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everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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5 truths you taught me about prayer & pregnancy

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I’m writing a book of prayers for pregnancy. (Slowly. Painfully slowly. Almost like pregnancy itself…)

I wanted to write this book partly because of my desire for a good (i.e., theologically sound, personally engaging, poetically written, honest and hopeful) guide to the spiritual side of pregnancy.

But the main reason I felt called to write this book?

Because strangers write to me every single day asking for prayers for pregnancy.

They want prayers for trying to conceive. Or prayers for pregnancy after miscarriage. They’ve been struggling with infertility. Or they’re dealing with unplanned pregnancies. They’re women and men. Single, married, and divorced. Across the globe and across religions.

And their prayers have become mine.

I remember them every night before I go to sleep, the seekers who share with me the holy gift of praying with them through joy and sorrow, hope and fear. I remember their names and hold their stories close to my heart.

It feels like a rare and undeserved gift to have people trust me with their deepest longings and ask me to walk with them, even in small ways, as they look for God in their journey to become parents.


In the quiet lulls when life gets busy and blogging falls silent, these seekers keep the site humming behind the scenes. Some days I think I should close up shop and just let the pray-ers take over. Because they have become the lifeblood.

Maybe you are one of them. 

Many of you have subscribed to Mothering Spirit because you found your way here through prayers for pregnancy. I’m grateful for your support. Even more for your inspiration. You keep me reflecting and writing and praying about pregnancy, even when it’s not the rhythm of my life.

And you’ve taught me, too.

As I’m deep into this book-writing season, here are 5 truths my readers have taught me about prayer and pregnancy:

1. Prayer is universal.

Every new blogger is taught that all their international hits come from spammers. (Because most of them do.) But after a few years of sharing prayers for pregnancy, I started noticing that prayer requests were arriving from every continent. From real people who shared real stories of hope and despair.

Sometimes the broken English is hard to decipher, but not the gut-longing behind the words. That I will never forget. Infertility is a haunting ghost, even after kids arrive.

So from Ireland to India, your invitations to pray remind me that prayer is a cross-cultural, interfaith, deeply human practice. You draw me out of my own small world each day, and I could not be more grateful for an ever-expanding prayer list.

2. We need each other.

People are lonely, anxious, and fearful. They want someone to hear them. I have never met a person who does not meet this most-human description. Yet we can spend so much of our days fooling ourselves into independence, imagining ourselves as individuals on our own.

Every comment and emailed plea for prayers from another hopeful parent-to-be teaches me how we are made for each other. In our darkest hours, we seek solace, support, and even a stranger’s promise of prayer.

Each new morning I am floored to think anyone would ask me to pray for them. But I do – because I know I need it, too.

3. The earlier, the better.

I’m fascinated to find that most pray-ers who come to Mothering Spirit are trying to conceive or are at the very beginning of their pregnancies. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised: my first trimesters have historically been so rough I can barely Google for help.

But all these parents seeking prayers for months 1/2/3 have made me wonder if this might be the thin place of pregnancy. The tender early weeks, when hope is all we’ve got.

The early birds remind me that there is no need too new or yearning too fresh that it cannot be brought to prayer. I would do well to follow your lead and remember to pray as they proverbially vote in Chicago: early and often.

4. God is good.

You would not believe the stories of suffering that strangers share with me. Multiple miscarriages, years of infertility, grief after stillbirth, devastating prenatal diagnoses, past abortions – the list goes on and on. And yet.

You would also not believe the resilience of people’s faith. The hope they find in God’s promise. The love with which they wait to welcome a child. Sometimes I cannot hold a candle to their convictions. And this is again the power of prayer: we pull each other through.

My readers remind me that God is good. The only thing I dare to do on these pages is the same.

5. Prayer changes us.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “Prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who offers it.”

Praying for all these couples, for all their children, for all these years, has changed me. Is changing me. Will continue to change me.

Prayer is the breaking open of the heart, the broadening of the soul’s view, the widening of faith’s eyes beyond what vision holds possible.

When I started this blog five years ago, I would never have dreamed of writing a book on pregnancy, with prayers and practices to find God on the path to parenthood. But I have been changed by the prayers of those who share slivers of their journeys with me here.

So I am writing this for you.

. . .

And if you, dear reader, want to tune in and hear more, I’m delighted to share that I will be on Relevant Radio’s Morning Air program next Wednesday, August 5, at 7:45 EST – talking about parenting, writing, and Everyday Sacrament!

Click here to listen to the interview live or to find the archives after the show. (Especially if you do not delight in rising with the dawn. Unlike my darling children.)

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Comments

  1. Tara says

    30 July 2015 at 9:25 am

    My husband & I began reading your prayers in pregnancy about a week after I found out I was pregnant. Since then we have had another loss, third miscarriage in a year. DO you have any prayers for loss & trying not to loose hope.

    Reply
    • motheringspirit says

      1 August 2015 at 8:55 am

      Tara, I am so sorry to hear of your loss. Three in one year is so much grief to bear. I will keep you in my prayers for peace and healing and hope. I have a prayer after miscarriage here: http://www.motheringspirit.com/prayers-for-pregnancy-2/after-miscarriage/ I also loved the book “After Miscarriage” by Karen Edmisten. She suffered multiple miscarriages too and gathered a variety of women’s reflections and prayers in her book. Maybe it will speak to your life, too.

      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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