“Goodnight, Baby Jesus. Goodnight, mommy. Goodnight, daddy,” Sprout said to his nativity, addressing Mary and Joseph. While his theology wasn’t quite right, I love how he personally identifies with the story. That intimacy with the characters is something I’m actually learning from him this Advent season.
As I wrote about back in November, my church is going through a significant transition. While I seriously thought we wouldn’t continue on, a few members have really kept things afloat. During the time we’ve been looking for a pastor, we’ve had a series of guest speakers. Because our usual organizer, Jan, was going to be at her husband’s high school reunion last Sunday, she asked me to organize the service. Here’s the sermon I gave, based on the passages Acts 4:32-35 and Romans 12:14-16.
Finding true community is rare. Finding true Christian community is even rarer.
I found true Christian community in college, when I broke bread in the cafeteria with my friends and my hall mates of different denominations gathered on Sunday evening fouir prayers.
I found it in rural Maine, when Chris and I lived on a cooperative farm. We gathered each morning for bagels and to recite St. Francis’ prayer before serving those who suffer most.
But those were unusual circumstances. Those supposedly aren’t situations that you can find in ordinary “adult” life.
In fact, an otherwise wise person – a priest – told me I wasn’t going to find a church like those places.
And yet I have – here.
This Easter is a little different from usual, as we’ve never had a week-old baby around while celebrating it. Sprout was almost a year old by the time of his first Easter, so he had a bit more comprehension of the world by then. At this point, Little Bird is strictly interested in eating, sleeping, and pooping. He’s hardly awake enough to register anything else.
But we still have a near three-year-old who is more than aware of the idea of candy, even if the concept of the Christian resurrection is beyond him. Fortunately, both we and the grandparents were more than willing to oblige his interest in sweets. He’s also old enough to do crafts, especially after a successful color-mixing activity during the blizzard, so egg-dyeing was a definite must.
Goals are tricky little beasts. They’re so easy to pin to big, specific things or be swayed by society’s expectations. It’s easy to ignore the more subtle things that need to be done, like forgiving yourself or making space to enjoy nature. In our capitalist, consumer-driven society, those seem shallow, even though they’re essential to loving others or contributing to a larger community.
After reflecting on 2015 and considering how to approach the coming year, I moved into the process of goal-setting. I knew that the things that were both frustrating me the most and in my control (aka not Congress) were the difficult, slippery issues requiring a lot of emotional work. Because I was overburdened and under-satisfied, I needed to deal with those issues before I could worry about specific actions for my career or volunteer activities.
Thankfully, the Holiday Council provided a nice framework for thinking through that type of goal-setting. Molly, the leader, encouraged us to come up with five ways of being for the coming year, as well as a word that encompassed all of it. While I frequently think about what type of person I want to be, I’d never really considered those traits as characteristics put into action at any particular time. Considering my personal values and what I particularly want to work on in the coming year, I picked the following “ways of being”:
After a such a stressful year, I wanted to find ways to be less anxious and more compassionate to myself and others while still “making a difference.”
From those, I realized that my word of the year is “Listen.” It reminds me of the three steps set forth in a prayer by my former church pastor: “Let me listen, let me learn, let me love.” Listening – whether to others’ needs or my own – must be the foundation of my action.
This word and these ways of being helped me establish my goals, which balanced internal, family needs with external ones.
The first two goals were both ones that I would undervalue and ignore unless I purposely focused on them: 1) to let go of my harmful expectations for myself and others and 2) immerse myself without regrets in spending time with my family during maternity leave. While I would be full-time on maternity leave no matter what, I want to have the maturity to feel like it’s not time wasted.
My second two goals were more traditional, although they’re as much about discernment as old-fashioned hard work: helping my church through its transition and having a sense of direction for my career. In both, I want to have a vision moving forward so I don’t just feel like I’m flailing towards nothing in particular.
