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look, mama, look – do you see?

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Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.
It presupposes faith and love.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

– Simone Weil

Look, mama, look, do you see?

A thousand times a day, tugging at my sleeve, calling out in the rearview mirror, yelling from upstairs, downstairs, around the corner, from the other room – look! Come quick! You have to see this!

You have to see!

Witness is part of parenthood. We watch a child becoming before our eyes. Awakening to the world at first. Alert for longer stretches each week, searching around the room with brand-new, blinking eyes.

We watch and wonder: how did we help create this creation?

We watch for the baby to smile, to laugh, to coo. Then to move, to roll, to crawl, to creep, to stand, to cruise, to totter, then triumphantly to walk. We clap and coax, we capture on camera: the marvel of witness.

But swiftly the tide turns. When words meet movement, we must change, too.

Now we are not simply the passive witness of milestone after milestone. Now we must become the attentive audience. Now we are beckoned, called, commanded to pay attention.

Look, mommy, look what I made! Look! You have to come see this. 

The years are short and fast, small and fleeting, when they want me to see. When they stand before me beaming with the glow of delight, the satisfaction of creation. When they offer me their first-fruits: playdoh, Legos, coloring page, cardboard box-turned-rocket-ship, basement fort, stuffed animal zoo, leaf collection, sand castle, soapy sink, spontaneous dance party.

They are uninhibited and unabashed. Their joy demands to be multiplied by a watchful, waiting eye. Look! Mom, look! Come here. Come! Look at this!

A hundred times a day. The call, the summons. Stop. Turn. See.

Let the light of your love and the gift of your attention shine on them. (I must remind myself in the exasperated moment, torn from something serious, from an otherwise urgent task, from whatever I deem important instead.) Again and again, movement of conversion, sacrifice of love, surrender to another.

If only I could see Your way, I pray and muse throughout the day, flitting between a thousand distractions. If only You would give more clarity, more direction, more confirmation of where and what You want from me, a sign of where I should go, and then –

Mom! Mommy! Mama! Look, look, come and see.

Perhaps their cry is the clearest answer. The only thing I seek.

In a world of whittled attention spans, in a culture of continuous partial attention, in an era of distraction and addiction and depression and isolation – is the greatest gift I can offer them the simplest?

Is the single, precious, focused, free offer of my attention the only everything they want right now?

(Is it all that I want, too?)

Set down the phone. Set aside whatever small, thin rectangle distracts me from the living, breathing, growing humans that call forth my time, attention, and love (which might all be the same).

Creation comes to fullness of life only when it is seen and shared by another.

Am I like this, too? I wonder. Needing to be seen by God, wanting to be heard by God, always seeking God, always losing God, longing to find and to know – do You see me?

Can You hear me? Does my day, my creation, my self, my life have meaning if You do not notice? If You do not see?

What I want is what they seek: to be the apple of another’s eye. The tiny person in the pupil that we carry with us. Me upside down in you. You upside down in me. Seen, connected, centered.

But we are this to God, too. Beloved and beheld. Never anywhere but the loving center.

Look! Look, Mom, look.

Urgent, imperative, shouting small prophets urging to wake me up all day long. Faith is one and the same story: blindness, then sight; cloud, then clearing; night, then day; darkness, then light.

Come and see, he beckoned to strangers-turned-friends, fishers-to-disciples. Come and see.

Because, of course, to see is to be changed. To come is to be converted.

They call to me even now as I write, call to me with laughter and cries and shouts and often all at once – come and see! You have to see this!

I do. I come and I see. Because I am, because they are, because I am theirs, because they are mine. Because seeing starts with the turn – from the self to the other, from inspiration to creation, from isolation to encounter.

Because the only reason we are here is to love, which starts with seeing.

Come, they will call me a million times before they leave this house for good. Look, they will ask me to love what they love. See, they will open me, heart and eyes.

This is why we are here. Come and see.

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  1. Kristin says

    21 March 2019 at 8:46 am

    This is beautifully written and so insightful. Exactly the encouraging reminder I’ve been needing recently! Thank you 🙂

    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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“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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