Living into the Sacred Depths of Everyday Parenting – MATTHEW LAMONT. This article appeared in The Aidan Way and The Australian Friend in 2010.
Raising young children can be relentless, overwhelming. It is hard to imagine where days and weeks and years go in the birthing, growing and learning. I now know by experience that rearing children is one of life’s holiest and most challenging endeavours. What would lead my life to join in the conceiving and growing of new lives? What force keeps stirring me to commune with the sacred within my life and the life of the world? Something about bringing children into the world brings one closer to what is real: the holy round of life, generation after generation. From leading and controlling to being led. Led by the power of ecstatic intimacy and union with my lover to new life. Even the movement of desire within one’s body, heart and mind is impossible to articulate satisfactorily. But it is something more than two lovers that desires this new life, a life so new that its uniqueness will never be seen again. And paradoxically a life shot through with the same life that every other human experiences in some way.
I imagine our first daughter who senses our readiness and decides upon a new becoming. I sense the power of our second daughter who surges from the invisible into life. I enter the mystery of our unborn child who brings great sickness but dancing feet and intriguing forms. A child is like Jesus, the teacher, who turns to the crowds on the road and demands the fullest attention. A child comes from the source of life itself, beyond the sexual encounter that sets cells in motion, and invites the greatest attentiveness. A child, like all of us, comes with the capacity for union, the one thing necessary. Why is it that only in my most contemplative moments do I see what is absolutely real? The simplest moments in the life of parenting can be the most meaningful. The heart rendering anticipation when one knows the waiting is over and birth is imminent…The delight of physical contact with a child whose feelings need soothing… Peacefully observing the imaginative play of children… The natural wonderment at the world as it is… The satisfaction that comes when children are asleep and all is finally quiet for another day. These are by no means uncommon experiences.
Becoming a parent forces a shift in the self. The vulnerability that comes with the changes in this stage of life is fertile soil for a new self to emerge. Waiting for birth, feeding at all hours, reduced sleep and energy, maintaining relationships and personal priorities and changes in sexuality all can be confronting on their own. The shift to parenthood can also bring about reflection on the wounds and strengths of our own childhood and the qualities and weaknesses of our own family background. So, internally, much is going on. In all this our humanity and connection to the larger whole can become more real. I remember holding our first baby daughter outside a Quaker Meeting while she slept one morning in 2005 and identifying with the Mary of Orthodox iconography who is pictured contemplating simultaneously the wonder of new life and the unavoidable movement towards death. The swaddling cloth of the infant is also the burial fabric of the tomb. Reflections on mortality are not just the preserve of the sick and the elderly but also of parents! There is enormous stillness in this contemplation because the Holy One is near and both beauty and grief are close at hand. Perhaps the beauty of a child is even more precious because we know in our most aware moments that all is fleeting, all is passing away. Even one’s meditation on this passes away.
In my less profound moments when I am feeling most overwhelmed by parenting and family relationships I experience the shadow side which lurks and is sometimes expressed in feelings of great impatience, irritability, isolation, anxiety and anger. It is tempting to be harsh towards my shadow side with its fire, inflexibility and self-entitlement but its fragility is palpable and carries a desire for wholeness, a desire to remember that I am not in fact alone and do not need to carry the whole thing or meet all the external and internal expectations attached to my life. In my most horrendous moments of anxiety, stress and self-judgement, I long most at these points to return to the Centre and yet it seems so far in the distance and, like the Prodigal Son, I sometimes do not know how to return or indeed how I got there. I think of the unceasing prayer of the desert was: Be pleased O God to deliver me. O Lord, make haste to help me! (Psalm 70:1). Perhaps it is the Holy One who longs most passionately for us in this inner desert when the shadows lengthen. For me it is my instinct for prayer, silence and loving relationship which becomes the salve and the gift. This gift hidden somewhere in the depth of the shadowy places represents a longing to be-loved so I can in turn love my family and the world from my heart rather than some fearful place. God help me to minimise the harm to others in the mean time! Family life, viewed from this lens, becomes a place for peace making.
And so like the passion narratives of the Gospels, I find that when I look at the whole thing it is passion which is lived out in my parenting. I commit to reject nothing in my experience of parenting, embracing anguish and the sublime, anxiety and fulfilment, ecstasy and isolation. I commit again to a journey of peaceful ways, seeking holiness in family life and affirming those moments in which the Sacred makes itself most known.