So far in the year, most of my efforts have focused on simplifying. It just seemed like the right place to start. During Lent, my former pastor always said that fasting wasn’t about giving things up so much as making room for new things. I realized that to have enough space for a newborn, I needed to make both mental and physical space in my life.
Oddly enough, simplification can be a massive project. To help, I drew inspiration from two books: Living the Simple Life and Spark Joy.
As part of our book clean-out, I found Living the Simple Life by Elaine St James. I got it as part of a holiday gift exchange years ago with another book about living in the woods, intending to romantically contemplate how to get back to basics. Appropriately, my busy life kept me from reading it until now. While a lot of the book is not applicable to my life or now radically out of date – it came out in 1998, when the Internet was still something most people didn’t use – just reading it sparked my motivation. Knowing it is possible to simplify helped me interpret what that may mean in my individual life. As the author says, it probably doesn’t mean selling all of your stuff and moving to a cabin in the woods.
For me, I realized a lot of my self-imposed stress emerged from having an endless list of things that “needed” to be addressed. In particular, my activist guilt is the most goaded by the flood of emails I get from organizations requesting I sign petitions or send them money. To minimize that, I’m trying to get myself down to only 15 mailing lists. While I haven’t gotten there yet, I’ve already made a habit of unsubscribing to lists immediately if it’s not what I want. I’m also trying to spend a couple minutes a day randomly erasing or archiving old emails so I don’t have that huge number staring me in the face. I’ve already reduced it down from more than 6,000 to 5,500. While it’s still giant, I’m glad it’s no longer growing.
The second book was Spark Joy by Marie Kondo, the follow-up to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. After hearing a lot of good things about the previous book and seeing Spark Joy as a free offer, it seemed like something arriving at just the right time. With the need to clear out the future baby’s room that had been a bit of a dumping ground for “stuff we don’t know what to do with” for years, I definitely needed encouragement. While I didn’t follow her “tidying” instructions exactly – or in many cases, not at all – thinking about how my possessions spark joy or not has been really helpful. In addition to helping get rid of stuff, it also helped me consider about how to enjoy the stuff I have now. For example, I’m going to take many of the ticket stubs from concerts and postcards from travel and make a big bulletin board so I can remember those fond memories on a regular basis. I’ve already made huge progress on the room. As it previously inspired despair and now looks like a place where a child may be able to live in the future (after we move some furniture), I’d say the book made a difference. Having things physically organized makes it a lot easier to be mentally organized.
Before: Yikes.
Almost done!
Besides simplifying, I’ve also focused on empowering other people. My core urge is to do everything myself because I think I can do it better. Empowering others requires a level of humility and trust that’s both challenging and necessary. At work, I’m putting together an extensive list of reference materials so that other people can take on pieces of my job while I’m on maternity leave. It’s both weird and illuminating to get down all of the knowledge I carry around in my head in a form that makes sense to other people. In my volunteer activities, I’m allowing other people to take over some of my Kidical Mass rides because I simply won’t be allowed back on the bike by that point. As hard as it is to hand my projects over to others, even temporarily, it’s better that they can continue without me than be lost. More importantly, it opens the door for others to contribute their own vision and experiences that wouldn’t have happened if I clung to these projects myself. I want my work to help others to learn and grow rather than restricting them, so this is a great opportunity for that to happen.
As the year progresses, I’m sure these specific goals and steps towards them will shift. But I deeply appreciate the sense of structure they provide as I move through these major transitions in my life. The word “Listen” and ways of being have already provided a foundation for how I structure my time and think about my priorities.
Editor’s note: I didn’t get paid by Stratejoy to write these blog posts. I just found that the Holiday Council helped me out a lot and wanted to work through some of these thoughts.
