what name do you give God?

My son’s favorite is Ancient One. Mine is (no surprise) Mother. But on frazzled days I remind myself of Source of Peace.

Sandy Eisenberg Sasso’s lovely book In God’s Name has become a recent naptime favorite. Strangely my young son is smitten with the most ancient of God’s names. Every time we reach the page that describes how “the grandfather whose hair was white with the years called God Ancient One,” the boy with blond curls squirms happily in my lap. It’s a mystery why this name has captured his attention, but he can’t get it out of his head: he delights at its reading and asks all day long about its spelling. He wants to know everything about Ancient One.

I’ve loved this children’s book ever since it fell into my pregnant lap (literally) as I rummaged through cast-offs at a kids’ consignment sale. The illustrations are bright and charming, and the fable that describes how each person names God out of their own life is even more beautiful. At the end of the story everyone gathers around a lake that is God’s mirror and proclaims their different names for God all at once, a joyful sound reflecting the unity-in-diversity at the heart of God’s self.

In an era when our churches seem as polarized as our political parties, I can’t help but wonder at the relevance of this book’s message. Far from a wishy-washy relativism, the truth it gently preaches is important to remember: my understanding and image of God were formed by my upbringing, education and experiences of church. So they aren’t necessarily shared by others who share my faith.

As we each seek to approach the unknowable mystery of God, we name aspects of the divine that speak to us. Hopefully we can also open our hearts to others’ journeys towards the same God, no matter how foreign they may first seem. I can learn from your name for God, just as you can learn from mine.

Quite often I ponder this question of how we image God as it relates to parenting. Developmental psychologists and faith formation experts agree that parents influence a child’s first image of God. It’s only natural that as we begin to wonder about a Being greater than ourselves, we look through the lens of the dominant figures of love, power and authority in our lives.

I want to help my children see God as loving, compassionate, forgiving and just. So when I lose my temper and yell too loud, the startled look in their eyes reminds me that the way I mother matters not only to their emotional and intellectual development, but their spiritual growth as well. (Hence my need to sit at the feet of God who is Source of Peace!)

And when I soothe their cries, teach them patiently or laugh long and hard with them, I pray they are picking up small pieces of the best of what a parent’s love can be – and what it reveals of the God they may come to know as Father or Mother.

Different names for God have been important throughout the changing seasons of my life. When I was younger, Christ as companion captured my heart. As I learned about pneumatology in graduate school, God as Spirit opened my mind. After becoming a parent, God as Mother has taken on a powerful new depth of meaning.

As In God’s Name reminds me, there is no single name for God. Even Scripture is bursting with different images: God as potter, builder, midwife, gardener, servant and redeemer. Today it is “Ancient One” that mysteriously captures my child’s heart. Who knows what names and images will shape him as he grows?

What names for God speak to you today? What names have been important in the past?

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.

hey baby, wanna wrestle? parenting’s battle scars

Parenting has permanently changed my body.

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

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.

parenting & scripture: christmastide

Where have you found yourself in the Christmas story this year?

. . .

Some years I’ve been like the wise men. Seeking. Searching for a sign. Stranger in a strange land.

Some years I’ve been like the shepherds. Having to trust what others have told. Wondering what to believe.

Some years I’ve been like the animals. Simply witnessing the strange events taking shape before me.

Some years I’ve been like the innkeeper. Turning away, no room to offer. Too busy, too focused on my own concerns. Unwilling to open the door.

Some years I’ve been like Mary. Full of love but exhausted by its demands. Wondering what has been asked of me.

Some years I’ve been like Joseph. Struggling to fulfill my roles and responsibilities. Troubled at how my call has changed in ways I never imagined.

. . .

Scripture gives us many windows to enter the story, many shoes in which to slip our feet. And since every year is different, we come back to Christmas changed. Wondering where to find ourselves this time.

Sometimes we come bearing gifts; sometimes with empty hands. Sometimes we know for certain what we are seeking; other times we are wandering and lost. Some years are full of joy; others are deeply troubled. Some years we delight in birth; others are overshadowed by death. Some years the manger is our happy end; for others it is just the beginning.

But no matter where we find ourselves, the stable has room for us. And we only begin to grasp the mystery when we have approached the manger from all sides.

