Last night I went to the latest session of “Awakening Joy,” a monthly class I’m taking with the Buddhist meditation teacher James Baraz. He had invited a guest speaker, the author M.J. Ryan, to give a talk to the group. Ryan is the author of several books on creating happiness, a motivational speaker and organizational consultant.
She said lots of interesting things, but one thing in particular interested me because of its connection to parenting. She talked about the research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. Dweck researched groups of children with learning problems to find out what could make some of them successful while others would give up.
What she found is that those who had a “fixed mindset” about their abilities would tend to give up more easily when they encountered setbacks. They had a fixed idea of themselves, like “I am bad at math” or “I am great at soccer.” These children had an underlying belief that talent was innate, that they were born a certain way and that experience was just going to continue to confirm those things they believed about themselves.
On the other hand, those students who had a “growth mindset” about themselves proved to be the ones who were able to excel. When encountered with setbacks, they were more apt to accept them as learning challenges along their developmental path. They understood themselves as individuals who are growing, and in this view, making “mistakes” is simply part of an overall process. These children handled criticism better and were inspired, rather than intimidated, by the successes of others.
Dweck’s recent book is Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
Ryan drew some corollaries to parenting and made some suggestions about how to praise our children to underscore a growth mindset. If we make a global positive statement about our kids, like, “Sally, you are a fantastic kid!” the problem is that the child knows it’s not completely true. She knows there was that time she stole something or whacked her sister on the head. And now here’s mom saying she’s totally fantastic, so that creates cognitive dissonance. What’s better is to praise our children’s efforts, choices and strategies. We might say instead, “Sally, that was great how you kept on trying to make a basket even when it didn’t go in every time.” In this way we help the child to form an understanding of themselves as a being who is in process.
I was really excited by this idea because it lines up completely with the spiritual perspectives I have studied for many years. It has always seemed that the transformative element for a life of greater meaning is indeed, an understanding of the human journey as an opportunity to grow in love. Dweck doesn't mention the love part. But I do.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
Becoming Heaven
Over the years I’ve taught Sunday School many times, and I can tell you with certainty that there is one activity that is sure to elicit groans and rolled eyes from the kids: ask them to draw a picture of heaven. “Oh Gawwwd,” I’ve heard more than one of them complain. “Not again. Here’s the bright golden sunshine, here’s the rainbow, here are all the angels. We’ve done this a million times before.” (I learned early on to never assign this activity in my classes.)
Why do they hate it? Because it’s too facile, too simplistic, too goody-goody. And I would imagine that some of us might respond the same way. Trying to conjure up an image for heaven either descends into a hopelessly cheerful stereotype, or presents us with the maddening prospect of trying to give visual form to something that is inexpressible. Maybe we would be irritated or impatient with the very question. Is it perhaps that the notion of heaven itself seems hopelessly saccharine—naïve in the postmodern age, irrelevant to the scientific worldview, too Christian in a world of increasing religious pluralism? Does it feel as if it would be a lot easier to simply let the shimmering notions of the afterlife fade away, as relics of less evolved time? And since the notion of heaven necessarily invokes the choice between its opposite, hell, and thus also would seem to point to some kind of terrifying judgment day, doesn’t it feel that it would certainly be easier to leave behind the whole convoluted mess, and go sashaying off into a cleaner, vaguer, spiritual understanding?
Well, I’d like to suggest that we not give up on heaven quite yet. With a little help from the spiritual theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, we can come up with a new interpretation of heaven that can be very powerful for our lives. These ideas suggest that we might see heaven as a nuanced, psychological and social concept that is anything but simplistic.
I think that this concept of heaven can be applied to our family systems as well in some really powerful ways.
Basically, the idea is this: heaven starts within us. Heaven is not a place but a state of being. It is a state of being in community that is conscious, relational, dynamic, loving, compassionate and alive. This is how we are meant to live. This is how we have been designed. Swedenborg said that the purpose of creation was for human beings to form a heaven.
This is how we have been designed individually as well. Each of us has been created with the capacity to be really, fully, truly spiritually alive and healthy. It’s just as much a part of us as our DNA. The trick is, learning how to get there. And getting there is the purpose of our lives: learning how to love. Learning how to be in authentic, giving relationship with those around us. Learning how to be truly useful to the world. It’s a beautiful prospect.