Trigger Warning: Pregnancy loss / miscarriage
Quite frankly, 2015 sucked. Nationally, the U.S. suffered from a series of mass shootings; racial-based violence; entire cities having their water supplies poisoned; the hottest year on record; and a racist, sexist bully leading in the polls for a major political party. Personally, I dealt with the trauma of having a miscarriage, followed by the added stress of restrictions on my next pregnancy, my church community going through a difficult transition, and a number of promising professional opportunities falling through. It was a year of crushed expectations, metaphorical doors slammed in faces. It would be easy to say “Good riddance” and not think about it again. But I’m not doing that, for a simple reason – I love to learn, and there are no better circumstances to learn from than terrible ones.
I didn’t feel this way in the beginning of December. At that point, I felt like my life had a tremendous number of moving pieces I was trying to keep in sync, all of which were exhausting and none of which I had any control over. Even though I was always doing too much, yet it never felt like enough. I wasn’t a good enough mother, co-worker, activist, wife, daughter, writer. I longed to have peace and satisfaction.
So I did two things that would have previously been anathema to me; I went to a therapist and joined a personal coaching group.
I had been thinking about the therapy since last year, when I had what I recognized after the fact as a panic attack at Disney. While I hadn’t experienced anything nearly so dramatic since then, Chris saw the toll that stress had been taking on me and encouraged me to talk to someone. I dragged my feet for months, taking weeks to answer emails that should have taken minutes. As a chronic over-achiever, I emotionally felt like getting help was weak, even though intellectually I knew that was bullshit. After all, I’m good at everything else – why can’t I fix myself? But I was too far inside my own head to know what was actually going on; I needed an outside perspective.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what I got with the therapist. Contrary to my Far Side-esque fears, she listened without judgment or even for the most part, recommendations. In fact, the most radical thing she told me was that what I was feeling was perfectly normal. My stress was understandable, considering the year I had been through. My feeling of never being or doing enough is common among folks who become invested in big causes, especially those associated with systematic injustices.
In other words, there was nothing wrong with me. Just hearing that was a relief. While I would want to get help if something was wrong, hearing that what I was feeling was justified (even if my coping mechanisms weren’t great) was so satisfying.
Following on this first dose of self-help, I signed up for Stratejoy’s Holiday Council. I had no idea what to expect, except that I felt drawn to it. In the past, I had dismissed this sort of thing as too touchy-feely or woo-woo. But my feeling of helplessness during the last year made me crave something to help me process it and move forward.
My intuition was right – the Holiday Council was just the thing to fulfill that need. It consisted of three group phone calls, a workbook to fill out and exercises (like posting in the private Facebook group) to complete between the calls. Each of the three weeks had a different focus: the first on looking back during the year, the second on visioning for the coming year, and the third on concrete planning for 2016.
The first week inspired a deeper look at some of the realizations I had come to with the therapist. In particular, the challenge to post a photograph to Facebook that summarized the year brought surprising insights. While I had previously dwelt on the year’s disappointments, I also wanted to acknowledge the beautiful moments I spent with my family. In fact, it was often those joyous times, whether playing in the basement with Sprout or camping in the mountains, that buoyed me through the hard ones.
Not the same photo, but also from Red Rocks.
I finally decided on a photo of Chris, Sprout and I at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, taken by my sister-in-law during our trip to Las Vegas. It was only days after I found out about my miscarriage, but I still have a genuine smile. On that trip, I experienced the freedom of being happy despite the surrounding circumstances. That lesson carried me throughout the year, teaching me how to function in spite of loss and disappointment. When I got pregnant again and then had complications, I found ways to revise our adventures around my restrictions instead of allowing my fears to control me. Sometimes that meant sitting on the ground at the Renaissance Faire because there were no seats available, but dirty pants were better than not going at all. Although I didn’t get a highly anticipated job, I coordinated a complex social media campaign while also launching a completely new website. Although I felt overwhelmed about the future of our church, I started chipping in so the congregation can run the services without a pastor. Reflecting back helped me realize how strong I had been, even when I felt helpless.
