As I waited, I thought of four young girls killed in a weekend car crash. Freshmen roommates, victims of a mild winter’s rare snow storm. One was from our town. Another was our sitter’s co-worker. Shiny senior portraits show girls on the brink of adulthood, bright-eyed and smiling. Lots of ashes at their loss.

I looked around at faces, young and old, as I entered the church. Many at Mass knew and loved those girls. What does Lent mean when we’re staring at death?

Before I left home that evening, my husband had told me a story he’d heard about the American reporter killed in Syria. The night before she died in the bomb blast, she told of the suffering of women and children, often the focus of her wartime front-line reporting.

“I watched a little baby die today,” she told the BBC on Tuesday. “Absolutely horrific, a 2-year old child had been hit. They stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said ‘I can’t do anything.’ His little tummy just kept heaving until he died.”

“Stop,” I cut him off before he finished telling me the story. “Stop. I literally cannot hear that.” I scooped up my own 2 year-old and squeezed his squirming limbs to my chest.

“My love,” I whispered into his hair as he wrestled out of my grasp. Overwhelmed at the thought of losing life closest to my own.

I prayed about both stories in the pew. Death close to home and far away. Parents living my worst nightmare. Mothers watching their babies blown apart, fathers sobbing at their daughters’ death. I hated to think about it. But I made myself sit with the terror of such loss.

Who doesn’t want to flip the page when they see the news? Who doesn’t want to turn their head from the TV’s wail? We shy away from the horror because it is too much for us to bear. And yet each day parents wake to our worst nightmare. Cancer. Suicide. Car crash. Overdose. Babies born too early; teenagers gone too soon.

I stared up at the cross while people shuffled forward to get their ashes. I remembered that at the heart of Christ’s story, too, stands this terrible tension. A mother holding her dead son’s body.

We have to sit with this image, this terror and sorrow. And not only on Good Friday, the day of death that makes us squirm so uncomfortably in the pews. But also Ash Wednesday. Ashes on our foreheads, burnt and smeared, remind us that we each will meet death. Even the young and the lovely among us.

A family filed down the aisle in front of me. In the mother’s arms was a tiny girl with blond curls. She, too, was marked with dark ash. What did her mother see when she looked down at the sweet face smeared with soot? A reminder of her child’s mortality? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Why do so many people come back to church this night? Perhaps because Ash Wednesday helps us make sense of life’s fragility. We ritualize our own mortality to remind us to turn from sin to life-giving love.

Ash Wednesday gathers us together as a church and reminds us that our community cares about the deepest realities of our lives. It gently leads us to the edge of our fears and shows us a way to live through the suffering. It shakes us loose from the clench of loss and speaks truth of rising after dying.

A stranger smudges soot on our skin, and the traces tickle our nose. Teenagers elbow each other and snicker at the size of each others’ crosses. Wide-eyed children peer over their parent’s shoulder, innocent of the dark sign they now bear on their forehead, as mortal as the rest of us.

This sacramental sign holds us in tensions we’d rather shudder off – we’re sinful, we’re mortal, we’re human – and transforms them from terrifying to something holy. Something we can hold.

If even for one night.

(And yes, I’m even aware that I split the infinitive. I broke my own grammatical pet peeve and did it on purpose.)

Lent starts tomorrow, and I could not be less prepared. No resolution carved in stone, no discipline established, no good intentions for prayer or fasting or almsgiving.

Sure, I’ve got a zillion ideas. Sugar purge. Facebook fast. Daily writing with Scripture. Creative donations to important causes.

But I can’t commit to anything. Why?

BECAUSE I CAN’T SLEEP.

My darling, beautiful, bouncing baby boy decided a few months ago to regress from his long-sleeping ways. Since Christmas, we’ve been up every three hours. Four if we’re lucky. Two if we’re not.

And everyone in this house is losing their minds.

Some days we can laugh about it. Some days I can drink enough caffeine to overcome it. But some dark days I do nothing but wallow in the exhaustion.

We’ve tried it all. And then we tried it again. And - parenting epiphany! – this child refuses to submit to our schedule, our demands, our desires.

