Order of Service Cover Quote: Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone
Opening Words
by the UU minister Joy Atkinson
“The womb of stars embraces us; remnants of their fiery furnaces pulse through our veins.
We are of the stars, the dust of explosions cast across space.
We are of the Earth: we breathe and live in the breath of ancient plants and beasts.
Their cells nourish the soil; we build communities on their harvest of gifts.
Our fingers trace the curves carved in clay and stone by forebears unknown to us.
We are a part of the great circle of humanity gathered around the fire, the hearth, the altar.
We gather anew this day to celebrate our common heritage.
May we recall in gratitude all that has given us birth.”
Meditation
Our meditation this morning was written by Wendell Berry.
“We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other's arms
And the larger circle of lovers,
Whose hands are joined in a dance,
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life,
Who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it
Except in fragments.”
First Reading
from the February 2010 issue of The Sun magazine, from the “Readers Write” section, on Borrowing, by Jennifer R. Myhre from San Mateo, California
“I have no children. I’ve been contentedly single for most of my childbearing years, and I haven’t really wanted kids. People have told me I’d make a good mother, but being good at something and wanting to do it are two different things. A few years ago I found out that I suffer from endometriosis, the top cause of infertility in women, so I probably couldn’t get pregnant even if I tried.
I’ve chosen to borrow other people’s children instead. My two best friends and my sister have all invited me into their homes after the births of their first children to help with chores and offer support where I could.
Three times I have washed bottle nipples with tiny brushes, changed diapers, felt spit-up run down my cleavage, fished boogers from tiny nostrils, patted out burps, sung lullabies, slept with a newborn on my chest, and stared deeply into a baby’s eyes. Three times I have fallen in love. Three times I have returned to my own home, heartbroken.
I live hundreds of miles from the children I once helped care for. This distance sometimes feels like a physical ache. Though I have not shepherded a child into this world, I have learned one of the lessons of parenting: how to love and let go.”
Second Reading
from the November 8, 2004 issue of The New Yorker magazine, from a piece by Ian Frazier
entitled, “Kid Court, abstracts of recent decisions”
4. The self-inflicted hit
This case involved conflicting complaints presented to court simultaneously. A and B, siblings, were in living room—B on sofa, A in armchair doing math. B was playing with “shark guy,” action figure with shark head, big arms, and smaller legs and torso. By manipulating movable shark jaw, B was causing shark guy to sing “Jingle Bells” with first consonants of words replaced, i.e., “Bingle bells, bingle bells, bingle ball be bay,” “Dingle dells, dingle dells, dingle dall de day,” etc. A requested that B stop. B’s response was to make shark guy repeat, through crude ventriloquism and jaw motions, words just spoken by A. Becoming angry, A pretended to hurl math notebook at B. B, not understanding that gesture was merely a feint, quickly lifted his arm to ward off anticipated blow, resulting in unintentional jab to own forehead with pointed end of shark guy. Howling in pain, B then hurled shark guy at A, striking her on wrist. Both immediately sought redress at court.
Here we have a more complex question in kid jurisprudence; that is, how does the “Always use words, not hitting” rule apply to fake or threatened blows, especially when the putative victim’s response itself results in harm? Or, put another way, what blame if any accrues to A for a mere gesture that, as she claims, she had no intention of following through? B, representing himself, argued that he had every reason to believe the threat was real,
and indicated as corroboration a large bruise below right kneecap, which he claimed was result of A kicking him earlier with field-hockey shoe. On redirect, A said that she did not even have field-hockey shoes, because practice had just started and she hadn’t gotten them yet. These remarks were followed with animadversions against B beyond scope of discussion.
Fed up, court cut Gordian knot by sending A and B to opposite corners; five minutes for every subsequent remark.
Before sentencing, as well as during and after, court admonished both A and B for their conduct, which he described as the worst seen all afternoon. Court asked if they had any idea how damaging their acts were for society, when he was forced to close the door of his basement office so as not to hear their disruption, and then had to get off the phone in the middle of an important call with a client, to whom he was trying to sell half a million dollars of term life insurance, because they came bursting in on him when they had been specifically told not to interrupt until six o’clock. Court asked if A and B would like to make large income necessary to pay the mortgage themselves, and, if not, would they be willing to move to a shack because they had created so much trouble and destroyed the business of the person who fed, sheltered, and clothed them. Court asked how they would like that.