While just choosing the photo was a challenge, posting it to Facebook was even harder. It was the first time I had told anyone outside of my immediate family, my church pastor, and the therapist about the miscarriage. I held my breath as I hit post.
But even though I hadn’t been able to speak of it in more than a whisper before, sharing my story with this group removed the barriers I had been holding on to. It enabled me to confront my feelings and write the piece just published on the Good Mother Project. It drew it out of my head, reducing its power over me. Even though I had been haunted for months by those images, writing about the experience was like writing about something that happened to someone else. I wrote that piece on the way up to my parents for Christmas break and was able to talk to Chris and Sprout as I wrote, even occasionally laughing. I can’t say I’ve moved on completely – I don’t think I ever will – but the safe space the Holiday Council provided allowed me to process and then share my story.
I’m glad 2015 is over. But I’m also glad I took the time and energy to consider how it changed me and what that means going into 2016.
This Sunday, I felt – and cried – as if I was losing a family member. But it wasn’t a person Chris and I are losing – it’s a community. A community that has inspired thought and action, provided comfort even when they didn’t know it, and loved us and Sprout so very much. We’re in the process of losing our church.
Our church started in 1938 as Bethesda First Baptist, part of the American Baptists, who are much more liberal than the Southern variety. About eight years ago, the congregation decided to relaunch, complete with a new pastor and focus. About a year later, with the congregation down to a handful of people, they brought in our current pastor, Todd. Under Todd’s leadership, the church became “multi-denominational,” embracing Christian traditions from a variety of times and places. From discussions of the saints to contemporary worship songs, the church embodied a unique mix of theology and ritual.
Chris and I came into this story long before we even knew about the church itself. After experiencing spiritual community in college and volunteering at Homeworkers Organized for More Employment (HOME) in Maine, I knew I wanted a church that deeply connected people together. While evangelical churches had previously been my go-to, I abandoned that branch as unfruitful after Chris found only disrespect for being Catholic. Not long after, I read Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy, which is about finding wisdom and depth in a broad array of Christian traditions. After we finally decided to get married in a Catholic church, I told the priest that I wanted a church that combined a strong sense of community with the theological diversity. In response, he not unkindly laughed and said, “Shannon, you’re simply not going to find that.”
And yet, we found exactly what I was looking for in the Church in Bethesda. The longer we were there, the more both we and the church matured. I led theological discussions and attended studies on ancient spiritual practices. Chris and I joined the leadership team, called the Servant’s Group, where we discussed the church’s vision and struggled with budget issues.
As part of the leadership, we realized that our community’s main strength was our focus on radical welcome. Our valuing of theological diversity expanded to include diversity of socio-economic levels, race, and sexual orientation. Beyond simple acceptance, we started emphasizing peacemaking, social justice, and reconciliation with groups often left out of Christian hegemony. We took pride in welcoming everyone without strings attached, from a Muslim family who stopped by to a Jewish woman who never comes to service but always shows up afterwards for snacks.
But just as it felt like we as a church had found our purpose – a very needed purpose – everything was falling apart.
All at once, we had a huge departure of young families. The year Sprout was born, there were 9 other kids born; now none of their families attend our church. While most were military – we have a large medical military school nearby – others couldn’t afford to raise a family in the D.C. area. At the same time, we didn’t have a new influx of people to replace them. Where we regularly had 70 people on Sunday mornings, we had dropped down to 40 on the very best of days.
To pile on the problems, our building was literally falling apart. While we always had problems, the first real emergency was the belltower shedding stones during the 2011 D.C. earthquake. After that, we had a major new repair every few months. The culmination was our boiler completely breaking down and flooding the entire basement last winter. When the repair crew drained the water, they found a natural gas leak. Then a water leak in a previously-frozen pipe and another and another. We didn’t have heat in our sanctuary for the entire winter. (Fortunately, we could meet in a smaller room.) While insurance covered the boiler, the building has continued to disintegrate. Only a couple of weeks ago, the radiator in the front hallway broke, leaving a huge puddle on the carpet in the back of the sanctuary.