But the trick is, we have to believe it for it to become real. We have to deeply, truly, authentically believe that wholeness has our name written all over it if we want to journey there. The belief has to be fully internalized into our minds first. And then slowly, bit by bit, we will start to notice changes in the people and situations around us. We will be building heaven, little by little, through our conscious choices in our lives. The only way to get there is through our real, everyday, mundane and fantastic lives.
And this is eminently applicable to families. Families are complicated systems. Oh, aren’t they ever. One individual is complicated enough, but then get three or four or five or more all growing and changing under the same household and yikes! There is all kinds of opportunity for suffering. People get hurt, people have struggles, grown-ups don’t unpack their childhood maps, and then other family members compensate in sometimes unhealthy ways, and that creates more problems. Pretty soon we can have quite a thicket of family dynamics.
I am sure that all of us want to have healthy families. I’d like to suggest that the first step to really building a healthy family is to believe that yours is fully capable of becoming one. You have the capacity within you to be a wonderfully fantastic parent. You have the resources within you to figure out loving solutions to problems, to welcome kindness and compassion into your family, to practice generosity to your community, to forgive the wounds of the past and to create joy. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that nothing bad will happen to your family. On the contrary, I’m sorry to say this, but it will. But heaven is not about perfection. Heaven is about love. Heavenly community is where struggle is taken on collectively and moved through with as much love and good spirit as possible, so that the bigger perspective is always held up—the bigger perspective being that all is held in a wider net of ultimate love.
So often, consciously and unconsciously, we carry around with us expectations of brokenness. We’ve all been wounded in one way or another, and often times our response has been to flee from that pain, and to put up a wall so that it doesn’t happen again. We start to feel like who we are is an incomplete person. And if that carries over into our family self-image, we start to feel like our family is incomplete. Maybe we wonder what is wrong with us, maybe we feel lonely and hopeless, maybe we start to feel like our family is screwed up. And if we start feeling that way, we might stop asking for help or being with other people, or we might simply avoid being present with our family members, and the whole thing gets more entrenched.
What we need to do is to shift our conception of what health is. Health—or heaven—includes the brokenness. It involves a discernment and a removal of that which does not serve our growth. A true vision of a healthy person or a heavenly community is one that has learned how to incorporate its pain and to move through it to embrace a wiser, more loving understanding of itself and others.
I know all this stuff because I’ve lived through it. I suppose that story will come out in pieces in this blog, but suffice to say for now that I am currently working on re-engineering my internal map of what my family can be. I believe now that we can be heavenly. I’m working on it these days, and being amazed at what happens when I bring out my new expectations. I’ve got great plans for us. I hope you do for your family too.
Can you believe that you are made for wholeness?
Can you believe that your family can be a slice of heaven?
I’d like to hear what happens if you try.
Why do they hate it? Because it’s too facile, too simplistic, too goody-goody. And I would imagine that some of us might respond the same way. Trying to conjure up an image for heaven either descends into a hopelessly cheerful stereotype, or presents us with the maddening prospect of trying to give visual form to something that is inexpressible. Maybe we would be irritated or impatient with the very question. Is it perhaps that the notion of heaven itself seems hopelessly saccharine—naïve in the postmodern age, irrelevant to the scientific worldview, too Christian in a world of increasing religious pluralism? Does it feel as if it would be a lot easier to simply let the shimmering notions of the afterlife fade away, as relics of less evolved time? And since the notion of heaven necessarily invokes the choice between its opposite, hell, and thus also would seem to point to some kind of terrifying judgment day, doesn’t it feel that it would certainly be easier to leave behind the whole convoluted mess, and go sashaying off into a cleaner, vaguer, spiritual understanding?
Well, I’d like to suggest that we not give up on heaven quite yet. With a little help from the spiritual theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, we can come up with a new interpretation of heaven that can be very powerful for our lives. These ideas suggest that we might see heaven as a nuanced, psychological and social concept that is anything but simplistic.
I think that this concept of heaven can be applied to our family systems as well in some really powerful ways.
Basically, the idea is this: heaven starts within us. Heaven is not a place but a state of being. It is a state of being in community that is conscious, relational, dynamic, loving, compassionate and alive. This is how we are meant to live. This is how we have been designed. Swedenborg said that the purpose of creation was for human beings to form a heaven.
This is how we have been designed individually as well. Each of us has been created with the capacity to be really, fully, truly spiritually alive and healthy. It’s just as much a part of us as our DNA. The trick is, learning how to get there. And getting there is the purpose of our lives: learning how to love. Learning how to be in authentic, giving relationship with those around us. Learning how to be truly useful to the world. It’s a beautiful prospect.
