PARENTING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

May 13, 2007

AFFIRMATION

Minister: Out of the mystery beyond knowing and into our lives our children are born, precious strangers with whom we share the most intimate ties.

CONGREGATION: IT IS OUR DUTY TO WELCOME THEM, TO GUIDE THEM, TO NURTURE THEM.

Minister: Even as we count every finger and toe, gaze into the wells of their eyes, and stroke their impossibly soft hair, we are daunted by the responsibility of their care.

CONGREGATION: AND SO, WITH LOVE WE BRING THEM INTO OUR LIVES, OUR FAMILIES, OUR COMMUNITIES, OUR WORLD.

Minister: Life is busy, their needs are many, demands on us grow, and time is so short.

CONGREGATION: HERE WE GATHER FOR SUPPORT AND CONSOLATION, TO COMPLETE THE CIRCLE OF CARE, TO MENTOR, TO TEACH, TO LAUGH WITH, TO CRY WITH, TO CELEBRATE WITH COURAGE AND LOVE.

Minister: And then the journey moves on. Our children leave our homes and make places in the world. The ties twist and stretch and yet endure.

CONGREGATION: HERE WE AFFIRM THE CIRCLE OF LOVE, WHERE WE EACH MIGHT CARE AND BE CARED FOR, WHERE WE MIGHT STAND WITH EACH OTHER, LIVING OUT OF OUR BEST HOPES AND FOR OUR BEST SELVES.

READING

Antoine de St. Exupery

In a house which becomes a home,
One hands down and another takes up
The heritage of mind and heart,
Laughter and tears, musings and deeds.
Love, like acarefully loaded ship,
Crosses the gulf between the generations.
Therefore we do not neglect
The ceremonies of our passage:
When we wed, when we die,
And when we are blessed with a child;
When we depart and when we return;
When we plant and when we harvest.
If others impart to our children
Our knowledge and ideals, they will lose
All of us that is wordless and full of wonder.
Let us build memories in our children,
Lest they drag out joyless lives,
Lest they allow treasures to be lost
Because they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things,
But by the meanings of things.
It is needful to transmit the passwords
From generation to generation.

SERMON

The moment is burned into my memory, so vivid and clear it is as if it were yesterday, not 27 years ago in a very different place and time in my life. I am standing at the head of a hospital bed in Charleston, West Virginia, tightly gripping Debbie’s hand as I urge her to “push, push.” And then, in a sight so improbable and yet so vividly real, Debbie gives birth to our first daughter, Anna.

I have only scattered memories of the 16 hours or so of labor that preceded that moment – the breathing, the washcloths and ice chips, the contractions coming with gathering intensity – but the few minutes of Anna’s birth glow in my memory, a shining moment when I suddenly understood so many things: the beauty, wonder and power of every person who enters the world, the generative miracle of which humans – of which I and my partner – are capable, and the incomprehensible depth of the bond of human love, a bond that I was to learn would fill and strengthen me, but also leave me helpless, as vulnerable as I could possibly be.

It was, in short, one of the most deeply spiritual moments of my life. I should add, lest our other two daughters, Erica and Meredith, get the wrong impression, that their births occasioned similar feelings. But this moment in October 1980 inaugurated Debbie and me into the journey of parenthood.

I expect that others of you who are parents could attest to a similar experience. And perhaps you may have shared another sort of spiritual experience of a very different character that we had some 48 hours after that first one, when I drove up to the hospital doors and mother and child were strapped into the car for the ride home. What are they, crazy? How can they give us this child to raise on our own? How could we possibly be capable of this?

It’s true that with all the joy and excitement that comes with being a parent it is a daunting task. Whatever our background, whatever our experience we are tested to lengths we had never thought possible by the experience of nurturing, guiding, consoling, nudging, honoring and loving a young life. And it’s a fair bet that each us at some point asks if we are truly up to it.