Lack of sleep has affected every part of our lives: our work, our home, our relationships. After too many breaking points, we’ve finally come up with a new plan that we hope will work. (So please send prayers for this weekend’s launch of Finally Getting the Baby to Break Bad Habits and Stop Nursing All Night Without Crying So Loud He Wakes Up His Brother Next Door And Then We All Go Insane.)

But in the meantime, Lent has crept up to the doorstep and is gently knocking to come in. And I can do nothing but laugh and shake my head. This house? This family? You seriously want to come in here?

I have no time or energy to prepare for Lent this year. I don’t even have time to feel guilty about it.

So for the next forty days, all I can do is invite Lent into the chaos of our lives. And pray that God’s grace forgives my stumblings. And remember that God’s invitation – and my response – was present there all along.

Going about my daily work even when I’m dragging? That’s prayer.

Giving up the glorious sleep I love to feed a hungry baby? That’s fasting.

Investing my last bit of energy in my needy children? That’s almsgiving.

So come on in, Lent. Pull up a chair (you’ll have to kick the toys aside) and a cup of tea (you’ll need to wash that dirty mug).

We’re completely unprepared. But you’re always welcome.

Back when the new translation of the Roman missal was front-page news, I wrote about my struggles in coming to terms with the change. I celebrated words I loved and would miss. And I promised I’d turn to what I could embrace in the new prayers at Mass.

And then life – and work and holidays and travel and illness and everyday chaos-with-kids – interrupted. And I never got to that third post, the hopeful one. Despite its persistent nagging at me every time we slid into the pew on Sunday.

But as the weeks passed and I guiltily thought of how I hadn’t made good on my promise, I started to see that perhaps it was better this way.

I needed time for the new words to bounce off my ear, roll off my tongue, rattle around in my head. I needed space to accept the awkwardness of “chalice” instead of “cup,” “consubstantial” instead of “one in being,” “was incarnate” instead of “born.”

I needed to grumble a bit. I’ll always miss “protect us from all anxiety,” among others.

I needed to stumble a lot. I still mangle the “enter under my roof” prayer every single Sunday.

And through my grumbling and stumbling, I came to realize something important about the new words we now say and pray at Mass each week:

We are learning them together.

It’s rare for a whole family to learn something brand-new. Usually the expert teaches and the novice learns. But as a young family in today’s Catholic Church, we find ourselves in the unique position of learning right alongside our children.

At this point I don’t know the words of the Mass any better than my toddler. We both scramble for pew cards: he pretends to read them, I pretend to memorize. He chimes in on the creed; I jump in late to stutter ”and with your spirit.” We each make mistakes, and what can we do but smile? We’re learning as a family. Adults and children alike, back to the beginning together.

Our kids will never know anything but this Mass. For a while that brought me sadness. I liked the words I knew and I didn’t like the reasons behind the change. But now I find myself turning to hope, because that is our Christian calling. I hope that my children will come to love church: listening to Scripture, breaking bread, going forth to serve. I hope that our praying together as community will both comfort and challenge our family. And I hope that my wrestling with the new translation will give my kids a glimpse of what it means to be Catholic.

Our faith is beyond words. It is lives given in love and service to God and each other. You can call that by a thousand different names, but it remains truth. And yet all we have are words – imperfect, human words – with which to pray and wonder and celebrate and question. So without further ado, here are a few of the new words I’m learning to love.

We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory, Lord God, heavenly King, O God, almighty Father. The words of the Gloria have been inverted. We used to address God first (“Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father”) and state our praise second (“we worship, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory”). But now we explode into this exultation of verbs – praise! bless! adore! glorify! give you thanks! – which crescendos into an explosion of God’s names. I love the build-up of phrases, heaping glory upon glory.

