Flesh and Bone, Body and Blood: Spirituality and Motherhood

I’d like to share with you five scenes about motherhood that I have recently encountered.

Scene 1: My 8-year-old daughter announces to me at the dinner table that she is not sure she believes in God. “I mean,” she says, “I think that things in this world just are the way they are, nothing more. I don’t think that God made them or is making things happen.” I gaze at her, all skin and hair and intelligence and beauty, and I know that the entire miracle of her own existence is all the proof she would ever need. How can I tell her that she came from seemingly nowhere into being, that her complexity fascinates me, that her love and affection take my breath away?

Scene 2: I am having lunch with a friend who has been trying to get pregnant for some time. She tells me about the miscarriage she suffered a few weeks ago. She tells me how startled she was by the blood, and how confusing it was to grieve. She admits to me that after that, she became intimidated by the intensity of it all. She took the books she had been reading on fertility and pregnancy and shoved them all into a closet-- as if to contain, to shut out, to tamp down, to deny, the life-giving potential they signified that she possessed.

Scene 3: I am at a birthday party listening to the mother of a three-year-old. She puts a hand to her forehead and says she cannot believe how difficult this phase of her very headstrong daughter’s life is. Every night, she and her partner wrestle with their daughter just to get through the basics of dinner and bedtime. And almost every night, she laughs, she calls her sister and asks, “do you want to take her home with you?”

Scene 4: I am at church talking with a woman whose teenage son has had developmental disabilities since birth. I ask how he is doing. She tells me, unexpectedly, that after living at home for 18 years, he has just that month had to move to an institution. His problems had worsened. She and her husband were not able to give him what he needed. They had gone to visit him the day before and he had only gotten angry at them.

Scene 6: I am walking into a building known as “the critical care tower” at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with my brother. We take the elevator up to the 7^th floor to find our mother in a hospital bed, myriad tubes coming out of her veins and sensors attached to her scalp. We are so relieved when we hear it was not a stroke. But I feel the opening up of a wild kind of uprootedness within me, reckoning with the possibility of losing the body that gave me life.

Motherhood is not easy—nor is it straightforward or one-dimensional. I imagine this topic brings up a variety of feelings for all of us. Some of us are mothers, some of us are fathers, some are neither. All of us have a mother, but she may be close or far in emotional or geographic distance, or she may no longer be in this world. Some of us had wonderful relationships with our mothers, and some had quite painful ones. I’d like to welcome all of those perspectives into our space this Mother’s Day.

I am a mother, and this morning I’d like to speak to you from that location. As a minister, I have been trained to speak about how we can understand God working in our lives. As a mother, I have borne new life through my body, and have experienced the way that love has shown me what God is like. When my first baby was born almost nine years ago, I found the experience of pregnancy, birth, and caring for an infant to be overwhelming in its awe as well as its difficulty. To be able to witness the way life comes into being was so completely humbling that I felt I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude to God. The emergence of life is at the same time so radically embodied and so powerfully transcendent. It was such a powerful experience, in fact, that when I went back to the Bible and to Christian tradition to see what they had to say about the spirituality of motherhood, I was stunned that there is so little. We do inherit, unavoidably, a patriarchal tradition. And yet, at the same time, within the tradition we find resources for the encounter between embodiment and transcendence. So for these past nine years I have been very interested in weaving these two strands together—theology on the one hand, and motherhood on the other—to see how we might affirm what motherhood can teach all of us about spirituality.

This morning I’d like to pull just one thin sheet out of that giant proverbial book, and the topic I’d like to talk to you about is flesh. My point is that being flesh and blood in relationship is the best spiritual training we could hope for.

The Bible has a complicated relationship with flesh. In the Old Testament it is mentioned most often as something offered up for a sacrifice, or it used as a metaphor for the weakness of the Israelites’ faith. But in the New Testament Jesus glorifies flesh. Jesus Christ is himself the Word made flesh; he is God in human form. This is why Christian faith is at its heart incarnational—meaning literally “in flesh.” God took on human form in Jesus Christ and in so doing claimed human experience as a gateway to the sacred. It is, in fact, the only pathway we have to God. Jesus knew this about embodiment; in fact our entire ritual of communion is all about remembering the body of Christ. At the last supper, Jesus said to his disciples: this is my body; do this in remembrance of me;” and they took the bread and the wine. Some say that the ritual of communion is then about re-membering a body, as in putting a body back together; it’s about remembering that we now make up the body of Christ in the world. It’s also about recognizing that in our very human need to eat and drink, we are made in the image of God. Our vulnerability, our earthiness, if you will, is not a hindrance to approaching God but is, in fact, the only way we can.

