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!