I also celebrate, here and elsewhere in the Mass, the change from “worship” to “adore.” More loving, more intimate, “adore” reminds me of the way I love my husband and my boys: with such sweet joy I can’t help but grin. I like the reminder to love God like that, too.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right and just. We used to respond to the priest’s opening of the Eucharistic Prayer by saying, “It is right to give God thanks and praise.” Which I always liked. Except that the addition of the word “just” has brought echoes of justice into the liturgy. We need more words that call us to justice, so I’ll take this small step.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. I can’t be the only faithful feminist out there who noticed that every “he” in the Creed which referred to the Spirit got replaced with “who”? Probably not the translators’ intention (ha!), but I celebrate it nonetheless. I love Spirit as Spirit – creative, powerful, life-giving, beyond-gender Spirit – so I secretly delight in stringing together clauses of “who.” Leaves a little to mystery and imagination, which are the root of faith.

I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. At the end of the Creed we used to say, “We look for the resurrection of the dead,” which for me evoked images of running around the house, searching for my keys (“What are you looking for?” “THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD! I CAN’T FIND IT ANYWHERE!” “Well, where did you last see it?”)

One directional adverb later, and suddenly I switch from scanning the horizon to focusing on the attitude with which I search. I look forward: I anticipate, I hope, I eagerly await. I like looking forward to things – Christmas, birthdays, my youngest child sleeping through the night - much more than I like looking for my keys. So Amen to moving forward.

How about you? What words of the new translation are you coming to love?

(And does anyone else just love the new Mass settings we’re singing? All praise to those liturgists who slogged through tangles of translation to create beauty out of unfamiliar territory. Our parish’s settings of the Hosanna and the Mystery of Faith are simply gorgeous – I’ll have to find out the composer and note it here…)

“What’s dat?” he asked, cocking his head to one side as he clenched in his chubby fist the silver cross he’d found inside.

“That’s a cross for you and your brother from Aunt G!” I smiled, delighted at the surprise. A treasure from her trip to Rome, the cross draws the Trinity together in a lovely and unusual pose.

But before I could wax eloquent on the nature of the Triune God, he raced across the kitchen dragging the cross along the cabinets, leaving a jagged silver line I then spent twenty minutes scrubbing off.

Later that night, S proudly slammed the cross against the wall at his height when I asked him where he’d like to hang it. “Right ‘dere,” he proclaimed.

A week later he and I were sharing an afternoon snack when F brought the mail inside. “Look who sent you a letter!” he exclaimed. When I saw the return address was the convent, I tore it open with a toddler’s enthusiasm.

“S, it’s a letter from your godmother! A real, live letter!” (From the postulant who only gets to send one letter a month, this was no small surprise.) I soaked in her words with February sunlight streaming over my shoulder. Such a gift, especially her words of love for her godson and his baby brother.

My boys are blessed with family near and far who adore them. But every so often, I’m reminded of how blessed they are to be loved by friends who aren’t even related. By their other-mothers.

Many of us had one growing up. Maybe a parent’s college roommate or a family friend without kids of her own. Women who embraced a role of nurturing that went beyond biology or blood ties. We called them “aunt,” and over the years they became a part of the family. They took us seriously, and we basked in their affection. We couldn’t imagine growing up without them.

This article - which in a God-incidence arrived on our doorstep the very same week as mail from the other-mothers – calls them PANKs: professional aunt, no kids. No matter the moniker, their role in children’s lives is real and important. They widen the family circle, stretch the boundaries of love, and broaden the tent of the village that raises the child.

Thanks to my babies’ many other-mothers – best friends from college, dear friends from grad school – they will know a world that is bigger than our family’s ways. And for their growing in faith, this is of utmost importance.

The two dear friends who blessed us with surprises in the mail this week could not be more different, or more dear to my heart. One reminds my boys to pray the rosary; the other reminds them to seek Christ in the margins. One other-mother Marches for Life; one marches on the School of the Americas. Through these two women who wrestle with their callings in vastly different ways, my boys will be loved into a faith that is more active and contemplative, more liberal and conservative, more vibrant and colorful than anything their two parents could show them alone.

As more women choose paths other than motherhood, perhaps the ranks of PANKS will swell. While I know many in their number mourn the loss of their own parenting experience, I also honor what their presence can mean for children who crave role models. The power of positive adult influences in a young person’s life cannot be underestimated.

Tonight I see a cross on the wall and a letter on the table. I think of a quilt in the nursery and a picture of Jesus on the shelf. Gifts to my children from their aunts-by-love, signs of the real presence of other-mothers in our home.