But the trick is, we have to believe it for it to become real. We have to deeply, truly, authentically believe that wholeness has our name written all over it if we want to journey there. The belief has to be fully internalized into our minds first. And then slowly, bit by bit, we will start to notice changes in the people and situations around us. We will be building heaven, little by little, through our conscious choices in our lives. The only way to get there is through our real, everyday, mundane and fantastic lives.
And this is eminently applicable to families. Families are complicated systems. Oh, aren’t they ever. One individual is complicated enough, but then get three or four or five or more all growing and changing under the same household and yikes! There is all kinds of opportunity for suffering. People get hurt, people have struggles, grown-ups don’t unpack their childhood maps, and then other family members compensate in sometimes unhealthy ways, and that creates more problems. Pretty soon we can have quite a thicket of family dynamics.
I am sure that all of us want to have healthy families. I’d like to suggest that the first step to really building a healthy family is to believe that yours is fully capable of becoming one. You have the capacity within you to be a wonderfully fantastic parent. You have the resources within you to figure out loving solutions to problems, to welcome kindness and compassion into your family, to practice generosity to your community, to forgive the wounds of the past and to create joy. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that nothing bad will happen to your family. On the contrary, I’m sorry to say this, but it will. But heaven is not about perfection. Heaven is about love. Heavenly community is where struggle is taken on collectively and moved through with as much love and good spirit as possible, so that the bigger perspective is always held up—the bigger perspective being that all is held in a wider net of ultimate love.
So often, consciously and unconsciously, we carry around with us expectations of brokenness. We’ve all been wounded in one way or another, and often times our response has been to flee from that pain, and to put up a wall so that it doesn’t happen again. We start to feel like who we are is an incomplete person. And if that carries over into our family self-image, we start to feel like our family is incomplete. Maybe we wonder what is wrong with us, maybe we feel lonely and hopeless, maybe we start to feel like our family is screwed up. And if we start feeling that way, we might stop asking for help or being with other people, or we might simply avoid being present with our family members, and the whole thing gets more entrenched.
What we need to do is to shift our conception of what health is. Health—or heaven—includes the brokenness. It involves a discernment and a removal of that which does not serve our growth. A true vision of a healthy person or a heavenly community is one that has learned how to incorporate its pain and to move through it to embrace a wiser, more loving understanding of itself and others.
I know all this stuff because I’ve lived through it. I suppose that story will come out in pieces in this blog, but suffice to say for now that I am currently working on re-engineering my internal map of what my family can be. I believe now that we can be heavenly. I’m working on it these days, and being amazed at what happens when I bring out my new expectations. I’ve got great plans for us. I hope you do for your family too.
Can you believe that you are made for wholeness?
Can you believe that your family can be a slice of heaven?
I’d like to hear what happens if you try.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Vacation
So there I was last Sunday night in seat 22E, flying high above the Pacific Ocean on Hawaiian Airlines toward San Francisco, trying to see through my stifled tears to open the stupid package of pretzels the flight attendant passed out. Molly, my four-year-old, was happily sitting next to me, pouring out her adulation on the new hula-dancing doll we had bought her in Kohala. It was outfitted with a green Hawaiian-print top and a plastic grass skirt, and instead of legs it had a plastic conical bottom which housed a battery-powered mechanism that made her move and swish her hips when you flip the switch. It was a cheap little thing bought in a tourist shop, but to Molly it was passionately enchanting. That morning, in a goofy mood in the car on the way to the airport, I had taken the doll and made an impromptu puppet show for the girls in the back seat. For once in my life I was funny, and it had set them off squealing and giggling. For the rest of the day and on into the airplane, Molly had kept asking me, “Mommy, will you make another show?” which I periodically obliged within the limits of the other passengers’ tolerance….
So why was I crying? Where the hell were these tears coming from? Was it just PMS, or was there something really moving me inside? It happened the next day again as I whooshed through Trader Joe’s getting groceries to refill our bare cupboards. Every time I saw a product from Hawaii or a Hawaiian print on an employee’s t-shirt, I got tears in my eyes.
Something happened during our vacation to the Big Island last week. I didn’t feel it when we touched down at the Kona airport the previous Sunday and looked out the windows to see barren chocolate-brown lava fields all around. The island felt strange and exotic, not postcard-perfect like the other islands, but mysterious, different. The sun was so hot and intense it felt dangerous to my pale skin. The posted signs for tsunami evacuation centers were oddly ominous. Strangest of all was the ubiquitous but silent presence of the Kilauea volcano, which a few months ago opened up a new vent and has been spewing sulphur dioxide into the air in enormous quantities every day. It made for a consistent white haze in the sky near Kona. They call it “vog,” and, as you might imagine, it’s a health hazard, though we couldn’t feel any tangible effects from it.
