community—to work out the foibles and joys of human living with other people. The nun’s cell and the silent prayer were brief counterpoints to a daily schedule spent working and eating and having fellowship with a group to whom one had made a life-long commitment.
So I would like to invite us to consider how our families can be our monasteries. How can we approach our home and the people we are committed to as precisely the place where our spiritual growth needs to happen? God is right there in the middle of all of it. No incense required.
Friday, June 27, 2008
The Spirituality of Parenting
Welcome.
Welcome to a conversation about the spirituality of parenting. About the transformative capacity of relational love. About spirituality that has everything to do with our real, flesh-and-blood lives, and everything to do with God.
Every week I witness the ways in which parenting—mindful and open-hearted—is an ideal spiritual practice. My two daughters have turned me inside out in the ways their arrivals have challenged me to become a fuller, less self-centered person. The love we share has wiggled its way deep into the innermost core of my being and changed the way I understand the world. It has forced me to give up my small and limited notions of who I am and what the world is, and to make room for a much larger and more expansive vision than I had thought possible. Parenting has called me out of my safe little shell and beckoned me to love.
It hasn’t been easy. To my surprise, parenting has also given rise to feelings of anger and rage I never knew I had. Not necessarily anger at my kids, but the rage of my small self being annihilated. It’s like this for all the parents I witness, and more: parenting re-opens our own childhood situations, beckoning us to understand them anew. Parenting leads us into a raw space of intimacy and unpredictability that can be threatening. Parenting makes us wildly vulnerable, if we can even dare to think about how much we now have to lose. Parenting calls us, in a way that is really aggravating to our small selves, to give up everything that keeps us from being a full and healthy person.
Parenting can open the door to our own spiritual growth. And since it happens in the context of a family, and since we are an extremely important element of that family, the spiritual growth that parenting engenders is kind of three-dimensional. Or four-dimensional. Or five-dimensional, or however large your family is. And since we are talking about our effects on little growing humans whose psychological maps are being formed in real-time, the consequences of this multi-dimensional spiritual growth can be profound, if we consider their effects on the future. What kind of adults our children will become. How they will influence the society around them. What legacy we are already creating for our own grandchildren. This is where my brain starts to hurt.
It’s because of this depth of meaning that parenting can open to us that I believe it can be a profound spiritual practice. It is a regular, daily practice that calls us to integrate our beliefs about ultimate reality into our real-life choices. In that sense it’s top-down. But it works the other way, too, from the bottom up: our hands-on, daily engagement with our kids opens up doors that lead us to understand the nature of God.
All of this has rocked my world enough that I thought I might share some reflections in hopes of helping other parents in their own journeys of figuring out what life and family are all about. This blog is an aspect of my ministry. I also lead workshops on spirituality and parenting from time to time. My hope is to provide support and inspiration to parents, who are doing the most important job in the world.
I would love to hear your stories and reflections on parenting too. Please comment if you are so moved, and we’ll see what kind of wisdom we might find revealed among us!
Welcome to a conversation about the spirituality of parenting. About the transformative capacity of relational love. About spirituality that has everything to do with our real, flesh-and-blood lives, and everything to do with God.
Every week I witness the ways in which parenting—mindful and open-hearted—is an ideal spiritual practice. My two daughters have turned me inside out in the ways their arrivals have challenged me to become a fuller, less self-centered person. The love we share has wiggled its way deep into the innermost core of my being and changed the way I understand the world. It has forced me to give up my small and limited notions of who I am and what the world is, and to make room for a much larger and more expansive vision than I had thought possible. Parenting has called me out of my safe little shell and beckoned me to love.
It hasn’t been easy. To my surprise, parenting has also given rise to feelings of anger and rage I never knew I had. Not necessarily anger at my kids, but the rage of my small self being annihilated. It’s like this for all the parents I witness, and more: parenting re-opens our own childhood situations, beckoning us to understand them anew. Parenting leads us into a raw space of intimacy and unpredictability that can be threatening. Parenting makes us wildly vulnerable, if we can even dare to think about how much we now have to lose. Parenting calls us, in a way that is really aggravating to our small selves, to give up everything that keeps us from being a full and healthy person.
Parenting can open the door to our own spiritual growth. And since it happens in the context of a family, and since we are an extremely important element of that family, the spiritual growth that parenting engenders is kind of three-dimensional. Or four-dimensional. Or five-dimensional, or however large your family is. And since we are talking about our effects on little growing humans whose psychological maps are being formed in real-time, the consequences of this multi-dimensional spiritual growth can be profound, if we consider their effects on the future. What kind of adults our children will become. How they will influence the society around them. What legacy we are already creating for our own grandchildren. This is where my brain starts to hurt.
It’s because of this depth of meaning that parenting can open to us that I believe it can be a profound spiritual practice. It is a regular, daily practice that calls us to integrate our beliefs about ultimate reality into our real-life choices. In that sense it’s top-down. But it works the other way, too, from the bottom up: our hands-on, daily engagement with our kids opens up doors that lead us to understand the nature of God.
All of this has rocked my world enough that I thought I might share some reflections in hopes of helping other parents in their own journeys of figuring out what life and family are all about. This blog is an aspect of my ministry. I also lead workshops on spirituality and parenting from time to time. My hope is to provide support and inspiration to parents, who are doing the most important job in the world.
I would love to hear your stories and reflections on parenting too. Please comment if you are so moved, and we’ll see what kind of wisdom we might find revealed among us!
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