Awe-full

Great and holy God
awe and reverence
fear and trembling
do not come easily to us
for we are not
Old Testament Jews
or Moses
or mystics
or sensitive enough.
Forgive us
for slouching into Your presence
with little expectation
and less awe
than we would eagerly give a visiting dignitary.
We need
neither Jehovah nor a buddy –
neither “the Great and Powerful Oz” nor “the man upstairs.”
Help us
to want what we need…
You
God
and may the altar of our hearts
tremble with delight
at
Your visitation
amen.

~Frederick Ohler

This poem was found as a meditation in the Mosaic Bible which is a regular New Living Translation of the Bible with a special section in the front that has art, essays, and poems by authors across time periods and continents. These are organized thematically and weekly into the church calendar. So this poem was a meditation for the first week of Lent which is this week.

It's been a long time since I have read poetry, and I like this one.

What does God do with dust and ash?

It's Lent again. I've been reading the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1662) off and on for the past year or so. One thing difficult for me to quite come to terms with is the constant petitioning for mercy and forgiveness. It's not that I think I deserve God's kindness, but as far as I can tell, it's been extended. The whole contrite thing can sometimes feel like sniveling and hoping for grace which has already been given. But perhaps that's why I stick with it; I think I still have much to learn. Maybe I need to be reminded more often of how my life is good only in that God imbues it with goodness.

I liked this guy's meditation on Ash Wednesday:

What does God do with dust and ash?

He grows things out of them.

He covers them with purple raiments.

He lifts people out of them.

He unfairly accepts them in exchange for beauty.

He writes mysterious things in them.

He spits in them and uses the mud to give sight.

He washes them off your stinky feet.

He breathes into them and creates new life.

He descends into them, submits to their suffocation, and emerges alive and spotless.

When you return to dust, even if your body should be burnt to ashes and scattered over the four winds, he who is the Lord over the earth will be able to collect you, reconstitute you, and resurrect you into a body fit for eternity.

~Jared Wilson

Ash Wednesday

The Collect

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent; Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This Collect is to be read every day in Lent after the Collect appointed for the Day.

~The Book of Common Prayer, 1662

Tortured inadequacy

I've been thinking about why new motherhood has provoked so much reflection and desire for guidance. Reflecting on reflection, like it? For me, becoming a mother has made me painfully aware of my inadequacies at a time when I was cresting a high point in achievement. I was a couple years into a marriage with my wonderful husband, financially stable (because of him), professionally accomplished and respected, and generally well-regarded in my circle of peers.

Motherhood, in the early weeks, was like bootcamp: crazy hours, physically demanding, a steep learning curve, and nowhere to hide. You can't imagine having to nurse every 2-3 hours until you have to nurse every 2-3 hours. And in that exhaustion, you have to care for the most helpless, innocent thing who's your child at whom you get frustrated, whom you are tempted to shake into silence, and who has conditions you don't know how to evaluate as medically serious or not. Mebbe this doesn't dump some women into the inadequacy pool, but it sure dumped me there. While my daughter is well out of those early feed-a-thons, I continue to find myself challenged. I'm less challenged physically having learned more of less how to keep pace, but I am more challenged emotionally as she blossoms into personhood. Can I put aside my to-do list to interact with her wholeheartedly? Can I speak kindly when our wills are opposed? Will I pause in the "doing" to tell her I love her? Honestly, a lot of times the answer is No and I know that.

And while I could despair in this, the following promise brings hope:

9But [Jesus] said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me.

~Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, chapter 12

One commenter's translation for my grace is sufficient for you has you need nothing more than my grace, in other words, the grace of God is adequate. And not only is the grace of God adequate but it dovetails into completeness when it rests in weakness. The Greek word translated as weakness, astheneia, here refers to an incapacity for something or an experience of limitation. Today, this is good news because this is the way motherhood frequently feels: I am incapable of loving well, limited in my selflessness, lacking in wisdom.

I have many questions about what the future holds and I often wonder if I will have the wherewithal to make the tough decisions. This passage reminds me that I probably don't have the wherewithal and that's ok because the grace of God will fill in the gaps gladly. It will even fill the gap of questioning whether gaps can be filled. Filling in gaps about gaps being filled, like it?

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This post is part of an ongoing series I am writing along with the author of On Expecting

Conflicting voices

I missed last week because I have been struggling between competing views on motherhood. In one camp, the 60s feminists reject the patriarchy of the 50s that told them "Father knows best" and that women were only for the home. Instead women are men; in fact, better versions of men with breasts and wombs. Anything you can do I can do better. Birth control and nannies open up endless possibilities to climb to the top of anything. In the other camp, evangelical women reject the rejection of the 60s feminists and say, "Wait a minute, mothering matters! It matters more than you would know." Just as hired hands don't care for the sheep the way the shepherd does, no one is going to love your kid more than you do, so hop to it. If you love Jesus, you won't work outside the home. At 30, I feel just young enough to have missed all of this. None of these ideologies are mine. I have never lived in a world where women weren't allowed to try for any career they wanted and where women haven't significantly contributed to making the world a better place in public fora.

I'm posting not because I've come to any conclusions about this but I'm trying to nail down why it's been so hard to pull together thoughts. So here are some observations.

1. I think that in addition to a theology of motherhood or family, we need a theology of work particularly skilled work that takes training.
2. We carry a lot of cultural baggage that makes developing any theology difficult or makes developing an honest theology that isn't just us stuffing ourselves into what we want the Bible to say difficult.
   