Their devotion to our boys is their true gift. They who do not deal with tantrums or teething or toilet training can cherish the heart of a child with a pure love, unfettered by the daily drain of parenting, much like the adoration of grandparents or the fierce loyalty of uncles.

It’s a good reminder that we’re all called to care for children who are not – by blood or bond – “our own.” Because they are still our own.

As any cherished aunt will tell you.

Women without children are also the best of mothers, often, with the patience, interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot often sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts.

Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parents, by another adult.

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

And I don’t mean the usual wear-and-tear brought on by bearing, birthing or nursing babies. That’s all too obvious.

I’m talking about my nose. Specifically, the bridge of my nose.

Which, for the past few years, has been in a constant state of ache due to an infant, then a toddler, and now another infant, head-butting me so squarely that I see stars sparkle and twittering birds circle round my head like a Disney cartoon.

The soreness has no visible signs, though for all its throbbing I should look like a boxer with a permanent dent from every broken nose and punch taken in the ring.

I can’t put a band-aid on this lingering ache. It almost heals, and then a snuggling baby suddenly reels back and snaps forward, or a toddler comes flying at me from around the corner. I’m right back where I started: nose throbbing, head wobbling, eyes glazed and dazed. Laughable at best, wince-worthy at worst – this tender nose is just going to stay painful for years to come.

I thought about my poor nose when I came across this wonderful reflection by Ron Rolheiser on wrestling with God. The Scripture he cites - of Jacob wrestling with God - is one of my favorites. It’s so real and raw and (literally) moving.

Jacob, left all alone, trades blows with a strange adversary all night until finally at daybreak, he is left with both a blessing and a final blow to the hip so strong that it dislocates from the socket. Jacob limps along with this lingering ache, a physical reminder of his encounter with the divine.

I always found the detail about poor Jacob’s hip to be bizarre. Was it just a backwards means of explaining the Jewish tradition of not eating “the sciatic muscle that is on the hip socket, because he had struck Jacob on the hip socket” (Gen 32:33)? Or was it one of those strange minutiae from Scripture that simply testify to their truth through their particularity?

But as I read Fr. Ron’s words about wrestling with God, my nose was throbbing from an afternoon head butt from my darling baby boy. And it made me think about my own wrestling with God, through the mysterious creatures of my children.

I wrestle with these two boys every day. I wrestle one out of diapers and wrangle the other onto the potty. I fight their flailing limbs to calm them down. I chase them around the furniture, sometimes squealing with glee, sometimes screaming in protest. At night’s end – or daybreak, depending – I’m often left exhausted, limping from the day’s tussles.

But I wrestle with them in deeper ways, too. The stubborn battles of will. The emotional drain of discipline. The sheer physicality required to care for young, needy children, day in and day out.

Ultimately this painful wrestling is a battle with myself – my own stubbornness, my selfishness, my desire for control. And I’m wrestling with God, too, who both blesses and challenges me through the gift of these beautiful children in my life. Parenting is physically, and emotionally, and mentally, and spiritually, the toughest task I have ever taken on. And I still thank God for it every day.

Maybe the bridge of my nose is just like poor Jacob’s hip socket. A tender reminder that’s not meant to heal. My own quirky battle scar from wrestling with both the human and the divine.

What’s yours?

We would do well to integrate this, the concept of wrestling with God, into our understanding of faith and prayer. We honor neither ourselves nor the scriptures when we make things too simple. Human will doesn’t bend easily, nor should it, and the heart has complexities that need to be respected, even as we try to rein in its more possessive longings. God, who built us, understands this and is up to the task of wrestling with us and our resistance. – Ron Rolheiser

Seated each time on the same couch in my in-laws’ living room, he and I gazed down together at the peaceful beauty of a sleeping child.

Their bodies hardly noticed the transfer from arm to arm: heads simply flopped from one side to the other, limbs still curled in newborn C. Their soft cheeks snuggled into his thick flannel shirt; their pink toes dangled over his old corduroy pants.

But the move to me seemed monumental. From one generation to the next, a stretch across time.