Today I want to begin with the premise that we are capable, each of us in our own ways, shaped by our own gifts and skills, our own tastes and talents, our histories and our hopes, whether the child is our own biological progeny, is adopted, or comes to us by the circumstances of life. Parenting in a way that helps another person grow up to feel healthy, whole, loving and loveable and imbued with a sense of meaning and purpose in life is possible. And a way I propose to make it possible is to think of the process of parenting as a kind of spiritual discipline.

By spiritual discipline I do not necessarily mean parenting understood in the context of any one religious perspective or theological orientation. Whether your perspective is theist, atheist, mystic, humanist, or any other is not relevant to this practice. What’s more important is a commitment to integrity and intentionality, in other words being real with yourself and your children and sticking with it. What makes it spiritual is that it touches the deepest in you, yet is focused beyond you to that which connects you to all things.

I want to suggest that like other spiritual disciplines such as meditation, prayer, fasting, and so on, parenting done with intention and care can bring us in touch that which is most sacred in our lives. As a discipline, though, it is a path to which we may dedicate ourselves, but which we cannot control. Our best work, our best intentions do not always bring the results that we want.

Not only that, but we will never have it fully figured out. We may have what we feel is a system, a strategy, an understanding in place that is working, but then things change: they change, we change, the world changes. A discipline is not a ready answer book but a commitment to a way of being, and so it can demand a flexible response, a response that fits the circumstances yet remains centered in a larger commitment. And like any commitment it takes time to become ingrained in our lives.

So, I want to offer you what I think could be called the steps to parenting as a spiritual discipline. There are only three of them. They’re not complicated, and I offer no provenance for them, no transcendent, authoritative source. They come only from my own observation and reflection, and so you are welcome to take them or leave them on that basis. Nor do I claim any personal mastery of them. My own children could give you chapter and verse on where I fall short. As with any discipline I, too, remain a learner.

Here they are, then. The three steps to parenting as a spiritual discipline: attend, engage, let go. Let me repeat them: attend, engage, let go. You see, I told you they were simple, and yet if followed diligently they are challenging enough.

Let’s begin with attend. By this I mean just being fully present. It sounds easy enough, and certainly when we first bring our children home we can’t take our eyes off them. But it’s not long before we get distracted and busy. In time, our children learn to yank on our coattails or act out until we pay attention.

Attention, of course, is the beginning of most spiritual practices. Buddhists call the state of mind where thoughts flit across our consciousness, distracting us from the concentration that meditation requires, “monkey mind.” In the case of parenting, the “monkey” is often the very person who is in need of our attention. But we are distracted and even find ourselves getting irritated at the child for disrupting us.

The Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield tells the story of watching a family settle down for dinner at a restaurant. After taking the orders of the adults, the waitress turns to the seven-year-old boy. “What will you have?” she asks. The boy looks around the table timidly and says, “I would like to have a hot dog.” “No,” his mother interrupts, “no hot dog. Get him meat loaf and mashed potatoes and carrots.”

“Do you want ketchup or mustard on your hot dog?” the waitress asks the boy. “Ketchup,” he says. “Coming up,” she says as she starts for the kitchen. There is a stunned silence at the table when finally the boy looks up at his family and says, “You know what? She thinks I’m real.”

“What is real?” the Velveteen Rabbit asks the skin horse in the children’s story of that name. Real, the skin horse says, is something that happens to you. When someone loves you, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real. To attend to another person fully is to make them real, not just to you but to themselves as well. It is the foundation of the bond of parenthood, the affirmation that as a child you matter intimately to this parent, you are worthy of their concern.

The discipline of attention is not always easy. We can get frazzled and stressed, and there are times when a child is in our face and we need at that moment to be attending to something else. The trick is even then finding a way to keep them in the orbit of our concern, finding ways to give them time when we have the chance.

Attending to another is to take them and their concerns seriously. It means careful, attentive, nonjudgmental listening. And that is hard. We know what we think, and before the first words are out of their mouths we are quick to pronounce, to declare, to dismiss.

