praying the particulars: wrangling children at church

A Prayer for Wrangling Small Children at Church:

God of infinite patience,

Help me not to lose my mind at Mass today.

When my son falls off the kneeler for the umpteenth time and howls at me indignantly, let me not say I told you so! but I love you.

When the baby gets so fussy during the homily that no one within six pews can hear the priest, let me not sigh with irritation but distract him with smiles.

When I miss every word of the readings (again) because I was fishing books out of the diaper bag, let me not brood about what I lost but notice the small service I gave to the least among us.

When I spend communion time pacing the floor of the gathering space, or trying in vain to nurse the baby in a corner of the cry room, or taking the toddler to the potty for the tenth time, help me to see that this is Eucharist, too – the gift of self in love.

When that older couple behind us, the ones I worried about the whole time – that we were annoying them and distracting their prayer and giving them reason to think the future church is going to hell in a handbasket – when they tap me on the shoulder after the final song and tell me we have a beautiful family, help me believe them. And even thank them graciously.

And when we’re tempted to skip Mass next Sunday because it’s just so hard in this crazy season of life, and it throws off nap schedules for the rest of the day, and what are we getting out of it anyway, let me remember the importance of coming. Because children are part of the Body of Christ. Because I need community and they need me. Because much of what is important about parenting isn’t easy anyway.

God, you promised that wherever two or three are gathered in your name, you are in their midst. That means our pew, too. The one covered with spit-up that two boys are trying to climb over.

Bless my hyper, healthy kids. Bless our diverse, dynamic church. Thank you for the weekly reminder of what matters most.

With gritted teeth behind that laughing smile,

A mama in the third row

book, bath, table & time: teaching at home

I recently read Fred Edie’s Book, Bath, Table, and Time: Christian Worship as Source and Resource for Youth Ministry for my research on vocation and youth. Drawing from his theological work with teenagers at the Duke Youth Academy, Edie writes about simple ways to retrieve the holy things and practices of the church to engage youth.

I’m not a youth minister. But I enjoyed this book, and not just because it’s about empowering teenagers to explore their vocations. I loved this book for its title.

Book, bath, table, and time.

Most of my life as a mother of two little ones revolves around these four things, places and moments. We read books from sun up to sun down. We splash in the bath every night. We gather around the table three times a day. And we follow a rhythm of routine that gives gentle order to our time.

Since I finished Edie’s book, I’ve found myself musing about book, bath, table, and time. Each offers opportunities for teaching my children – not just about God or religion, but about the world, other people and themselves. When I think about raising kids to have a heart and imagination for faith, these are times and places where I hope to start conversations about what it means to be human and to wonder about the divine:

book: We live in a house of books. They line the walls and cover our floors. Not only the favorite stories that have become part of our daily routine, but the special, sacred books: the photo albums, the baby books. Books that tell our family who we are.

I hope that through the books we share together, my kids will come to know that Scripture is not something stale or stodgy, saved for Sundays. Our stories are woven into God’s story everyday. Every time we snuggle with a child and crack a favorite cover, we have the chance to tell them a story that will open their heart to wonder, joy, and imagination. The more stories we share – of every genre, flavor and color – the more our minds open to the wideness of God’s world.

bath: Everyone needs to wash, to get clean. To slow down and relax into calming warmth and water. But we also need to delight in the simple: bubbles, splashing, rubber ducks and silly songs. Bath time is a great equalizer between parents and children.

All the little “bath” moments – washing hands before meals, scrubbing garden dirt from fingernails, wiping paint from faces – remind me that baptism is an everyday sacrament: cleansing, refreshing, blessing. I hope I can immerse my children in a deeper awareness of how moments of transformation are always around us. As dirty becomes clean and old becomes new, so are we given chances every day to start fresh, with each other and with our God.

table: Much of our day spins around the table: preparing food, eating meals, cleaning up. Sometimes table time reminds us that we’re all-too-human – cranky when we’re hungry, angry when we’re frustrated. But gathering at table can also bring out our best as a family. We laugh and sing, listen and share about our day.

Seated together, we notice milestones: high chair to booster seat, baby food to solids. The infant once held in arms over dinner becomes the boy who helps set the silverware. Remembering to be grateful for these simple moments – and the blessing of sharing food with those I love – is an everyday Eucharist.

time: Family life brings its own calendar of feast days and ordinary time. For babies and toddlers, routine is key to keeping their lives ordered. As children grow, their activities set the family schedule. No matter the age, the way we live and share time shapes us as a family.