I have no grandparents of my own left. So the gift of Grandpa in my life has been a reminder of these figures from my childhood: one grandma’s hug, another’s warm smile, my own grandpa’s deep guffaw. Their faces and stories rise in my memory when we visit Grandpa.

Behind thick glasses, his eyes beamed as he welcomed each new great-grandson. “Teeny, teeny baby,” he cooed, patting their backs with a rough, weathered hand.

Half-hovering, half-heartened by the sweet scene unfolding, I sat in silence, smiling at the pair. Two balding heads: one old, one new. In the bell-curve of life, our beginnings and ends are not so different.

We who are new at parenting – whose arms are unaccustomed to the weight, whose shoulders have not long borne the responsibility – pass over the baby to the elder with hesitation: will he remember to hold the head? Will he jostle the wee one awake?

Amateurs at the feet of experts, we remind ourselves that they raised plenty of babies themselves. The body never forgets how to cradle, comfort, caress.

But perhaps beneath our anxiety lies a deeper worry: will we be questioned? Will we be judged? Are we doing this right?

So when the inevitable words of joy and pride are pronounced – what a sweet baby, what a beautiful boy – we feel comforted and reassured. Another generation is blessed to take up the work of raising the young.

Grandpa has offered no great words of wisdom to me upon these presentations.

(Although, for this most recent child, he proclaimed that the babe had “nice, squinty eyes” and further elaborated that “we don’t need any more of those big-eyed babies around here.” No idea what this meant.)

But the very fact that I got to witness him holding my babies was blessing enough.

His gnarled hands grasping their tender curls of fist, his knobby knees bouncing their bottoms when they woke, his wrinkled face grinning at their puzzled eyes.

He brought to my babies’ beginnings all the other grandparents who surely wished their own blessings from beyond. Who must have hoped and prayed for these children to grow and become strong, filled with wisdom.

His hands brought the grace of the grandparents upon them.

“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.

“Brothers and sisters: I should like you to be free of anxieties.”

(1 Cor 7:32)

Parenting, thy name is anxiety.

This week I heard a mom joke that she tossed and turned for twenty minutes last night, mentally trying to design multiple escape routes from her home in the event of a fire.

“I thought, ‘What if the fire breaks out between my room and my daughter’s?’ What would I do then? So I had to come up with yet ANOTHER plan.”

We laughed, but behind the smiles lay a nod of affirmation: Yes, I’ve been there. Yes, I’ve worried about that. Yes, I’ve lost sleep, too.

Whether anxiety starts during pregnancy or flares during the teenage years, worry goes hand-in-hand with being responsible for a child. Parents cannot protect their babies from all the dangers in the world, and they toss and turn wondering how to make choices that will keep kids safe.

Today’s reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians speaks directly to our anxieties, both worldly and otherworldly. Yet this passage can seem frustrating: everyone suffers from anxiety; God doesn’t want us to be anxious; so, good luck reconciling those two truths on your own.

But read alongside today’s Gospel, we are invited to see anxiety in a whole new light.

While teaching in the synagogue, Jesus encounters a man with an “unclean spirit.” When the man cries out, Jesus orders the spirit to come out of him, and the man is set free.

A Scripture professor once told me that the stories about “evil spirits” in the Gospels can be read as descriptions of people suffering from mental illness. Lacking today’s clinical language of depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, people in Jesus’ time understood the forces that took over someone’s mind and behavior as evil spirits.

Anxiety falls into this category, too, given how devastating its darkness can become over the mind and body.

So today we hear a story of a man who brings his suffering into a holy place of worship, right to the feet of someone he senses – despite the darkness that has consumed him – can help.

And Jesus does not delay, to the amazement of those who witness the healing.

What if parents could bring their worries to church, in the hopes of being set free?

What if depression and anxiety were no longer cloaked in shame, but bravely revealed in the light of day?

What if we could marvel at the ways God can cast out demons and darkness in each other’s lives, instead of gossiping behind backs about other’s mental states?

Would we worry and agonize a little less, knowing that our faith and our community could help “deliver us from all anxiety and grant us peace in our day”?