What moved me about the Big Island crept in slowly. It was the thrilling change of scenery as we drove from the hot and dry north into the wetter, coffee-growing south and into a rainstorm. It was visiting an ancient Hawaiian religious site that still so strongly held a sense of peace and sanctuary; a silent connection with a people who lived and breathed hundreds of years ago. It was tasting the native pineapple, mango, papaya, macadamia nuts, fish; feeling the fresh plumeria flowers around my neck in a white and violet lei; snorkeling with bright yellow and zebra-striped fish in the turquoise waters; and being quietly stunned by the abundance of the natural world in this spot on earth.
What moved me also was my family. Paige, who had been terrified of water as a two-year-old, now could not get enough of it. Her uncle and grandpa taught her to snorkel, and she loved it. Molly was inexhaustibly delighted with a pink inner tube and all the things she invented to do with it. Here, the two of them were freed from their everyday routines of home and school life and set forth into a giant, beautiful world that welcomed them with soft air and buoyant water.
I think it was the first vacation where the four of us actually had fun together. The girls are finally old enough to have some adventures without naps and diapers ruling our every decision. After surviving a near melt-down of our marriage last year, my husband Roland and I seemed like perplexed aliens set down on the beach, unsure of quite what to make of the overflowing abundance of beauty and harmony. The extended family who joined us on the trip gave our lodgings the feel of an ongoing block party. Molly delighted her grandparents by tottering off to their condo every morning to join them for breakfast (often unbeknownst to me). Paige played tug-of-war with palm fronds with her two teenage step-cousins, her giggles wafting over the lawn in the balmy night. I enjoyed a walk I took with my dad one morning to see some ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs baking in the unforgiving heat. I’m not sure which was more perplexing: the hundreds-year-old petroglyphs, or the fact that my dad had just turned 76.
I think my tears were simply sadness that all of this had ended. It was time for us to return to the Bay Area, to find our car in the parking garage of the San Francisco airport, to weave through the traffic on the Bay Bridge, in the middle of what now seemed an inordinately sprawling urban metropolis. It was time to check my email again, to put my watch back on, to send the girls to camp and preschool. It was time for the four of us to disengage and go our separate ways during the day and try to reconnect at night. It was time to re-accept the terms of the modern world. To re-enter the hurly-burly of it all.
But I didn’t want to. (I kept joking that “inowanu” is a real word in Hawaiian.) What I think I tasted in Hawaii was a few days of living in a more holistic way. And I think my tears were about my intense yearning for me and my family—and the whole world—to live a better life. How wonderful—and how right—it would be to live on land that is unspoiled, to swim in water that is clear, to taste the wonder of fresh food from the earth, to live in community with extended family and peaceful neighbors, to gaze at the stars and connect with the past, to be able to discern the most important parts of life and to give them our attention.
Yes, it sounds like a description of paradise. Is heaven a silly concept? Is the holy city just a dream? Or is there something in our yearning in itself, and in the yearnings of the scores of generations before us, that somehow makes that wholeness a little more possible?
So why was I crying? Where the hell were these tears coming from? Was it just PMS, or was there something really moving me inside? It happened the next day again as I whooshed through Trader Joe’s getting groceries to refill our bare cupboards. Every time I saw a product from Hawaii or a Hawaiian print on an employee’s t-shirt, I got tears in my eyes.
Something happened during our vacation to the Big Island last week. I didn’t feel it when we touched down at the Kona airport the previous Sunday and looked out the windows to see barren chocolate-brown lava fields all around. The island felt strange and exotic, not postcard-perfect like the other islands, but mysterious, different. The sun was so hot and intense it felt dangerous to my pale skin. The posted signs for tsunami evacuation centers were oddly ominous. Strangest of all was the ubiquitous but silent presence of the Kilauea volcano, which a few months ago opened up a new vent and has been spewing sulphur dioxide into the air in enormous quantities every day. It made for a consistent white haze in the sky near Kona. They call it “vog,” and, as you might imagine, it’s a health hazard, though we couldn’t feel any tangible effects from it.