The paradox of time is how endless it feels in the moment and how fleeting it finally proves. I hope that as the seasons slide by, our family will create our own rituals to celebrate the gift of the time we’re blessed to share. And I hope we’ll regularly make time together to do absolutely nothing at all. To savor slow Sunday mornings with heaps of pancakes. To lay on the floor and read stacks of books in the afternoon sunlight. To meet God in quiet Sabbath moments.

Book, bath, table, time. These can be sacred moments for a family. Around here, holy water is sudsy bath bubbles. Communion is crackers at snack time. Scripture is beloved bedtime stories read night after night.

But there aren’t the only moments that hold promise for going deeper. Timeouts and saying sorry can be moments of reconciliation. Putting band aids on scraped knees and dosing medicine can be moments of anointing the sick. Noticing our children’s gifts and blessing them with hugs and kisses can be moments of confirmation.

Sacraments are more than seven. And sacred moments aren’t reserved for holy buildings. Because ancient practices of faith speak to what makes us human: the simple moments where we meet each other (and God, too). Where we learn how the ordinary can be holy. How the dirty can lead to the divine.

(Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go rescue a toddler who recited so many favorite books to himself during nap that he didn’t sleep and is now sobbing for a snack. Book meets time, bath meets table…)

What are your family’s favorite ordinary moments?

on being raised vs. raising kids catholic

Catholic school, as vicious as Roman rule, I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black. I held my tongue as she told me, son, fear is the heart of love. So I never went back.

“I Will Follow You Into The Dark,” Death Cab for Cutie

Our culture is full of ideas and images of what it means to be raised Catholic. Past-tense.

But a picture of raising kids Catholic today? A hazy blur, at best.

People often look puzzled when I tell them we go to church. Sometimes I get the condescending smile that suggests “well, isn’t that quaint and unenlightened.” Sometimes I get the blank stare that betrays utter ignorance of anyone still darkening a church’s doorstep these days.

And quite often I get a knowing roll of the eyes, followed by, “Well, I was raised Catholic, but…”

Most of my friends don’t go to church. I have more ex-Catholics in my life than practicing church-goers. And they’re in good company: 1 out of 10 Americans is a former Catholic.

So when I search for support in raising my kids Catholic, I sometimes feel like a pioneer wandering in the wilderness, despite the fact that parents have been doing this work for centuries.

My parish, like too many, has few resources for young families. Most of my friends with kids enjoy Sunday mornings at home rather than at church. And even with a degree in theology, I find myself casting about for ideas and inspiration on how to weave faith into the fabric of our family life.

So my question for those of you raising kids in the Catholic Church is: What does it look in your family? How is your life together colored by being Catholic? What difference does it make in your week, your routine, your house or your activities?

In our house, at this season in our lives, it looks like this: Mass on the weekends. Grace before meals. Simple hymns sung along with nursery rhymes. Books about God read with books by Dr. Seuss. Learning prayers as we learn ABCs. Saying I’m sorry for lost tempers. Saying thank you for people we love.

Some days I worry we’re not doing enough. (The boys are little, but still.) Some days I blush that we’re doing too much. (Like last week when my son declared to the babysitter that “you don’t have to be scared of the shadows in your room when you nap because Jesus is always there.”)

But almost every day I find myself wishing I had more ideas and inspiration for how to lead my kids down a path that fewer and fewer people are taking these days. The road feels lonely, and not well-lit.

We all know what it looks like to have been raised Catholic. But what does it mean to do the raising ourselves?

ash wednesday: every parent’s nightmare

Last night I lingered in a long line of blinking tail lights to turn into the parking lot. I wondered about the growing crowds at each year’s Ash Wednesday services. What packs the pews this evening every Lent?

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.

learning as a family: the new translation

Bet you thought I forgot about this one…

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…)

parenting & scripture: 4th sunday in ordinary time

“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.

why i make my kids (and myself) go to church

A few months ago, I rediscovered a quote from Anne Lamott that I’ve always loved. Citing her young son’s frustration that she drags him to church every Sunday, she answers the question (per the essay’s title) “Why I Make Sam Go To Church”:

The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want – which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy – are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, and Christians – people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.

In the darkness of this year’s Advent – when I find myself frustrated by universal church and local church alike – I find hope in the glimmer of this candle: remembering why I want to be a part of church at all.

