holy week reads, day by day

We’re on the cusp of the holiest of days.

For those who call themselves Christian, the Triduum is the most sacred time of the year. A truth often buried under piles of Easter candy, pink bunnies and plastic grass.

Each day has a distinct flavor. The earthy service of Holy Thursday: washing dirty feet and breaking bread with friends. The stark emptiness of Good Friday: lamenting death and sitting with suffering. The long stretch of Holy Saturday: wondering and waiting. And the brilliant delight of Easter Sunday: singing joy and celebrating life.

I love Triduum. Every year I slowly slip into a lackluster Lent, but always find myself on the eve of Triduum with childlike anticipation. Because the journey from Thursday to Sunday never fails to surprise as it draws me into the stories and the rituals, the sacred and the mystery.

Triduum sums up what I love about being Catholic: ritual, liturgy, Scripture, sacrament. I wrestle with my faith and my church and my God every other day of the year. But for these four days, I enter in deeply, willingly, openly.

That said, the prospect of multiple church services with a baby and a toddler in tow is practically laughable. I’m sure we’ll end up with good story material this year as we always do. And I know much of our Holy Week will be lived out at home, which is just fine, too.

To balance the mayhem we’ll bring to Mass, I’ve collected a handful of lovely reads and reflections to help celebrate each day at home, during those rare gems of quiet moments to myself. Perhaps a few will intrigue or inspire you as well:

Palm Sunday lessons from an unlikely Pontius Pilate by James Martin, SJ. “Because, as even a six-year-old knows, everyone roses from the dead.”

Strip.ped bare: Holy Week and the art of losing by Richard Lischer for Holy Thursday

Busted Halo’s excellent Virtual Stations of the Cross for Good Friday

What did Jesus do on Holy Saturday? From the Washington Post’s On Faith blog

And lest you get overwhelmed, take this advice and let one piece of the Passion rest in your thoughts this week. The whole is too much for any of us to hold.

(Especially without a good soundtrack to accompany the highs and lows.)

Happy holy week. We’re almost there.

enlighten your spirit: louise erdrich

“But of all passing notions, that of a human being for a child is perhaps the purest in the abstract, and the most complicated in reality. Growing, bearing, mothering or fathering, supporting, and at last letting go of an infant is a powerful and mundane creative act that rapturously sucks up whole chunks of life.”

Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year

I knew from the moment I saw the book’s cover that I would lose my heart to it.

Drawn from the back, a dark-haired woman nuzzles a dark-haired baby in the curve of her neck, both gazing together at a blue jay outside the window. A newer edition has replaced the duo with the lone bird’s unflinching stare. But at the beginning of my own birth year with baby #2, it was this quiet, anonymous madonna-and-child that drew me in.

Erdrich describes her book as “a set of thoughts from one self to the other – writer to parent, artist to mother.” (So of course I tore through it cover to cover.)

And her treatment of a well-worn feminist theme – the dilemma of mother torn between child and work – is tender and tough at all once.

But what I love above all is that her treatment of maternal love is the most true and least sugary-sentimental I’ve yet read:

We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence. The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby’s needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children’s faces.

You have to love nature to truly love this book, or at least be willing to stay the course through Erdrich’s wanderings through the wild that eventually wind back to mothering.

(You also have to forgive her several sections of randomly-placed recipes and homages to her husband’s cooking. Though pregnant and nursing mothers can’t help but fall in love with food as they nourish themselves and their babies at a staggering pace. Writes the woman who just helped herself to second dinner.)

But anyone who has lived through the seasons of a child’s early years will find themselves in her changing landscapes, both of the natural world and the interior life.

She weaves the stories of three of her babies into one narrative of a nameless daughter, reminiscent of the way any mother of multiple children looks back and wonders, “Was that with the first baby? Or the second? Or was it the third?”

A blur of babyhoods, but the powerful love and the raw frustrations and the deep conflicts meld into one story of woman becoming mother over time.

I love this memoir of early motherhood because it is poetic in its imagery and powerful in its honesty.

She writes of walking in winter at the end of a pregnancy and letting her swollen body sink to rest in a deep snowbank, wishing she could just birth the baby right then and there.

She describes her fraying nerves while rocking a colicky newborn for the umpteenth night in a row that finally resort to whispering (amidst the baby’s screams) words that parents never admit in the light of day: I love you, but you’re driving me completely nuts. You’re such a g****** crank.

I still laugh out loud when I think about that scene.

So if you long to write in the middle of life with littles, or if you gaze out windows to mark seasons passing through the maddening monotony, or if you simply love to dig in the dirt with children, your mothering spirit can find yourself in Erdrich’s words.

Perhaps we all can:

 Mothering is a subtle art whose rhythm we collect and learn, as much from one another as by instinct. Taking shape, we shape each other, with subtle pressures and sudden knocks. The challenges shape us, approvals refine, the wear and tear of small abrasions transform until we’re slowly made up of one another and yet wholly ourselves.

inspire your spirit (great websites): picturing God

You know the days. You’ve had them, too.

(I’ve been having too many of them lately, hence the lack of recent postings ’round these parts.)

