Personal. Religious.

I'm using this blog as a kind of spiritual diary these days. If that's not your thing it's okay to skip it.

Longsuffering is my middle name.

Or maybe it's martyr.

I’m learning that being a saint isn’t good enough, not by a long shot: that the higher calling is to be human.

Because being human is what we’ve really been called here to do.

We distract ourselves with thinking we have to we have to suffer or sacrifice in order to be perfect, because we don’t want to do the really hard work of being imperfect.

That requires more humility than we are willing to practice.

It’s so much irony, because those of us who get muddled by this sainthood thing are tricked by the devil at our weakest point, aren’t we?

Once we’re willing to be human, then the way is opened for us to do God’s work. God says, ah, you’re here. Now we can begin.

So I look up "Saint" on youtube thinking I'll find some deeply inspirational Bach cantata and I find this pop music "Saint Etienne" instead. Heh.

Motherhood leadings.

Thinking about motherhood because this morning I went upstairs to the playroom, one part of the house where there is semi-reliable wifi, and it was a disaster area full of toys. Toys scattered everywhere. And there in the middle of this huge mess, one of the girls, I strongly suspect the 3 yo, had turned a box upside down and put down a doll pillow and placed two baby dolls down, heads on the pillow, and covered them with a brand new dishcloth, flat and neat and the baby dolls were tucked in so carefully and lovingly amidst the mess. I thought, she gets that from me.
I remember when my firstborn was two days old. My teenage stepdaughter and a friend visited us in the hospital (I’m a c-section mom so I get three whole days) . The friend held my two day old son and he started to fuss. I said, well, if he’s going to cry I will hold him, no point in your putting up with that, I’m his mother, it’s my job. The instant I held him he stopped fussing. All he wanted was Mom.

One thing that astonished me about new motherhood was how instantly and intensely all of us moms know our baby’s individual cry. At day care or the church nursery there can be five babies and five moms outside the door and if one baby starts to cry one of the five moms instantly knows “that’s mine” and the other four know that it’s not theirs.

I wish I had an elegant way to tie all of this to the Motherhood of God. I like to think of God as a mother in her kitchen, wearing a big apron with pockets full of blessings, but not taking any guff and always ready with a correcting look or even a quick spank to get our attention when we’re really pushing it. Our angry older brother, Richard Dawkins, writes a whole book about how Mother doesn’t really exist and is a delusion and Mother looks over his shoulder and says, that’s very nice dear now eat your breakfast. And when one of us cries she is right on the other side of the door and her ears perk up and she says, that’s mine, I might as well hold her, no point in anyone else putting up with that, I’m the mother, it’s my job. And when life is a complete mess and there seems no order to anything, in the midst of all that, love is there. That’s easy for me to type on a laptop in the middle of a nice park….I’m not lying naked and cold in some Iraqi orphanage. I try, though, to see that awful suffering as a lesson for US rather than for God. A sermon once told me that Jesus’ statement “the poor you always have with you” is an accusation, rather than a resignation.