3. Our cultural baggage includes the false dichotomy of either being a stay at home, home schooling mom OR being a secular, working woman.
4. Our cultural baggage also includes the sense that work endows us with our identity AND is meaningless.
   

Here are some small verses that have given me pause since I last posted:

¹⁰Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. ¹¹ He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots...He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
~I Samuel, chapter 8

¹After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, ²and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; ³Joanna the wife of Cuza, the manager of Herod's household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
~The Gospel according to Luke, chapter 8

What I see here are women with publicly applied skills many of whom, given the culture they lived in, probably had husbands and children. What does this mean for us today? I don't know, but that's what I see.

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This post is part of an ongoing series I am writing along with the author of On Expecting

Jesus is never too busy for her

In my head, I have a "9-5" which actually much longer than 9-5 but also my unit of productive work. I like to think that at the end of the day when my husband comes home we can share what we did during our "9-5s" My 9-5 has three domains: A) caring for L, B) taking care of the house, and C) academic writing. This week has been a major struggle because time wise A > B > C, but in my heart I was wanting C > B > A. I have a looming deadline to push out a few pages of writing and I am woefully behind. I'm one of those writers who works best when I can "get in the zone". It's not "be in the zone" it's "get in the zone". Getting there takes some doing and frequently, by the time I'm there, L is done with her nap or done with my ignoring her or just done and needing my attention. I grit my teeth and turn to her with unwritten thoughts flying through my head and disappearing into the ether. So that's me: at home but maybe not with my daughter.

In our evening readings this week, N and I read through the Gospel of Mark passing through this passage:

They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, "What were you arguing about on the road?" But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all."

He took a little child and had him stand among them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me."

~The Gospel of Mark, chapter 9

I blithely tried to put this passage out of my head, but there's no denying the drama. After a stretch of dusty travel, Jesus reveals to his disciples that he overheard them arguing about who was the greatest. They're all sheepish because they got caught, but really they do want to know how they rank because they all think they have personally sacrificed the most and achieved the most. And then Jesus upends everything. What's this stuff about being first and being last? And then he holds up one of Peter and Andrew's cousin's friend's boy and says, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me…"

Maybe there are mothers who know in the deepest core of their being at every moment and hour of the day that serving their child is an act of service to God, I am not one of them. More often than not, I think that applying the training I've received over the past 7 years is an act of service to God which is hindered by having to amuse and attend my drooling baby who so wants to be with me that she has crawled under my desk and is sucking on my computer cables. This passage rudely questions my evaluation of things, now doesn't it? It's not that my job as a researcher has no kingdom value, it does. It's more that when she's crawled 6ft from her play area to be near me at the computer, can I put down that work and embrace this little one fully, with an open heart because I wouldn't want to be too busy for Jesus and Jesus is certainly never too busy for her?

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This post is part of an ongoing series I am writing along with the author of On Expecting

Between a rock and a hard place

"Being a mother is hard."

I remember thinking that before I became a mother from watching my friends around me have children. I think mostly the issue was that they were enormous and pondering before they disappeared for a couple months and when they reappeared they looked tired.

"Being a mother is hard."

I feel this now as a mother. The first couple months, it was probably mostly the tired thing that came from frequent feedings around the clock and painfully engorged breasts. But that phase is a distant memory. L sleeps relatively well, and I now get to sleep through most of the night. Feedings are a breeze, both solids and nursing. What's hard is that I feel torn between attending to her and my work.

The trick is that I feel like I shouldn't feel that being a mother is hard because the physical stuff isn't hard anymore. Yea, I have to attend to L's physical needs: food, clean diapers, warm clothes, a safe place to sleep, but really it's her emotional needs of wanting attention and affection that tear at me. I'd rather be writing or reading. Can't she just sit with me and let me do that? We'd still be together, you know?

This past week my husband and I read through the end of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus talks about the signs of his second coming and the end of the age. And here (Matthew 24), he talks about how at that end time those who are in Judea flee to the mountains… and in that fleeing How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers!…For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now… In all the dreadfulness, pregnant women and nursing mothers are the only named category of people; they are singled out for particular difficulty. That has always struck me as kind of unfair, but this week, I agree.

Pregnant women and nursing mothers not only must keep themselves alive but also are the literal lifeline for their child. You might think that nursing mothers are a somewhat different case than pregnant women but their children also depend on them and not just for physical but also emotional care. Children can nurse into toddlerhood even after they can eat solid foods which suggests to me that their nursing isn't just for physical sustenance but also emotional connection. Reports from orphanages where children were fed but not tended to help us see how important emotional care is for proper development and survival.

Looking at this passage, why are pregnant women and nursing mothers in desperate straights in times of trouble? Because they cannot be substituted for. No matter the upheaval in the world around, no matter how desperate the fleeing, that mother has to care for that child or the child is not likely to survive.

For moms and probably new moms in particular, it is easy to feel a lot of guilt and then to feel guilt for feeling guilt. This text helps me to realize, new motherhood is hard. Not that new motherhood is insurmountably hard and for most of us, it'll never be fleeing from destruction hard. It's a special kind of, special stage of hard. I don't need to beat myself up for not feeling like this is smooth sailing even though I've had great support from family and friends and I get to work at home. And I can remind myself that eventually, I won't be a nursing mother and I'll be out of that special category.

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This post is part of an ongoing series I am writing along with the author of On Expecting