B expressed remorse, had sentence shortened; remanded to video games. A, unrepentant, referred to court as ‘a big fat hypocrite’; sentence to be continued indefinitely.”
Third Reading
A poem by Elizabeth Spires, "The Faces of Children" (from Now the Green Blade Rises. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.)
The Faces of Children
Meeting old friends after a long time, we see
with surprise how they have changed, and must imagine,
despite the mirror's lies, that change is upon us, too.
Once, in our twenties, we thought we would never die.
Now, as one thoughtlessly shuffles a deck of cards,
we have run through half our lives.
The afternoon has vanished, the evening changing
us into four shadows mildly talking on a porch.
And as we talk, we listen to the children play
the games that we played once. In joy and terror,
they cry out in surprise as the seeker finds the one in hiding,
or in fairytale tableau, each one is tapped and turned
to stone. The lawn is full of breathing statues who wait
to be changed back again, and we can do nothing but stand
to one side of our children's games, our children's lives.
We are the conjurors who take away all pain,
and we are the ones who cannot take away the pain at all.
They do not ask, as lately we have asked ourselves,
Who was I then? And what must I become?
Like newly minted coins, their faces catch
the evening's radiance. They are so sure of us,
more sure than we are of ourselves. Our children:
who gently push us toward the end of our own lives.
The future beckons brightly. They trust us to lead them there.
Sermon: “The Spiritual Discipline of Parenting”
They say that people preach the sermons they themselves most need to hear. Parenting is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, both at home and at work, and I wanted to think about it in more of a spiritual context, which is in keeping with the sabbatical theme. I also think that it is very apropos that today is both the Sunday closest to Valentine’s Day and Pledge Sunday-- parenting is all about love, and about commitment to something larger than oneself. And one definition of Unitarian Universalists is “agnostics with children.” So I am honored to have the privilege of speaking to you today.
And I am quite humble as I contemplate trying to tell any of you something useful or knowledgeable about parenting--
I want to be clear that I am talking about all kinds of parenting … biological parenting, adoptive parenting, stepparenting, … grandparenting and godparenting... and borrowed parenting,
A parent is “a caretaker of the offspring in their own species.” A parent is “a person who brings up and cares for another.” And I believe there are many ways for each of us, to help bring up and care for children.
This room of full of amazing parents, I have watched and admired many of you as you have parented your children… and as you have helped me parent my children… I don’t presume to be an expert or especially gifted in the parenting department, and while I’m pretty fond of my children, I don’t claim that they are exemplary, nor that I can claim credit for any of their accomplishments… though any of their failings I am sure I have played a role in…
As one expert put it, “Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.”
(I told my daughter yesterday that I was going to be preaching about parenting today, and she said, “So that's why you've been asking me all week if you're a bad mother!”)
I want to think about parenting as a spiritual discipline. Now usually when we think of spiritual disciplines, we think of things like meditation, yoga, fasting, prayer, and worship… but I think that parenting shares some aspects of these, in some obvious and not so obvious ways. At their most basic, spiritual disciplines are behaviors that facilitate spiritual growth. As one practitioner put it, “Practicing a spiritual discipline is necessary to both a vibrant spiritual life and a meaningful transformation of our daily living.”
Some characteristics of a spiritual discipline—include that it: requires intention, is both universal and particular, is hard, takes practice, changes over time, requires letting go, deepens one’s self and broadens one’s connections to the world.
So first of all-- a spiritual discipline requires intention. Just as a daily morning walk may be simply a physical exercise or may be a spiritual discipline, depending upon the walker’s intent-- parenting too requires intention.
And while not everyone who becomes pregnant or who impregnates another necessarily intended to do so-- to ‘parent’ requires great intention-- to raise a child, whether or not you gave birth to them, to bring up and care for another, is a conscious choice, a commitment to a long term course of intentional and often highly demanding work.
In their book, Everyday Blessings, The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn, they write, “Becoming a parent may happen on purpose or by accident, but however it comes about, parenting itself is a calling. It calls us to recreate our world every day, to meet it freshly in every moment. Such a calling is in actuality nothing less than a rigorous spiritual discipline-- a quest to realize our truest, deepest nature as a human being.”
Another aspect of most spiritual disciplines, is that they are both universal and particular. Yoga is practiced in many cultures around the globe, and yet there are many individual schools and forms. Parenting is universal and timeless, and yet very particular and unique.