Between the loss of members and the continuing bills, we simply couldn’t keep up financially. Our pastor took on a second job as a customer service person for the local Apple store. Members of the leadership group took over maintenance tasks, like mowing the lawn.
I stepped up by doing what I do best – communications. We organized events, increased our social media, improved our website, posted online ads. Our Easter Egg hunt attracted many more families than anticipated, nearly overwhelming our resources. But even though we made sure every kid walked away with a special treat, none of the families returned. The Earth Day event was even more of a bust, with no one outside of the volunteers showing up to hear the speaker from Interfaith Power and Light.
Each Sunday morning, I sat in the back with Sprout playing on the floor and counted the number of people. There were never more, never enough. Even though I had done the best I could, it felt like failure.
What finally brought everything to a head was the decision from our pastor to leave at the end of this year. I can’t blame him – while it was exhausting for the leadership group, it was far worse for him. He was spending too much time just trying to keep the church above water with little time for his spiritual / vocational development and no financial stability. As his friend, I completely understood.
But as a parishioner, I was angry and frustrated. Not at him personally, but the entire situation. We don’t have enough money to keep up our failing building. We don’t have enough money to pay a new pastor. We don’t have enough volunteer time or energy to run a regular service. More than half of the Servants’ Group were too burnt out to start from scratch. The future was a big blank.
So at last week’s congregational meeting, we took the first step in figuring out what to do come January – we gave up control of our building.
While it wasn’t the end-all, be-all, it felt like the first step towards complete dissolution. We had put so much in for what felt like so little. I had envisioned bringing my son up in this community and that simply couldn’t happen now.
Which is why I was sobbing in the pews. All of the community, all of the values that we stood for are needed, now as much as ever. They’re needed in a world with terror, hunger, racism, and violence. We as a society and individuals need to hear and embrace them.
But maybe, our society doesn’t need those values wrapped up in a traditional church structure. Maybe they’re needed in service, art, music, and something completely different from what’s come before. Maybe we can rebuild.
But for now, I’m still sad for the fact that what the future holds will never be the same as the past. I’m still in mourning for what had been and uncertain of what is to come. I already miss my faith family.
I have a guest post over at the blog for my awesome church, Church in Bethesda. It’s about how doing things over and over and over again with Sprout has fed my spiritual growth and how even those without toddlers can grow from repetition. Here’s the first paragraph to give you a feel for it:
In meditative circles, one sometimes hears, “Solvitur ambulando,” or “It is solved by walking.” Often, this refers to the act of walking around a labyrinth. But it just as easily could be stated as “It is solved by repeating.” Besides the action of placing one foot in front of the other over and over again, labyrinths frequently have repeating motifs or patterns. Most are also fairly small, so you’ll probably end up making your way around it multiple times. Of course, repetition as a spiritual technique is far from limited to labyrinths. Many Christian traditions – most prominently, Catholics – have repeated prayers as a practice, with or without a rosary. While I had never spent much time with these techniques until recently, my baby turned into a toddler and repetition became utterly unavoidable. Fortunately, I’ve been able to embrace the opportunities for spiritual growth this particular season of parenthood provides.
Read the rest of The Circle Game: Toddlers, Repetition and Spiritual Growth
We have so much to be thankful for. That’s never been more apparent than this past Thanksgiving, when we had not just one, but two different feasts with our church and biological families.
Usually, we trek home to upstate New York for Thanksgiving. But as it takes us close to 10 hours to get there and we’re going home for Christmas, we had no desire to make that drive twice in a month. Plus, a quirk of bad work scheduling means that I am traveling the first two weeks of December.
Instead, this year our parents came to us. I’m an only child, so it was simple for my mom and dad. For Chris’s parents, it was a bit more complicated – his sister lives in Las Vegas. As they couldn’t be on two coasts simultaneously, we delayed our Thanksgiving until Saturday.