My prayer, like Paul’s, hopes yes.

My head is going to EXPLODE. How is that baby screaming again?

I cannot handle his yelling. I’m going to lose my mind.

Didn’t I JUST get up and feed him? Sigh.

I could sleep for weeks and still not get enough.

God as my witness, I am never going to have another baby.

How is his brother in the next room waking up, too? I wish they would grow out of this phase.

I can’t believe how this time drags on and on and on. These days are so dang long.

8:00 am (after a shower and a cup of tea)

My heart is going to explode! How can the baby be grinning like that?

I cannot handle his laughing. I am going to lose my mind!

Didn’t we just bring him home from the hospital? Sigh.

I could cuddle him for days and still not get enough.

God as my witness, I want to have a zillion babies.

How is his brother in the next room going to preschool soon? I wish they would stay little forever.

I can’t believe how the time flies. These years are so short.

There’s nothing like a season of travel to make you appreciate home.

We spent Christmas with one family, New Year’s with the other. Paused briefly for a week to unpack and pack, then jetted off for a vacation to sunnier climes. Timing wasn’t ideal, but that’s how the planning shook down. Each brought celebration and relaxation in its own way. But together they added up to a lot of time away.

Coming home proved as bumpy as airplane turbulence. The boys were both off sleep schedules and routines. The Christmas decorations and presents and toys all clamored to be put away. The poor beagle nearly starved himself to death in our absence.

It took us a while to get used to being home again.

As we settle back in chez nous, calendars flipped to a brand-new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about home. What defines a home. What creates a home. How we know it when we find it.

Home is place. Here is where we live. The address we fill out on endless forms. The location where we can be found. The building and bed where we lay our head at day’s end.

Home is sights and smells: the ever-changing collection of our worldly goods. Home is the colors we love, the things we treasure. Even the quirks of aging houses or cranky appliances. We know the flaws of home, and we learn to embrace them, too.

Home is shelter. Protection from the weather and the dangers outside. Home is haven, refuge. The proverbial roof over our heads.

Home is outside and inside. Gardens and lawns we spend hours tending, familiar windows we glimpse from the street below. The lights that welcome us through the darkness, the driveway our car pulls to by instinct, the door that leads into another world.

I remember a photo of my parents bringing me home from the hospital, pausing at our doorway to capture the threshold moment. We have similar photos for our babies, too. Born of a desire to memorialize the passage from outer to inner life, their entrance into the place they will spend their earliest days. Home is sacred.

Home is people. Here is where we spend the most time with those closest to us. Where we bump up against each other, literally and figuratively. Where we learn to love and live with other’s faults.

Home is those with whom we share our most intimate moments. Sex and sickness. Fights and feasting. Growing and grieving. When we take off our coats to come inside, we leave our defenses behind, too. Home is people who protect us, who share our vulnerability.

When we miss home, it is most often the familiar faces that we long for, not the physical plant. Home is the people we come from and those we return to. Whether we choose to create a life together or whether life thrusts arrangements upon us, we are home for each other.

Home is practices. Here is where we celebrate our rituals: the daily rhythms of eating, sleeping, playing and praying. Here is the space for acting out what it means to be partner, parent, family, friend.

Home is the way we cook our food. The way we entertain guests. The way we relax after work. The way we celebrate holidays.

Through our practices – songs, meals, games, hobbies, chores – we practice being home to each other. Along the way, our life together becomes a home with a life of its own.

And because home is place (where we live) and people (with whom we live) and practices (how we live), home holds something of God for us as well. The God in whom we live and move and have our being.

Home is where we first learn about God, for better or for worse.

Our image of the divine is shaped by those who care for us in our early years and those with whom we choose to spend the remaining. Whether we learn about love or judgment, forgiveness or fear, we learn about God at home in a way that we never could in church.

Because home life is real and raw. Because a weekly hour or two spent in four walls of a church can’t compare to the hours spent at home. Because living together as family – spouses or siblings, parents or children, blended or extended – is the core community for most Christians.

Home is the places and people and practices we are from. And those we create for ourselves. So the work we do to make a home is no small thing.

It shapes the face of God for those around us.