Church is bigger than changes of words. Church is bigger than a single pastor’s flaws. Church is bigger than my own pet peeves.

Church is the Body of Christ, wildly diverse in its members but all needing each other. Church is a Spirit whose dance refuses to die. Church is a people trying to understand a God, a beautiful mess of saints and sinners. Always has been, always will be.

And the reason I make myself go to church, the reason I want church to be a part of my children’s lives, is precisely what Anne names.

It is good to be surrounded by others who are trying to answer life’s big questions and understand the truth of God. It is good to spend time every week in a place that both challenges and comforts you. It is good to pray shoulder to shoulder with people you agree with and people you disagree with. It is good to be part of something bigger than yourself.

I have no illusions that my kids’ relationship with church will be smooth and easy. Church will certainly bore, annoy, anger, disappoint, or confuse them at times. But my deeper hope, my dream of faith, is that church will also inspire them, support them, teach them, love them, offer them a light brighter than the glimmer of their own candle.

Church is both beautiful and maddening. I suppose we all are.

And I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way.

parenting in advent: second sunday

“A voice cries out: In the desert prepare the way of the Lord! Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!” (Isaiah 40:3)

“Since everything is to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be?” (2 Peter 3:11-12)

Variations on a theme, it’s a conversation that plays out in many corners.

The latest version I heard came from a mother furious with her son’s soccer coach for scheduling practices on Sunday. “How are families supposed to get to church,” she lamented, “when we have games on Saturday nights and practice on Sunday mornings?”

Raising children of faith – any faith – has never been easy. No matter the culture, it has always been full of temptations, frustrations, and distractions that make it hard to keep spiritual practices at the heart of family life.

Religion is not cool or sexy or popular. It calls for commitment and sacrifice and humility, none of which ever top Parents magazine’s “quick ways to have fun with kids!” or Seventeen’s “must-haves for this school year!” But lots of parents dedicate their time and effort and energy anyway.

They take the babies to be baptized, the kids to faith formation, the whole crew to church on Sunday mornings. They do it for lots of reasons, and sometimes they’re not sure why. But it has to do with helping make their children the “sort of persons you ought to be”: people who treat others well, who act with kindness, who stand up for what they believe in.

All of this work of parenting – the arguments over why you can’t wear those clothes or listen to that music or skip church on Sunday – is the work of preparing a way in the wilderness, making a place in our hearts and lives for God to enter in. Because the truth is that the temptations, frustrations, and distractions “out there” are in our own hearts and minds as well. The wasteland and the wilderness are often closer than we’d like to admit.

Advent is about this, too. About being counter-cultural. About being quiet when the world says noise! About being still when the world says rush! About simply being when the world says do!

About preparing a way to become the people we ought to be.

Have you made any counter-cultural decisions as a parent? What message do you hope this sends your children? 

the old translation: what i will miss

The Catholic Church in the U.S. is on the cusp of change. Starting on Sunday, the new translation of the Roman Missal will go into effect, and all of us in the church – from pastor to pew – will begin learning new prayers and responses.

Last week I wrote about my need to grieve the loss of the well-loved words I won’t hear anymore, in order to turn and embrace new words. So today I give you a few of the changes that I’ll leave behind with longing…

[Words in bold are the part of the old translation that will be changed.]

We believe in one God…

I know that by definition, the “credo” of the creed means “I believe.” Yet I can’t help but miss how it feels to stand in a full church, shoulder to shoulder with family and stranger, and declare what we as a people hold true. Especially in a world as divided and contentious as ours, there is something powerful about proclaiming the truths that a wide and diverse group holds as sacred. We are liberal and conservative, we are practicing and lapsed, we are certain and unsure, but we all stand together and share the beliefs that make us church.

…by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

The loss of “born” (in favor of “was incarnate”) is one that I especially grieve. I love the moment in the creed when we bow in reverence of Jesus’ conception and birth, not only because it honors the wonder of the Incarnation but because it honors Mary’s role in God’s great plan. Ever since the births of my own babies, I have barely been able to speak the words of how Jesus was “born of the Virgin Mary” without a lump in my throat. To learn all that bearing and birthing a baby demands from a woman, to have lived through the pain and the power of those moments – I felt that I was honoring Mary and her strength every time I prayed those words of the creed.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Powerful and poetic, simple and succinct. Yes, there are many ways to proclaim the mystery of our faith, but I’m saddened that I’ll never hear these three phrases prayed in the Mass again. They always reminded me of the constancy and consistency of Christ: everywhere and always, in time and beyond time, past/present/future.

Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

At a family wedding years ago, I overheard the guest behind me whisper to her date right after the assembly prayed these words before Communion. “That is my favorite part of what Catholics say at church,” she said. “I don’t really get what they’re saying a lot of the time, but I love that part – ‘I’m not worthy to receive you, but I shall be healed.’”

I never forgot her words, how she recognized the power of humility and certainty of faith, all wrapped into one. At times in my life, I didn’t feel worthy to receive – but I could, so I did. Unworthy but grateful and hopeful – and therefore worthy in ways I couldn’t see. I know that the change to “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof” is more Scripturally sound, but I mourn the loss of the intimacy of simply saying “receive you.”

These are just a few of the changes come Sunday, words that will pass from everyday use into the history books. But they are words that shaped my faith, prayers that guided me through dark moments and showed me glimmers of light. Maybe it’s not too dramatic to say that losing them is like losing an old friend. Because words matter. And we loved the ones we lost.

What words will you miss?

parenting in ordinary time: solemnity of christ the king

I myself will give them rest, says the Lord GOD. The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal. (Ezekiel 34:15-16)

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me…

Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:35, 40)

Toward the end of my time in grad school, I took a class on ministry through the life cycle: the joys and challenges of caring for people from childhood through the elder years. And during our class on ministering to young families, we watched a video of a speaker encouraging a church full of mothers that their work as a parent answered the call of Matthew’s Gospel: to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend to the sick. Whenever they cared for children – the least among us – they were caring for Christ himself.

I remember my reaction vividly. With the confidence and wisdom that one can only swagger before having children, I raised my hand and declared that this so-called parenting expert had it wrong. The idea that Christ’s commandment to care for the poor and needy – the very criteria by which we will be judged at the end of times – could be satisfied by raising one’s own kids was a complete cop-out.

It was really about justice, I argued. It was really about solidarity. It was really about radical love for marginalized members of society. It was not about diapers and bottles and car pools and doctor’s visits.

If anything, I soap-boxed, Christian parents were called to teach their children what it meant to actually visit prisoners, to actually welcome strangers, to actually feed the starving. Anything less was simply the watering down of American Christianity.

(Oh, the charming arrogance of bold declarations made from the sidelines. I am one heck of an armchair quarterback.)

Years later, I can tell you with just as much confidence that I only had it half-right.

Yes, I still believe that parents have a duty to raise their children to care for those in poverty and need. Yes, I still maintain that the watering down of the Gospel is an alarming trend for those of us who live in relative comfort and wealth. Yes, I still argue that today’s Gospel is about radical love and charity and service – a disturbing reminder for we who squirm in the pews and wonder if our lives will leave us on the right or the left side on judgment day.

But what I have learned in my short stretch of parenting is this:

If I don’t see Christ in my children, if I don’t remember their weakness, if I don’t serve their daily needs with love, then I’ve failed this Gospel call as well.

I can claim to work for justice but treat my own family unfairly. I can claim to love my brothers and sisters around the world but struggle to love those in my own house. I can claim to care for the poor but miss the needs of those right before my eyes. Because the other half of the equation is the everyday reality that meets the radical ideals. The domestic church that looks inward to turn outward.

Every day my children cry out because they are hungry. Thirsty. Lonely. I scoop them up with kisses and promise to tend to their needs. And that is good and right – all that I am called to as a parent.

But every day there are babies just like them who cry out and aren’t heard. Who hunger and aren’t fed. Who thirst and have no clean water. Who suffer and die from diseases that have simple cures. And if I don’t care about them, too – if I don’t share my wealth and resources, if I don’t change my habits to live more mindfully, if I don’t teach my children that caring for the poor and fighting against poverty go hand in hand – then I haven’t seen Christ in all his many faces.

From where I stand now, I see that my wise-grad-student, wise-child-free self was both right and wrong. The call is radical and can’t be domesticated. But the domesticated love is sometimes the most radical. It is dirty and demanding and exhausting and everyday. It is Christ in my children’s eyes and Christ beyond my front door. It is, as many theological truths prove, a “both/and.”

My mothering spirit is not for only those I have been given to raise. It is for all who cry out for what my children enjoy whenever they need: healthy food, clean water, warm clothes, a doctor’s care. To do any less is to ignore the face of Christ where he plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his.