Nonetheless, we carried out some Thanksgiving traditions on Thursday. Chris baked off Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, a treat his family has every holiday. We plopped on the couch for the Macy’s parade, which enthralled Sprout. He grooved to the Broadway numbers, tried to lift his leg like the Rockettes, “toot toot”ed at the Thomas the Train balloon, and loved the Sesame Street float.
With the afternoon free, we joined our church’s Thanksgiving dinner. We have one every year for congregants who aren’t leaving town, along with any family or friends they bring. This year, it was Chris, Sprout and I, my parents, another couple from our church with a small child, my pastor and his family, and one of my pastor’s homeless friends. The table was full of conversation and laughter. One of the more amusing incidents was my pastor’s son describing an imaginary Blue’s Clues parody that involved Blue rabidly attacking the videocamera and Steve using Slippery Soap to take a shower. While it was pretty funny, his dad shut it down before it got even longer and more inappropriate.
After dinner, several of us participated in the nerd-traditional post-meal activity of playing video games, namely an eight-person game of Super Smash Brothers. I couldn’t figure out where my character was half of the time, but it was a lot of fun. While the babies couldn’t play, they kept busy building towers out of Megablocks. Later on, we put them on the piano bench and they played the cutest little duet I’ve ever seen. While it sounded like a modernist sound piece, they were tapping on the keys rather than banging, which was impressive for a couple of toddlers.
That night, we pulled out the board and card games. After a couple games, my dad headed to bed while Chris, my mom, and I stayed up with a bottle of red wine. Although I had earlier insisted that six bottles of wine was too much for the weekend, I was clearly wrong. A couple of glasses each fueled a conversation about drunken escapades, poorly thought-out decisions, and other quirks of adulthood that was so engaging that we completely lost track of our game of 500 Rummy.
My in-laws arrived on Friday night, making the party complete. I’m extraordinarily fortunate to have a great relationship with them. As Chris and I were high-school sweethearts, I basically grew up with them.
Despite all of the company, I was relaxed. While I sometimes get defensive when visitors help with the dishes or clean my house, I accepted the assistance. As the grandparents adored playing with Sprout, I was happy to give them that time. At work, I’ve been sprinting from one project to another, so it was good to physically and mentally rest.
Thanksgiving dinner was similarly lacking in disaster. The menu was fairly traditional – turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, canned cranberry sauce (with ridges, of course), Crescent rolls, green beans, corn, and carrots. As it was the first Thanksgiving we ever hosted, we made some compromises – my family’s sweet potato casserole instead of his apples and yams, his canned cranberry sauce instead of my cranberry jello mold. We made about a million trips to the store and ran the dishwasher about 10 times, but that happens any time Chris takes on a big cooking project. The only thing that didn’t go quite according to plan was that for all of our existing kitchen equipment, we had to buy a turkey baster after the bird already went in the oven.
We even had time for some family activities. Heading over to the park, we found out that Sprout is very interested in basketball but tragically a little too short to play it yet. Our park has a “funnel ball” game, where you toss a ball up into a big funnel and it falls out of one of three holes. The adults were playing it, although we weren’t very good at actually getting it in the hoop. After watching us, Sprout took his ball, walked up to the pole supporting the funnel, stood up on his tip-toes, and threw it as hard as he could. Which was about three inches. And then he did it again and again. He was convinced that if he just tried hard enough, he would get it in. When we lifted him up to help him out, he was just pissed that he was still too short to get it in the funnel. He finally got so frustrated that we had to move on to a different part of the playground to prevent a full-blown tantrum. I had to admire his can-do spirit though.
