God of the sweeping

Or what woman having ten coins and losing one would not light a lamp and sweep the house, searching carefully until she finds it? And when she does find it, she calls together her friends and neighbors and says to them, “Rejoice with me because I have found the coin that I lost.” In just the same way, I tell you, there will be rejoicing among the angels of God over one sinner who repents.

Luke 15: 8-10

Every night I take the broom in hand,
both of us worn and tired
but still working.
As I stretch out arms
to reach the bristles’ brush,
the steady rhythm comes back easy,
drag of dirt across familiar floor.

Every day it slides the same:
crumbs, hair, dust, food 
all piled into tidy heaps
left waiting for the bin.
One swift dump, then goodbye.
But making clean is holy work –
refreshing for another day,
forgiving what is past and gone.
To gather, to release 
and then repeat
makes way, always
for one day more.

I know the time it takes,
the pattern of the pulling
corners into center,
how to turn and switch
the broom’s direction when the grit is stubborn.
Sometimes I even do my sweeping in the dark
when all the world’s asleep.

Only when I lose the precious
slipped under couch,
rolled into corner dark
or simply disappeared –
then only do I blaze the lights,
look steady as I clean, search
focused on the finding,
knowing work that will not fail.

But if I did not sweep each day,
memorize these floors,
their stains and scuffs,
then I could not seek what’s lost
when it’s the coin that matters most.
So thus it was and always must it be:
pull creaky closet door to find old broom,
swish brush, brush swish
reach pull, pull reach
and then again to rest.

God at work (and the rest of us, too)

Growing up, I never imagined God sweeping.

Or baking. Or gardening. Or helping deliver a baby.

For the past few months I’ve been writing a new program on work and calling for small groups in congregations. Since we keep learning that people’s challenges with vocation often stem from a lack of understanding about how God calls, I’ve been weaving in lots of Scriptural passages that broaden our image of who God is. So lately I’ve been living and working closely with God as worker: farmer, potter, metalworker, baker and midwife, to name a few. 

These biblical images of God at work are so rich and so relevant that I’m amazed to realize how easily we skip over them, so stuck is the white-bearded Father in flowing robes in our minds and in our churches.

Had it not been for graduate studies in theology, I might have missed many of these facets of Scripture’s portrait of God, too. I grew up with loving images of God – a tender shepherd, a caring father – but no one told me till I was much older that Scripture held more pictures of the divine than what I saw in my children’s Bible or the stained glass windows at church.

I love these images now: God as artist, molding us like clay. God as blacksmith, forging us in fire. God as gardener, planting and watering and waiting to harvest.

These are images of God that fire my imagination and make me believe differently – with depth, with creativity, with fresh eyes.

So now that I’m nearing the end of this writing project, I want to explore in a new way what I’ve learned and loved about these images of God at work. Especially as we begin bustling around the house, hurrying into the holidays, preparing for guests and feasts, I want to slow down and ponder images of God we often overlook.

The domestic ones. The feminine ones. The everyday ones.  

(And because I’m mentally preparing for Advent, my favorite season of the year for soaking in poems and psalms, I’m inching out on a limb and playing with poetry in this space, too.)

So till tomorrow, I’ll borrow a line from Lake Wobegon country:

Be well and do good work.

ordinary time

It was an ordinary moment, during an ordinary day, in an ordinary week.

(Which, in the midst of life with littles, means complete chaos.)

Ordinary is never boring, never dragging these days. Our ordinary is unexpected, our mundane is a mess.

With each new dawn, schedules get shifted and plans get changed. One boy rises early, the other sleeps late; one naps like a dream, one wrestles like a nightmare; one gobbles three plates, the other shoves the spoon away. The next day they switch roles and everything changes again. Never a dull moment.

It was one of these everyday-crazy moments that I paused, my attention caught by turning leaves on the tree near our window, flashing orange in afternoon sun. Ordinary, I thought, such an ordinary day.