I recently watched the documentary “Babies”-- which, with hardly any narration, focuses on filming four babies in four different countries-- Namibia, Mongolia, Japan and San Francisco-- from birth until about 18 months. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it.
The parenting of these 4 babies was in some ways similar and in some ways very different…
the parents all fed, groomed, supervised, and interacted with their children, and the babies showed remarkably similar developmental stages… and yet the settings and cultural norms were very particular... for example, all the babies were bathed, but in San Francisco it was in a shower, while in Mongolia it was in a basin in a window that a goat wandered up and drank from until the mother shooed it away.
I was reminded that every human being that has ever lived began their life as a baby, the same helpless needy, dependent creature, and each of these babies had parents…
I admit, trying to imagine Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld as babies was a little difficult…but it helps sometimes to try.
And I do find it comforting that parenting is a practice as old as humanity… and that evolutionarily we have been programmed how to succeed at it, or else none of us would be here. Some even say that our extended period of attentive parenting it is the key to our evolutionary success… The longer that human babies can take to mature, the more developed their brains can become… and effective parenting is required to protect the child for a much longer time. Parents have been working hard at getting children from dependent to independent creatures for a long time... and there's a great deal of influence we have along the way.
Louise Hart said, “Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we had.”
But we all know that's much easier said than done. Another characteristic of parenting as
a spiritual discipline, is that it is hard.
It’s not hard all the time, and I would say that I have always thought it was worth it, but sometimes it is really really hard. And it requires a kind of self-discipline that many of us don’t have naturally and that we don’t have in many other areas of our lives…
So often it would be easier to give in, and sometimes we do… but much of the time we stick to it, and we ask for the thousandth time about homework being done, or an instrument being practiced, or a thank you to be written…
But as Robert Fulghum has said, “Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” And that’s hard.
And Carl Jung reminds us of the painful fact that, “If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.” And that's hard.
Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn say,-- “The very fact that we are a parent is continually asking us to find and express what is most nourishing, most loving, most wise and caring in ourselves, to be, as much as we can, our best selves.” And that's hard.
The Kabat-Zinns remind us that “As with any spiritual discipline, the call to parent mindfully is filled with enormous promise and potential. At the same time, it also challenges us to do the inner work on ourselves to be fully adequate to the task,…
They continue, “People who choose to become parents take on this hardest of jobs for no salary, often unexpectedly, at a relatively young and inexperienced age, and often under conditions of economic strain and insecurity. Typically, the journey of parenting is embarked upon without a clear strategy or overarching view of the terrain, in much the same intuitive and optimistic way we approach many other aspects of life. We learn on the job, as we go. There is, in fact, no other way.”
Another aspect of spiritual discipline is practice and repetition. And parenting is a funny one in that aspect-- because there is lots of repetition, but it tends to be time-limited-- so that unending series of diapers you changed every few hours day in and day out… became almost second nature, until all of a sudden (or maybe not so suddenly depending your potty training philosophy and technique) -- no more diapers. Nursing, bottles, baby food, bedtime stories… all of these things require a great deal of constant repetition, for a time… and then are replaced with other routines and tasks… and there are constantly new things to learn...
As one wise person put it, “the trouble with being a parent is that by the time you are experienced you are unemployed.”
Anne Lamott, in her book, Traveling Mercies” writes, “It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools--friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty-- and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.”
Another aspect of parenting as a spiritual discipline, one that I am struggling with particularly these days, with my teenagers, is the need to let go.
When Axel and I had our babies-- the book “What to expect when you’re expecting’” had just been out for a few years-- and in many ways it was very comforting, because it described all the many aspects of pregnancy changes... actually we read a huge number of books because we had no idea what we were doing. And we have continued to read books, though it all gets a little more complicated once they're actually born.
One of the few things that I read in those first months of parenthood has stuck with me and greatly shaped my parenting decisions. There was a pie chart-- and I guess it’s less important what it actually said than how I remember it-- It showed a circle which represented a person’s life, I think, so roughly about 75 years, and it was divided up into segments representing different life stages-- so there was a pretty big slice of childhood and school years, then another fairly sized slice for post-secondary and young adulthood… then a teeny tiny slice that represented your child, from birth to kindergarten… (that time that you have their most undivided attention, the most waking hours with them, before school, and then friends, sports, clubs etc. take over), and then there was another big slice once the children are in school and finally a big one after they leave home.