The days when all you see around you are piles of dirty dishes, heaps of laundry, stacks of bills, messes of toys. The days when email and voice mail and children are all whining for your attention. The days when distraction and disorder reign supreme.

The days when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and you shudder at the wild-eyed, disheveled soul who glares back.

It was a day like this when I stumbled upon a beautiful website while doing research for work. Picturing God: Faces and Traces of the Divine is an oasis of calm amid the internet’s frenzy, a place of prayer amid the online babble.

The website, run by Loyola Press, is exactly what its name suggests: a collection of photos submitted by readers that illustrate glimpses of God. Many are stunning landscapes or skyscapes; other are places or people with spiritual significance. Some are exotic; others are everyday. Certain photos look professional; most are decidedly amateur. They are both simple and spectacular.

But each daily selection has such depth and conviction and beauty behind it. I love that people saw God in that instant, were moved to capture it, and inspired to share it. The world would be a better place if we all woke up each morning with eyes open to find God in the places and faces around us.

Seeing each day’s photo and reading its description have become God moments in my own day. They slow me down and remind me to see. They give me hope that beauty and peace can still be found all around us. They remind me that the world is full of seekers and soaked with the divine.

And on frenzied days like today, my mothering spirit needs that reminder.

Here’s my* glimpse of God for the day. What’s yours?

*My amazingly talented sister-in-law snapped this shot, so I can take no credit. But hey, recognizing others’ talents is a glimpse of the divine, too, right? And the beauty of baby ears…sigh.

lift your spirit (good music): elizabeth mitchell

Music lovers can mark the seasons of their lives by what they were listening to at the time.

A beloved band or a favorite song or even a few notes take us back to when we loved that music. Sometimes for me the memories are so strong – for good and for bad – that I have to open my eyes and remember I’m no longer there.

In the years that come, Elizabeth Mitchell‘s voice will always pull me back to these early days of mothering. I first discovered her gentle lilt on a Putumayo children’s CD, and then one by one her albums have crept into our home. We are all better for it.

Elizabeth’s music is balm to my frenzied days of parenting. She has become the soundtrack to our evenings, the antidote to our witching hour. I push “play,” and her soft soprano fills the air, accompanied by gentle guitar and the sweet sounds of her daughter and husband harmonizing in the background. Family folk music at its best.

(The fact that they cover Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” AND the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On” on the same album only makes me love her more.)

One song in particular has been lifting me up lately. I first heard “Peace Like A River” when a friend and I were lucky enough to hear Elizabeth live in concert last year. The song was simple enough to teach to the audience in two minutes or less, and we all sang along as Elizabeth strummed the guitar and her daughter Storey played the harmonica.

When I discovered this track was on her “You Are My Little Bird” album, I was delighted. It came along during a week when I need more than a little peace like a river in my soul. On one especially awful day, I reached the end of my rope and was thisclose to screaming at the children. But that song serendipitously snuck into my head, and I decided to sing instead of scream.

I kid you not, it was one of those rare, magical moments of parenting. The toddler stopped whining, the baby stopped screaming, and smiles crept across both their faces. The song is simple enough that by the third go-round, S was singing along. Later that night, I heard him singing it to himself in his crib as he went to sleep, and I smiled again. We all need peace like a river, joy like a fountain, love like an ocean.

I hope this lifts your spirit today, too. Enjoy.

nurture your mothering spirit: a new series

So here it is, dear reader. The last in my bursts of inspiration for Mothering Spirit 2.0. (I hope it does not disappoint, or you may have to wait awhile for the next brainstorm.)

I’ve been reflecting lately on this space: how this blog lives and moves and has its being. And I’ve come to realize that it has many purposes. It motivates me to write. It helps me to reflect. It allows me to explore (and sometimes vent).

But it also reminds me that there are other seeking souls like me out there. And I’d love to make this space more of a place where we can connect and share what lifts us up.

You may have noticed that the blog’s tagline recently changed to “towards a spirituality of parenting.” That’s because over the past almost-two (!) years since I started writing here, I’ve come to discover that there is very little online for parents interested in reflecting on the spiritual side of their vocation.

Yes, there are forums where moms of the same faith can connect. Yes, there are great websites about religion and great websites about parenting. But the two rarely meet. And I’d like to explore more of these intersections.

So I’m hoping to nudge my writing and our conversations here together in this direction. We all have wisdom to share and we all have a deep yearning to connect with others and with the One who made us – no matter how solid or shaky or skeptical our faith may be at times. I am Catholic in my bones, but I’ve tried hard to cultivate an ecumenical heart. So I hope you will feel at home here, no matter what your practice or persuasion.

In this weekly space called “nurture your mothering spirit,” I’ll share a snippet of something I’ve discovered along my own journey of motherhood. A book, a prayer, a practice, or an artist that has helped me to see more clearly, reflect more deeply, or care more closely for my own spirit and soul. I hope you’ll share your own in turn, and we’ll be able to build up a collection of ideas to inspire our mothering – and fathering - spirits along the way.

So check back tomorrow for the first in the series. I’m excited to share a few surprises with you as we go – stay tuned!