Even in the midst of mania – one child spilling CDs from the cabinet, the other pulling paints from a drawer – my thoughts tended theological, as they often do.

I thought about ordinary time, where the church spends most of its year. I thought about all of Jesus’ ordinary time, the years before his public ministry. So much of what matters is ordinary – the regular season, the everyday work.

In a season of life when so much seems ordinary, preparation for what’s ahead or maintenance of what’s right now, I sometimes think about all the ordinary years that Jesus spent. Scripture goes silent on the subject; the Gospels skip from twelve-in-the-temple to thirty-in-the-desert in the flip of a page. But those long lost years must have held quiet growth, careful learning, hard work, cultivated relationships, deep prayer. It made all the difference how Jesus lived his ordinary years.

So many days I dream, amidst the cries and chaos, about the years to come. When the house is finished. When my kids are in school. When I have more time to write. I often wrestle with the waiting, the reality of so much ordinary stretching out in front of me.

But when I stop, seized by an extraordinary ordinary like autumn leaves in October sun, I realize how much God must love ordinary. Because all of life is wrapped around it.

The sacred ordinary of every day.

the jesus of the cry room

Ironically, they’re the easiest scenes in the Gospels for me to skip over.

Yesterday it was an episode from Mark. Arguing disciples, who’s the greatest, elbowing each other on the road to Capernaum like bickering brothers: nuh-uh, I’m the favorite. Exasperated Jesus, here’s the least, plunking down the kid in the middle like an exasperated parent: why can’t you be more like this one?

And every time, deaf and blind me, paying half-attention in the pew with my own squirming least, I miss the message, too. My eyes glaze over; my ears lull to auto-pilot. I’ve heard this one a million times; let the little children come to me; the kingdom of heaven belongs to them; yawn.

Until yesterday, I’d never thought about the shocking fact of Jesus noticing – to say nothing of embracing – a child.

But at Sunday Mass, while my youngest shrieked in my arms, flailing with frustration, lunging for a nap nowhere to be found, and I missed most of the Gospel as I plotted my exit from the pew pre-homily, before the hollering protest drowned out the priest entirely, I had a brief moment of clarity. Irony’s lightning bolt. Here I am, embracing the same child that Christ put his arms around. And I’m planning to whisk him out of the assembly ASAP so he doesn’t disturb the patient prayers around us any further.

(I still left. Amen, amen I say to you - that kid was CRANKY.)

But as we gently paced the gathering space, watching through windows at the quieter crowd within, I tasted the irony. I ignored the homily I couldn’t hear anyway and entered the scene.

I pictured Jesus, sweaty and grimy from the journey, annoyed with his quibbling friends, troubled at their stubborn hearts. I wondered about the child he chose to put his arms around.

Did the baby squirm in his arms, lunging for his mother? Did the toddler leak while she sat on his lap? Did the boy wrinkle up his nose and announce, to his parents’ mortification, that this man smells funny?

Or did the child cuddle in Christ’s arms with delight? Was Jesus like the favorite uncle, the one who never had kids of his own but never hesitated to get down on the floor and wrestle with the little ones, who always knew how to get a grin and a giggle?

I’m embarrassed to admit that for years I’ve slid over these passages like a worn-out children’s Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke. Did I think they were simply moments when Jesus turned into a sap? That they were Hallmark sentiments or photo-ops for centuries of kitschy artists to paint in fuzzy pastels?

Even after I took graduate courses in Scripture, I still never realized the shattering shock of this scene. I learned lots of theological analysis of what the child means for the reordering of societal and familial structures in the reign of God. But I never thought about the kid on Christ’s lap.

Until I held the one that exasperated me, who smelled of wet diaper and oatmeal-smeared hair, who crawled too fast to contain in a chair, who babbled too loud to pray in a pew.

I tried to hold him with Christ arms instead of my tired own. I saw, for the first time, the shock of a savior scooping up the smallest.

And I realized that this was exactly the upside-down-ness of the Kingdom. He’s in.

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