What moved me about the Big Island crept in slowly. It was the thrilling change of scenery as we drove from the hot and dry north into the wetter, coffee-growing south and into a rainstorm. It was visiting an ancient Hawaiian religious site that still so strongly held a sense of peace and sanctuary; a silent connection with a people who lived and breathed hundreds of years ago. It was tasting the native pineapple, mango, papaya, macadamia nuts, fish; feeling the fresh plumeria flowers around my neck in a white and violet lei; snorkeling with bright yellow and zebra-striped fish in the turquoise waters; and being quietly stunned by the abundance of the natural world in this spot on earth.
What moved me also was my family. Paige, who had been terrified of water as a two-year-old, now could not get enough of it. Her uncle and grandpa taught her to snorkel, and she loved it. Molly was inexhaustibly delighted with a pink inner tube and all the things she invented to do with it. Here, the two of them were freed from their everyday routines of home and school life and set forth into a giant, beautiful world that welcomed them with soft air and buoyant water.
I think it was the first vacation where the four of us actually had fun together. The girls are finally old enough to have some adventures without naps and diapers ruling our every decision. After surviving a near melt-down of our marriage last year, my husband Roland and I seemed like perplexed aliens set down on the beach, unsure of quite what to make of the overflowing abundance of beauty and harmony. The extended family who joined us on the trip gave our lodgings the feel of an ongoing block party. Molly delighted her grandparents by tottering off to their condo every morning to join them for breakfast (often unbeknownst to me). Paige played tug-of-war with palm fronds with her two teenage step-cousins, her giggles wafting over the lawn in the balmy night. I enjoyed a walk I took with my dad one morning to see some ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs baking in the unforgiving heat. I’m not sure which was more perplexing: the hundreds-year-old petroglyphs, or the fact that my dad had just turned 76.
I think my tears were simply sadness that all of this had ended. It was time for us to return to the Bay Area, to find our car in the parking garage of the San Francisco airport, to weave through the traffic on the Bay Bridge, in the middle of what now seemed an inordinately sprawling urban metropolis. It was time to check my email again, to put my watch back on, to send the girls to camp and preschool. It was time for the four of us to disengage and go our separate ways during the day and try to reconnect at night. It was time to re-accept the terms of the modern world. To re-enter the hurly-burly of it all.
But I didn’t want to. (I kept joking that “inowanu” is a real word in Hawaiian.) What I think I tasted in Hawaii was a few days of living in a more holistic way. And I think my tears were about my intense yearning for me and my family—and the whole world—to live a better life. How wonderful—and how right—it would be to live on land that is unspoiled, to swim in water that is clear, to taste the wonder of fresh food from the earth, to live in community with extended family and peaceful neighbors, to gaze at the stars and connect with the past, to be able to discern the most important parts of life and to give them our attention.
Yes, it sounds like a description of paradise. Is heaven a silly concept? Is the holy city just a dream? Or is there something in our yearning in itself, and in the yearnings of the scores of generations before us, that somehow makes that wholeness a little more possible?
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Waking Up to the Miracle
When we bring a child into this world, we are participating in something extraordinary. From the moment they are conceived, babies bring with them questions of awe and mystery. If we are lucky, their unfathomable creation and the love they engender will help us awaken to the awesome creativity and potency of life all around us.
When I had a baby, I realized that I was living in the middle of a miracle. Now, I do not use the word “miracle” lightly. I mean it in the sense of an overflowing experience of the divine boldly breaking in to my life in such a way that it altered my previous understanding of reality itself. I could not ignore this miracle: it happened right in and through my own body! With only the slightest involvement from me and my husband, microscopic cells merged deep within by uterus. They multiplied by powers of magnitude within days, and before it could barely seem possible an entirely brand new human being was being formed within my body, complete with a spinal cord, a head, skin and eyeballs. For forty weeks this unfathomable process continued without me needing to so much as push a button, write a line of code or design a single hair. She was there, within me, getting perfectly formed by the awesome biology of human design.
The miracle continued when my baby was born. My body knew when it was time to go into labor. My body knew how to let go of the placenta, stop feeding an umbilical cord and start producing breast milk, basically all at the same moment. My baby knew how to nurse. But even more than all that, there she was: my daughter. She had ten fingers and ten toes. She had blond hair and blue eyes. A brand new human being had issued forth from my very body and was now living in the world with a soul and personality. And I experienced this twice.
Whether we have given birth to our children or received them through adoption, when we raise children we are living in the middle of a miracle. To witness the birth and growth of a human being is one of the most mysterious and awesome experiences of life. If we open our hearts and minds to this miracle, we will begin to see the divine all around us.