The last day, we went to the National Zoo to see their Christmas light display. Needless to say, it was far more successful than our last trip there. While many of the exhibits were closing when we arrived, we saw some animals who are often hiding in the heat. Sprout watched the furry beaver intently as it ambled along and then splashed into the water. As he woofed at the wolf, it sulked by and then cast an intense gaze on him. He also liked the farm animals, especially the huge Holstein cow who had an astoundingly low moo. But his favorite part was the holiday train display, where he just stared at the three levels of trains going around and around and around for a good ten minutes.
I’m so grateful that I could spend the holidays with so many people who are both weird and wonderful.
Lately, I’ve been struggling with fear. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize it when it affected me the most – I misidentified it as anxiety or self-righteous anger. My fear has revolved around two major themes: not being a “good enough” mom to Sprout and not doing enough to “make the world a better place.” My fear around the first issue was most prominent during our Disney trip; the second emerged while I was washing dishes last week as an extended, angry, despairing rant about climate change, poverty and other injustices. Both are always bubbling under the surface. While I don’t believe God manipulates people to send personal messages, I do believe that if people ask, God will open their hearts to help hear what they need to from the noise of everyday life. This past weekend, I had a one-two punch of those messages, leading me to realize that I need to embrace my fears rather than ignoring them.
The first blow came on Saturday night, from a marvelous episode of Doctor Who. Even though it was advertised as a “properly scary” episode, it ended up being something very different indeed. Without spoiling the plot, it was fundamentally about how fear isn’t inherently a bad thing. Fear can make us stronger, quicker, and braver; it can make us super-powered. Fear comes from the knowledge that there are things we do not and perhaps cannot understand, but that’s okay. Whether the monster under the bed is real or not is irrelevant. Fear may be our constant companion, but instead of letting it control us, it can drive us to become better people.
The second hit came the next morning in church. My pastor has been preaching on the Beatitudes and what it means to be a peacemaker in the world. Last Sunday, he preached about how love and peace need to be at the center of our lives. That although we may have fear, we can’t let it drive us. That peace comes from breaking cycles of violence, whether physical or emotional. When we have peace at the core of our being, it acknowledges the pain of others and moves out from us.
The Doctor Who episode deeply connected with me, but I didn’t know why until hearing the sermon. Putting the two together, I realized that by trying to ignore my fear, I was allowing it to overwhelm me. To paraphrase the Martin Luther King Jr. quote on this week’s church bulletin, I was trying to merely drive out darkness instead of bringing light. But there can be no known without an unknown, no comfort without fear, no rebuilding without destruction, and no resurrection without the despair of Good Friday.
By worrying about not being a good enough mom, I don’t give myself the space to make and acknowledge the mistakes that are needed to grow. By being so concerned that I’m not doing enough, I make it all about me and deny the efforts of the folks around me. One of my favorite bloggers, Phil Sandifer, says that progressive causes like feminism involve both tearing down the current systems and making new mistakes in the process. As both a parent and activist, I have to forgive myself and others so that we can all make new mistakes together.
From now on, I will try to embrace my fears, realizing that they’re an outgrowth of how much I love my son and am concerned about the world around me. Instead of being afraid of caring too much, I will try to celebrate it.
I have a guest post up at my awesome church’s blog reflecting on the Saint Francis’ prayer and how it relates to parenting. Even though I’ve been saying this prayer every morning for years, I never quite understood the depth of it until I became a mom. Also, the post is illustrated by a really cool picture of St. Francis, my favorite saint.
Here’s the first two paragraphs as a preview…
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“Let me not so much seek to be consoled as to console / to be forgiven as to forgive / and to be loved as to love.”
While I repeat these words – part of the prayer colloquially known as Saint Francis’ prayer – every morning, they truly get put to the test at night. As the mother of a one-year old, I’ve gained a much deeper understanding of these words over the last 12 months. After rocking a newborn as I paced the house to catching snatches of sleep upright on the couch because it’s the only way my baby can get any himself, I now understand that as a parent, this prayer isn’t a request – it’s a rule.
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