the trinity of family life

Give and take. Sacrifice and compromise. The exchanges we make in love.

Our December has turned into a microcosm of our marriage, a portrait of our partnership. First I was gone for five days of meetings, and F had to scramble to stay home with the boys when the babysitter was sick. Now he leaves for a week-long business trip, and I’m the one scrambling to rearrange my schedule.

This month we’re both juggling child care and work responsibilities and housework and errands. We’re sharing dinner duty and diaper duty and sending a zillion emails a day between home and office to coordinate the caring, cooking, cleaning.

One feeds the baby and the other washes the bottles. One makes dinner and the other scrubs the dishes. One does the laundry and the other buys the groceries. One stays up late with the baby and the other gets up early with the toddler.

The next day – or week or month – we switch. And the cycle of sharing starts over again.

Sometimes we’re tempted to keep track or keep score. We’ve sacrificed more, we think. We’ve done too much lately, we brood. But that is the temptation away from agape, from mutuality, from self-giving love. Marriage and parenting are never 50/50, but the allure of the equal makes us constantly renegotiate what’s working, what’s not, and how we can change.

This is the dynamic we’re daily carving out for our family. This is the model of marriage we want to give to our boys. This is the way of life that makes the most sense for us – even when it doesn’t make sense. This is the Trinity of family that teaches me daily what it means to love, to give and to receive.

The nature of our God as Trinity is no dry doctrine. Sometimes it seem mysterious or esoteric, but sometimes it is as close as the people in our own home: those with whom we share a table or a bed.

The Trinity is a dance of love among a family. It is the gifts we give and receive as we help each other become the people we were created to be. It can be messy and demanding but also beautiful and divine.

And in the midst of this busy week in a busy month, I’m humbled and delighted to share the glimpse of God that our family life gives to me. Check it out at Picturing God: Faces and Traces of the Divine.

 

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.

parenting in advent: first sunday

“Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you the potter; we are all the work of your hands.” (Isaiah 64:7)

At the university where I went to grad school, there is a pottery studio. No mere hangout of artsy undergrads, this is a place of pure creation.

Until I crossed its dusty doorstep and breathed in the deep smell of clay, I never imagined how the work of a potter’s hands could be theological, philosophical, intellectual. But the master and his apprentices have devoted themselves to an art that springs from the heart of the university and the abbey. Theirs is a craft that comes from deep within the land: the clay hidden within the hills, the water that flows deep underground, the wood from surrounding forests that stokes the kiln’s roaring fires.

The few times that I’ve been privileged to watch the potter at his wheel, I marvel at his intense concentration on the clay taking shape beneath his fingers. His hands instinctively know how to bend and curve to produce the cup or bowl or plate he desires. But as he works, he speaks with reverence of honoring the materials and the process by which pottery is created. He honors the life within the art, the freedom of the clay itself to become what it can be, the beauty it can call forth from within the potter.

Isaiah calls God father and potter. Yet the connection between parent and artist is not always immediate. Yes, the raw material of the child is placed in our hands and given to us to mold. But we were not apprenticed in this demanding work; nothing prepares us for this all-consuming call. Yes, the work is less certain science and more attempted art. But it is not always beautiful and attractive; it reveals our darkest sides and our deepest flaws.

Sometimes these words of Isaiah seem too easy: we are passive clay and God is active potter; we lie waiting on the wheel for God to shape our lives. What I forget when I breeze over this image is that God as father is like God as potter: blessing the creation, honoring its freedom, celebrating its unique beauty. There is a gentleness to God’s hands, a loving working on our lives. We are works in process, always spinning round the wheel.

Our work as mothers and fathers is earthy and embodied like the potter’s. The wisdom that guides us is found deep within, even when we struggle to let it shape us. Perhaps this image of God as parent and potter can invite us to see our parenting as art, to see our children as works in process. In this Advent season of preparing, how can we give ourselves into God’s hands to be softened and smoothed into the people we hope to be?