There is a lot of flesh in motherhood. There is an awful lot of flesh. A lot of motherhood is holding flesh, bathing flesh, feeding flesh, kissing flesh, clothing flesh. It is all so bodily—it is so much about flesh and bone, body and blood. (It’s a lot about poop too, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate to go into that in a sermon.) Motherhood reminds us that this is what humanity is. All around the world, and from the beginning of time, humans have been embracing one another or lying in bed with an illness, taking a first step or taking a last breath. So one thing that motherhood teaches is that new creation happens in and through our bodies. Being human is messy, it is earthy, and it is the ground through which inspiration and creativity come into being. This is the medium through which God works.

Another thing that motherhood teaches us about spirituality is that love is the creative, dynamic, soul-stretching force which is both the source and goal of life. In the best of circumstances, a baby is conceived out of love between two people. From that love comes a being with bones and a nervous system and a preference for peas or pears. It is knit into the design of life that parents nearly always automatically love that little being. But the most amazing thing is that the little being loves them back! In this design, we find an echo of the Swedenborgian understanding of divine creation itself: God is love, and since the nature of love is to love something other than itself, God had to create the world in order to have something to love; in order for God to be God. And not only that, but God’s creation had a purpose: to love God in return.

In the journey of motherhood we find that the project of love is a challenging and exacting spiritual teacher. The truth is that having a child reveals to us our own self-centeredness. A child needs our attention, love and care, and with every cry for help he or she is pulling us away from what we were doing or wanted to do; from who we thought we were and what we wanted. Over and over again, caring for someone else will reveal to us the millions of attachments we have to our time, to our ego, to our productivity, to our solitude, to our need for acceptance, to our vanity. Practicing the art of love asks us to give up these attachments and to enter into the pure presence of being with another. It calls us as well to our highest selves—to be healthy in the fullest sense that we can, to let go of destructive behavior so that we can model the best for the new beings who have been placed within our care. As any parent will tell you, this process is not easy and it is not fun. This love, in the end, calls us out to be our humblest, realest, healthiest, most honest selves.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the hardest of all our tasks, the ultimate test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation . . . Love . . . is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in herself, to become a world to herself for another’s sake . . . and human love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”

Emanuel Swedenborg teaches us that the human being corresponds, in its wholeness and in every least part, to spiritual and heavenly realities. In describing heaven, Swedenborg wrote that what heaven most closely resembles is a BEING that is conscious, relational, loving and alive. He called it the universal human. He described in great detail how the different parts of a human body correspond to different dimensions of heavenly life. This is a claiming of the entire embodied human enterprise as sacred. It is saying that what God is, we are. It is saying that what we are, God is like.

Swedenborg also says that this correspondence is the genesis of human life and continuance. This means that God is the source of human life. And the human being is contiguous with the source of life, with God. To me, this brings an entirely new dimension to thinking about motherhood. Motherhood is thus allowing divine life into one’s physical body, bearing it out and fostering it into the world. This is radical creativity. This is divine creation in motion. It reminds me of the lava fields on the Big Island of Hawaii where you can watch new land being formed. Mothers get to watch new humanity being formed. But they also get to shape it.

We can all learn this spiritual lesson from the example of motherhood. We are all invited to bear forth new life through our bodies and to participate in the ultimate creativity of divine providence. This is what we have been created to do: in flesh and bone, body and blood, we are meant to love.

Neither Sarah nor Mary could believe the incredible thing that the angel of the Lord had come to tell her: that she would bear a child in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Today, I invite you to believe this incredible thing that the Lord is saying to you: you will create new life through your own flesh and blood.

How do you wish to participate in the flow of divine providence? What and whom do you love, and what will that love create? What life do you wish to bear into the world through your body and blood? Allow your flesh and bone to be a conduit for God’s inflowing love and wisdom. Let yourself believe that what the Lord has said will be accomplished. Give yourself to the exigencies of love; let it stretch you to give up your attachments, to pull you away from your self-centeredness and closer to God. As Jesus said, this is my body. Do this in remembrance of me.

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?

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.

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!