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on advent acceptance

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The teenaged lector looked nervous in his (untucked) shirt and (crooked) tie, peppering the intercessions with quiet stammers and awkward pauses.

My heart sunk for him, remembering how mortifying it felt to read in front of peers in high school. The church crammed full of faith formation students, bored or giggling or texting under their pews, collectively cringed as we waited for him to finish the prayers of the faithful.

“For all….acceptant parents…during this Advent season, that they…may….m-meet Christ as they wait… in joyful hope for…the…arrivaloftheirchildwepraytotheLord.”

Acceptant parents. Even I couldn’t hide a smile at that one.

Regardless of whether we have children of our own or not, we all know what it means to be an “expectant parent”: equal parts joy and sheer terror at the life-changing event to come.

Expectant parents have books and baby showers; they get pats on the back and the belly. We offer them congratulations and advice; we smile and tell them to sleep while they can. Expectancy is well-defined, even if it requires patience and persistence.

But what does it mean to be an “acceptant” parent instead? What insight did the young lector offer with his mangling – or improvising – of the well-worn phrase?

All parents are acceptant in their own way. Reality forces us to accept the children we are given, with all the challenges and frustrations they bring, along with great joy. Our child may have disabilities or emotional issues. They may struggle with mental illness or addiction or disease in terrible ways from which we long to protect them. Or they may simply present us with the mirror that reveals the ugly truth of our own flaws as we strive to walk with them on their journey of growing up.

Acceptance calls us to greater love as parents – not the idealized pastels of baby showers, but the bold, brash colors of real life. When we accept our children as they are, we let go of illusions and embrace the beauty and brokenness right in front of us. When we accept another person as a child of God, we see him or her with new eyes – a clearer vision.

Acceptance may be an Advent virtue as well. We wanted a powerful, political messiah – a strong leader to free us from the hell of slavery we were living. Instead we got…a baby? Born in a barn of animal stink and dirt? What about the prophets’ poetry – the images of our expectancy? How could we reconcile their words with the reality in front of us?

The Nativity is shocking in its reversal of expectations. Our idealized, commercialized version of the happy, glowing Bethlehem scene has gradually eroded our understanding of the barely believable truth that This was where and when and how God chose to break into our world in an unprecedented way.

Yet those who came to learn from and love this Jesus of Nazareth, who gradually accepted him as the savior and recognized his truth – their acceptance allowed them to see with new eyes, freed them from expectations to live in a new way, urged them on to greater love and compassion.

My Advent challenge today is to be an acceptant parent, spouse, friend. To set aside my preconceived notions of How It All Must Play Out and to embrace the reality I have been given to live. To allow God and other people to surprise me, upend my expectations.

What better Advent model of an acceptant parent than Mary herself:

No payment was promised, no promises made

No wedding was dated, no blue prints displayed

Yet Mary, consenting to what none could guess,

Replied with conviction, “Tell God I say ‘Yes.'”

(John Bell, Iona Community, “No Wind at The Window”)

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  1. the old translation: what i will miss « mothering spirit says:
    22 November 2011 at 1:31 pm

    […] grieve. I love the moment in the creed when we bow in reverence of Jesus’ conception and birth, not only because it honors the wonder of the Incarnation but because it honors Mary’s role […]

    Reply
  2. the impossibility of advent « mothering spirit says:
    17 December 2012 at 3:47 pm

    […] the brilliance of true light. It’s the lifting up of lowly and the bending down of divine and the upending of all our expectations. It’s the constant, humming, throbbing beat of love’s heart pulsing out life into the […]

    Reply

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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

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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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.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

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.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

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.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

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.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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