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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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our domestic vocations

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“Religion never thoroughly penetrates life until it becomes domestic.”
Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (1847)

What parent, faced with washing another sinkful of dirty dishes, or cleaning up after another sick child, or folding another seemingly endless load of laundry, doesn’t wonder – is this what I signed up for? Is this how my talents are best spent? Is this what I got that degree for?

I have plenty of days like this.

But I also have the gift of good work that challenges me to think about such questions from a theological standpoint. I’m in the midst of researching what’s been written on “vocation through the lifespan,” namely, how God’s call to us evolves over our lifetime.

Quite often the literature on vocation touches on the vocation to marriage and the vocation to parenting, sometimes romanticizing their merits, sometimes enumerating their challenges. Both of these vocations – to marriage and to parenting – can change dramatically over one’s lifetime, although the evolutions happen gradually, day by day.

What also strikes me about both vocations is that they are largely centered in the home. We certainly remain spouses and parents when we go into the workplace, the school, the church, the community. But we spend much of our time as spouses and parents in the domestic setting.

The home, then, is the primary context for the unfolding, developing, and maturing of vocations to marriage and parenting.

We answer a call when we rouse in the dark night to calm a screaming baby, when we sit down to talk with our spouse at the end of the work day, when we spend time on all the chores required to keep our household running.

Vocation can be deeply domestic.

I’ve come across this quote from Horace Bushnell several times in my research lately. Each time I read it, it gives me pause.

What does it mean for religion to “become domestic”? Does it lose its power and conviction when it comes home? Does it become self-centered when it is less concerned with the needs of world outside? Does it become softer, taken-for-granted, everyday?

Hardly, Bushnell insists. Faith does not become real, raw, relevant until it finds a way into our homes and hearts.

The domesticity of faith is not something to be dismissed. The religious challenges and crises we face in our marriages and families are some of the most real and penetrating questions of faith we will ever encounter. Why did God let my loved one get sick? How can I help my child with her addiction? Can this marriage be saved?

I believe our churches, in turn, need to help couples and families to see the home as the place where we learn to care not only for our own, but for all of God’s people. As the domestic church, the family must be the school where we learn about the needs of the world and ask how God is calling us to respond.

The domesticity of religion, therefore, is not mere navel-gazing. As we encounter love and life in its gritty, day-to-day, up-and-down realities, we learn what it means to be in relationship with others, to forgive and to grow, to recognize Christ in one another.

Religion becoming domestic is a good thing, when it sends us forth with faith into the world in turn.

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  1. Kate says

    19 October 2010 at 2:00 pm

    Amen, mother sister! “As we encounter love and life in its gritty, day-to-day, up-and-down realities, we learn what it means to be in relationship with others, to forgive and to grow, to recognize Christ in one another.”

    My hubby’s going through RCIA this year–I’m going to point him to this post, because I think you’ve captured what authentic religiosity is really about.

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
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Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
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I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

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I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

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He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
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Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
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Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

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