If my child came into being in such an awesome way, we might say, then every single other person in this world also came into being in a miraculous way. If there is something fantastically good about the human creation that is my child, there is something fantastically good about creation itself. This goodness, perfection and wonder that we witness as parents is an intrinsic aspect of life. This is the way we are created. The entirety of the whole divine-human-natural creation is nothing short of astonishing.
Parenting calls us to wake up to this miracle. It reminds us not to take things for granted, not to get in a rut, not to project our same old tired and defeated assumptions on the world. It calls us to awaken to the wonder that surrounds us, not only in our parenting, but everywhere in our lives.
Parenting brings up questions of who we are, where we are, what we are doing here and how we should love. And with these we enter the realm of spirituality. With an open and loving heart, we find that parenting can open the doors to contemplate and find clues to the whole mystery of God and humanity.
How do we wake up to the miracle? The links between parenting and divine mystery aren’t (usually) revealed by visions of angels or in email messages from God. We have to be alert to their subtlety. They come from being present, and from noticing. A little voice peeps up from the back seat of the car and asks a question that touches your heart. The after-bath routine devolves into an ebullient tickle session of giggly, squirming flesh, and you notice the fullness of your heart. A human body that a short time ago did not exist anywhere on earth is now enfolding you in its arms and loving you.
Let us remember to stay alert to the wonder of the divine that arcs its way through our everyday lives. Let us open our hearts and minds and see what our children and God might have to show us today.
How does your parenting call you to stay awake to God’s presence?
When I had a baby, I realized that I was living in the middle of a miracle. Now, I do not use the word “miracle” lightly. I mean it in the sense of an overflowing experience of the divine boldly breaking in to my life in such a way that it altered my previous understanding of reality itself. I could not ignore this miracle: it happened right in and through my own body! With only the slightest involvement from me and my husband, microscopic cells merged deep within by uterus. They multiplied by powers of magnitude within days, and before it could barely seem possible an entirely brand new human being was being formed within my body, complete with a spinal cord, a head, skin and eyeballs. For forty weeks this unfathomable process continued without me needing to so much as push a button, write a line of code or design a single hair. She was there, within me, getting perfectly formed by the awesome biology of human design.
The miracle continued when my baby was born. My body knew when it was time to go into labor. My body knew how to let go of the placenta, stop feeding an umbilical cord and start producing breast milk, basically all at the same moment. My baby knew how to nurse. But even more than all that, there she was: my daughter. She had ten fingers and ten toes. She had blond hair and blue eyes. A brand new human being had issued forth from my very body and was now living in the world with a soul and personality. And I experienced this twice.
Whether we have given birth to our children or received them through adoption, when we raise children we are living in the middle of a miracle. To witness the birth and growth of a human being is one of the most mysterious and awesome experiences of life. If we open our hearts and minds to this miracle, we will begin to see the divine all around us.
If my child came into being in such an awesome way, we might say, then every single other person in this world also came into being in a miraculous way. If there is something fantastically good about the human creation that is my child, there is something fantastically good about creation itself. This goodness, perfection and wonder that we witness as parents is an intrinsic aspect of life. This is the way we are created. The entirety of the whole divine-human-natural creation is nothing short of astonishing.
Parenting calls us to wake up to this miracle. It reminds us not to take things for granted, not to get in a rut, not to project our same old tired and defeated assumptions on the world. It calls us to awaken to the wonder that surrounds us, not only in our parenting, but everywhere in our lives.
Parenting brings up questions of who we are, where we are, what we are doing here and how we should love. And with these we enter the realm of spirituality. With an open and loving heart, we find that parenting can open the doors to contemplate and find clues to the whole mystery of God and humanity.
How do we wake up to the miracle? The links between parenting and divine mystery aren’t (usually) revealed by visions of angels or in email messages from God. We have to be alert to their subtlety. They come from being present, and from noticing. A little voice peeps up from the back seat of the car and asks a question that touches your heart. The after-bath routine devolves into an ebullient tickle session of giggly, squirming flesh, and you notice the fullness of your heart. A human body that a short time ago did not exist anywhere on earth is now enfolding you in its arms and loving you.
Let us remember to stay alert to the wonder of the divine that arcs its way through our everyday lives. Let us open our hearts and minds and see what our children and God might have to show us today.
How does your parenting call you to stay awake to God’s presence?
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