Somehow this tiny slice of pie, the birth to kindergarten slice, made a huge impression on me… and that is really what drove Axel and I to each work half-time once our children were born, and to each parent half-time…because it seemed like such an important time of life to spend with our children, and such a fleeting time... There is a polish proverb-- “you have a lifetime to work, but your children are only young once.”
Now, not everyone has the luxury to make this choice, and the truth is that we had to give up some material things, and some financial security in order to be able to live on one salary, but for us it was the right choice.
But more importantly, what I have realized since then, is that each 5 year, (or 3 year, or 1 year) portion in my children’s lives, and my life, is so fleeting, and so precious… and there is never enough time... and yet it must always be enough. And so I try my best to treasure each stage, and then to let it go, and be ready to welcome whatever comes next... knowing that it too will pass too quickly, and so I had better pay attention. But letting go is one of the most important things we can learn to do for our children.
One final aspect, of parenting as a spiritual discipline, that I truly value, is its communal nature, which can both deepen our selves, and broaden our connections to the wider world.
It is hard for me to believe, but when Axel and I moved here, our son Noah was 2, and our daughter Sophia was 6 months old. He just turned 17 and she just turned 15 last month. They have grown up here, in this town, and in this church. Many of you have played important roles in their growing up-- and you have helped us to parent them, for which we are very grateful.
And professionally, for the past year, I have been the Director of Generations of Hope, a non-profit agency in Rantoul. Generations of Hope was created 16 years ago, by a visionary woman, Brenda Eheart, who was a sociology professor doing research on foster care. Many of the foster care placements didn’t work well, particularly because families often lived in rural areas and felt isolated and without support. Children would often get shuffled from family to family until they aged out of the system and were on their own. Eheart began planning a community of adoptive families in 1992, but the final piece of the puzzle came about one year later, when she came up with the idea of having seniors live in the community for reduced rent, and they would help support the children and families.” The result is an intentional intergenerational neighborhood with 10 adoptive families, 30 children and fifty seniors, who act as surrogate grandparents to the children, and as support for the parents and for the other seniors. (You know why grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? Because they have a common enemy!) It is a great privilege to work in this setting, and to see the amazing relationships that develop between some unlikely individuals, of different ages, incomes, backgrounds, and experiences. But as Ted Koppel once said about Generations of Hope, “it's an idea so old fashioned, it's new.”
Barbara Kingsolver—in her book High Tide in Tucson writes, “The one sure thing is that no parent, ever, has turned out to be perfectly wise and exhaustively provident, 1440 times a day for 18 years. It takes help. Children … thrive best when their upbringing is the collective joy and responsibility of families, neighborhoods, communities, and nations.”
She observes that, “A neat (nuclear) family model constructed to service the Baby Boom economy seems to be returning gradually to a grand, lumpy shape that human families apparently have tended toward since they first took root in the Olduvai Gorge. We’re social animals, deeply fond of companionship, and children love best to run in packs. If there is a normal for humans at all, I expect it looks like two or three sets of the ‘family of dolls’ I played with as a child, (mom, dad, junior and sis,) connected variously by kinship and passion, shuffled like cards and strewn over several shoeboxes.”
She says, “The sooner we can let go the fairy tale of families functioning perfectly in isolation, the better we might embrace the relief of community.”
I believe that parenting is a collective responsibility-- the care and nurturing of our young, has always taken a village... a tribe... a community... a neighborhood, a congregation.
Anne Lamott in her book Traveling Mercies, says that the reason she makes her son go to church, “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, 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.”
I'd have to say that that's why I brought my children to church too, to help them feel and understand that they are connected to something larger than themselves, and larger than our nuclear family.
Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn tell us that, “The greatest gift you can give a child is your self. This means that part of your work ... is to keep growing in self-knowledge and in awareness. We have to be grounded in the present moment to share what is deepest and best in ourselves. … We only have right now. Let us use it to its best advantage, for our children’s sake, and for our own.”
And the poet Elizabeth Spires reminds us, that , “They are so sure of us, more sure than we are of ourselves. Our children: who gently push us toward the end of our own lives.
The future beckons brightly. They trust us to lead them there.”
May we approach caring for and raising the next generation as a spiritual practice, that requires intention, is universal and particular, is hard, requires letting go, and is best done by all of us, together, in our neighborhoods, our congregations, and our communities. Then we will each follow a light brighter than the glimmer of our own candle, and all be a part of something beautiful.
Amen.
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