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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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settling: maybe not such a dirty word after all

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Walking the miles, singing the blues

Learning to love what God gives to you

 – Brandi Carlile, “Way To You”

Last night I took the dog out under a twilight of dramatic clouds. As I waited for him to sniff the entire row of pine trees in search of the perfect place to do his business, I turned back towards the house, now outlined with the last traces of the setting sun. For some reason it took my breath away as beautiful.

And I was suddenly struck with the realization that this was My Place, my chosen corner of the earth.

Lately I’ve been reading all sorts of interesting things about the information and sensory overload facing us in the digital age. We can’t read it all (“The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re Going To Miss Almost Everything”). We can’t do/see/learn it all, as this essay describes in respect to today’s generation of young adults, whom the author calls “possibility junkies”:

Its members have a spectacular hunger for life and more life. They want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they’ve ever known. And there’s something else, too, that distinguishes them: They live to multiply possibilities. They’re enemies of closure. For as much as they want to do and actually manage to do, they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut possibilities down before they have to.

Yet regardless of age, part of our challenge in discerning vocation means that we have to close certain doors. We cannot live there and here. We cannot marry him and him. We cannot work there and there. Life is shaped by limitations, carved by the choices we make.

Gazing up at the outline of my house against the summer sky last night, I realized that this is the first childhood home of my babies. This is where they take their first steps, speak their first words, learn to explore the world around them. This is not just a starter house or a pit stop on the way to somewhere better; this is a sacred space.

Many days my house drives me nuts. It’s too small. It’s not well-designed for a young family. It has too many things to fix. While I recognize that we are incredibly fortunate to have a roof over our heads, I still grumble about the not-quite-rightness of our house. I dream of the next house, the bigger house, the house with a real office for my work and a bedroom for each baby.

But this is the house I have today. This is the home I have been given. This is the life we are creating for ourselves.

Learning to love the life that God gives to you means celebrating this path, these choices, without indulging in too many daydreams of how it could have been different. And realizing that we are the sum of our choices, but we are also something more – something mysterious and unknowable, and that is the proof of God’s hand at work in our lives.

As I drifted off to sleep last night, I listened to the night noises, the house creaking into its foundations.  The sounds of its settling reminded me that I’m slowly doing the same.

And despite the connotations the word might have conjured up for me a decade ago – the shudder of resigned acceptance of something less than ideal – I begin to see that “settling in” does not have to equal “giving up.” Instead it means that I am settling in to the life God gives to me, which lets me put down roots and push up shoots.

There’s a beauty, a fruitfulness, a grace in that kind of settling.

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  1. home: where we live and move and have our being « mothering spirit says:
    25 January 2012 at 10:05 am

    […] too. Born of a desire to memorialize the passage from outer to inner life, their entrance into the place they will spend their earliest days. Home is […]

    Reply
  2. where we dreamed our babies « mothering spirit says:
    23 April 2012 at 9:45 am

    […] the seasons I’ve spent gazing out the same windows at the same trees, I’ve learned that settling in isn’t the same as settling. The joy of owning a home is putting down deep roots so beauty can grow. It’s the wisdom […]

    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
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.
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. 
 
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.
“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.

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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.

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Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
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What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
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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.
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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.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
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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.
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