The discipline of attention calls us to withhold our own input, to attend to theirs and all that it is communicating. We called to be present not only to words but also to feelings, body language and the unspoken agenda just beneath the surface. To do all this we must remain in the present moment. We must step back from our own torrent of thoughts and feelings and make ourselves available. It takes practice to do this at all, no less to do it well. And yet, while it is a discipline, it is also a joy. For it is out of love that we attend, and by attending in the posture of love our love deepens and grows.

Next, engage. Having attended to their children, parents are invited to engage them, to bring their full selves into their interactions with them. Our children need so badly to have their parents participating in their lives. More than food on the table and a roof over their head, they need parents who share themselves.

Pat Westwater-Jong, member of a Massachusetts Unitarian Universalist church, says in her essay on “Parenting” in the book Everyday Spiritual Practices, that whether or not she agrees with her children, she feels they need to sense that she understands them.

“Sometimes I can be generous and give them what they want, sometimes I agree with their perspective,” she says. “But sometimes what they need is for me to gently and firmly not give then what they are requesting.”

By the same token, she says, she believes it is incumbent on her to acknowledge when she is wrong. “My parents didn’t feel they had that option,” she says. “When I was a kid, my dad told me that when he was a boy his parents were always right, he was never allowed to disagree with them. To disagree, no matter how politely, was disrespectful. I can remember as politely as possible making my case for a review of a decision my father had made. He said to me that even if I had a point, he would not go back on his decision because I would not respect him. I remember thinking that he was wrong; I would respect him more for admitting he was wrong and being able to change his mind.”

We long for connections that are real and genuine, the speaking of truth, authentic modeling of ethical behavior. It is said the moral lessons we remember best are those that are caught, not taught. That means we need to engage our children, not preach at them. Nor for that matter should we let them drift without guidance. We need to share what matters to us and why, and why they matter to us as well.

This can be hard work, a discipline to be sure, especially as children grow older and become so adroit at pushing every button we have. And yet, ironically, it is as they grow older that they most need a parent they can trust to engage them, to hear them, to affirm them at some times and challenge them at others, but always with love, and to stick by them through and through.

Now, finally, to let go. Mary Oliver sums it up at the end of her poem “Blackwater Woods.” “To live in this world you must be able do three things. To love what is mortal. To hold it close to your bones knowing that your life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

Yet even here there is an important discipline at stake. As I once heard someone say, there is a big difference between letting go and giving up. Letting go is in a sense an act of trust. It is giving up any sense of control while staying in relationship.

Parenting, of course, is full of letting go: letting a child play at a friend’s house, letting them go to school, letting them make their own decisions about clothes, toys, friends, and so on. This year Debbie and I experienced a flood of letting go: watching our oldest child get married, our middle child graduate from college and our youngest go off to college, leaving us as parents with no children at home. And yet we remain deeply in relationship with all three and know that we always will.

Making peace with letting go, though, does take some discipline. Each act of letting go is a moment of self-differentiation. With each one, we are acknowledging the spaces in the bonds with our children. Kahlil Gibran famously wrote, “your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you they belong not to you.”

It is in the letting go that we acknowledge this fact, the truth that our children are, as I read earlier in our affirmation, “precious strangers.” Each life that arrives in that amazing moment of birth is unlike any other that preceded it or will follow it. We may, as Gibran says, give them our love but not our thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.

And so we do. We attend to them, devote our time, our energy, our love to their nurture and growth. We engage them deeply, sharing ourselves in all the ways that we can, and when the time comes, we let them go.

Of course, this is no linear path. Parenthood is full of attending, engaging and letting go. We cycle through it over and over again, and perhaps if we’ve given some thought to it we get better at it over time. In other words, it becomes a discipline, and in the end, I submit, a deeply satisfying one.

For it touches and feeds what we treasure, the source of love within us and the capacity to confer that love on another without reservation, or hesitation. What makes it hard is the courage and humility that it demands of us, the endless learning. And yet, that’s how it is as, generation to generation, we lengthen the chain of human life, endeavoring to uphold what is worthy and good while also planting the seeds for a better world.

It is in our hands, in the generative power that we humans possess and in the deep purpose that we bring to the task.

So Be It.