“Do we not all want to become shepherds and catch sight of the angel? I think so. Without the perspective of the poor, we see nothing, not even an angel. When we approach the poor, our values and goals change. The child appears in many other children. Mary also seeks sanctuary among us. Because the angels sing, the shepherds rise, leave their fears behind, and set out for Bethlehem, wherever it is situated these days.”

~ Dorothee Soelle, from On Earth As In Heaven

parenting in advent: 4th sunday

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.  And coming to her, he said, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.” (Luke 1:26-31)

The announcement of a child’s arrival rarely comes the way we planned.

For some it is an utter shock – unexpected, unplanned, unprepared. For others it is the culmination of years of trying – astonishment, delight, but still surprise.

Sometimes the news is revealed in the quiet of one’s own home, a breathless waiting for the lines to appear on the test. Sometimes it is announced in the sterile light of the doctor’s office. Sometimes it breaks into everyday life with a phone call or a letter that the long-awaited child is here.

But the news is never quite as we expected.

When we are far from parenting’s beginning, we picture how the announcement might look, feel, or sound, and how we will share it with others in turn. But the reality – the years of infertility, or the recurring miscarriages, or the “oops!” baby, or the failed adoption – can be darker shades of grey than we ever imagined. And even when the child is hoped for, longed for, prayed for, we still find ourselves overwhelmed by emotions. Joy. Fear. Love. Anxiety. Wonder. Despair. Hope.

Parents often find themselves younger or older than they would have liked. They don’t have the money or the job or the partner or the resources to raise the child in the way they wanted. They ask, “How can this be?” They wonder how they will bear the news. They grieve the loss of their former life even as they prepare for the future to come.

“The world is never ready for the birth of a child,” wrote one of my favorite poets. It has always been such: parents have never felt fully prepared, completely ready, absolutely certain that they knew what they were getting themselves into.

Zechariah was troubled. Joseph was troubled. Mary was deeply troubled. Each had to lay aside expectations of what a child or a family or a parent should look like. Each had to give themselves entirely to trust in a strange and surprising God. Life was never the same after the news.

Is this Advent’s reminder to us, year after year? That Christmas is never quite what we expected, either. That our plans are not always God’s plans. That we can only prepare so much before giving over to trust in our surprising God, for whom nothing is impossible.

Our hopes and dreams for ourselves, our children, our lives all exist within God’s greater dream of love for us. A love which we will never fully understand or grasp or even imagine. A love which will challenge us and demand from us things we never wanted to give. A love which asks us to trust what we cannot see.

May delivery be easy,

may our child grow and be well.

Let him be happy from time to time

and leap over abysses.

Let his heart have strength to endure

and his mind be awake and reach far.

But not so far

that it sees into the future.

Spare him

that one gift,

0 heavenly powers.

 - from “A Tale Begun” by Wislawa Szymborska

parenting in advent: third sunday

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor,
to heal the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and release to the prisoners. (Isaiah 61:1)

He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty. (Luke 1:53)

I never really loved Mary.

I know that’s a horrible thing to admit, especially growing up Catholic. And I liked Mary just fine: she seemed like a nice mother and an awfully brave girl to have done the things she did.

But I never loved her.

To me, Mary was unattainable perfection. Virgin yet mother, sinless yet human – it didn’t make much sense to me. Mary popped up a few times a year – the Christmas crèche, the May crowning – but most of the time she didn’t cross my mind.

Until a wise woman I met in grad school told me that during the darkest moments in her life, the times when she could barely pray at all, she could always pray the Magnificat. Because Mary’s hymn of praise to God was a prayer of a strong and brave woman: a mother of faith and a prophet of God’s justice.

I never read the Magnificat the same way again. And I came to see Mary in a whole new light. She became a woman of justice. She became a champion of the poor. She became the kind of strong, passionate mother I hoped I’d be.

Mary’s words that echo Isaiah’s truths remind me that she must have been the first to teach Jesus about God’s justice. That God raised up the lowly and cast down the powerful. That God fed the hungry and sent away the wealthy. That God would turn the world’s order upside down to care for the poorest and weakest.

Mary’s mothering in the light of justice reminds me that I have to teach my children what it means to love a God who loves the poor. What it means to feed the hungry. What it means to heal the brokenhearted in a broken world.

Her strength and faith remind me that from the humblest of circumstances and quietest of voices can come the conviction that changes the course of human history.

And in an Advent pregnant with God’s promise, in a world crying out for justice, in a home with two boys who need strong models of faith, I love Mary for that.

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? 

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?

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.