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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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the spiritual practice of summering

2 Comments

Slipping off shoes before bare grass.

Watching a nightly sunset, not in passing but present to the pastel palette of the sky.

Listening to early morning birds, awake even before the babes in the next room.

Spotting fireflies’ silent blinks at the wooded edge, gentle as grace.

Plucking first beans from the lush leaves of a growing garden.

Slurping melted ice cream from dripping cones.

Praying. Witnessing. Listening. Beholding. Harvesting. Savoring.

Some say summer is a lazy season, a lull between the wakening of spring and the work of fall. But I find summer ripe for the spirit. There is so much of God to be glimpsed in this greenest of seasons, in this brightest of sunshine.

The One who walked in the garden in the cool of the evening.

Summer 2013 023

The practice of parenting shapes my days and weeks but sometimes I forget how it shapes my seasons. I am woken up early with the extra hours of light, but do I wake to what matters most?

If the pressure of a Pinterest-worthy bucket list and the nagging reminder of winter’s biting zeros right around the corner overwhelm me with ambition to conquer these months by someone else’s standards, then I run ragged like a red-cheeked toddler sweating from slide to swing to slide to swing.

Even summer’s playground can become a place of exhaustion.

So I delight deliberately in a summer of spaciousness. Of longer days to wait and watch and listen. Of lingering light to sense the presence of the God who waits for us to slow down. Of Sabbath time to revel in the sultry days that beckon for rest.

We have no calendar crammed with activities. Sometimes we picnic or play in the park; sometimes we do nothing and loll around the house happy as clams. My children will only be so young for so long, and I feel no need to fill their days with the crush of extracurriculars. Will it hold them back? I don’t much care. We’re raising boys with mosquito bites behind their knees and sidewalk chalk smeared across their shorts and last week’s ice cream cones stained across their collars.

We are summering and it couldn’t be sweeter.

. . .

What do you love most about summer? How do you “practice” this season well?

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  1. Lauren L. says

    19 July 2013 at 8:42 am

    Yes! A summer of spaciousness.

    I didn’t realize quite how crammed and cramped my season has been until I was on a writing retreat last week. There was so much open space, so much breathing room. As I have returned this week to busyness and schedules and people and noise, I am attempting to figure out where to include spaciousness in my days.

    And yet, even in the busyness, much goodness is taking place. Finding someone who sends me flowers and whom I can’t wait to see again. Brushing and snuggling with my kitten. Making good, healthy, simple food. Listening to live music in the hot sun. Drinking a cold beer. The eightteen-month-old daughter of my friends squealing with delight when I visit.

    This has been a summer of happy.

    Reply
    • Laura says

      22 July 2013 at 9:34 am

      Just beautiful, Lauren! I love your micro-blogs in the comments – they make me so happy. 🙂 And what a gift of a summer it sounds like you have been blessed with. Spaciousness is something we have to work at cultivating – isn’t it ironic? But loved ones, flowers, pets, food, music, drink, children – all these are sources of inspiration for me, too. May you enjoy many more days of delights till the season is through.

      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
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.

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.
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