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Mothering Spirit

everyday parenting as spiritual practice

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About

Welcome! 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.

I’d love to connect on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Please take a moment to subscribe to my blog (in the sidebar) so you don’t miss a post.

I also publish a monthly newsletter with ideas for living out faith at home and favorite reads. Sign up here and get a free e-book of Prayers for Parenting!

Let’s get to know each other!

My husband and I have four wild boys who keep us running dawn till dark and three sweet babies forever in our hearts: one lost to miscarriage and Maggie & Abby, our identical twin daughters who died in 2016 from twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS).

I work as the director of the Communities of Calling Initiative for the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Minnesota. As part of my theological work on vocation, I’ve written To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation (Wipf & Stock, 2017) and co-authored Living Your Discipleship: 7 Ways to Express Your Deepest Calling with Kathleen A. Cahalan (23rd Publications, 2015).

Check out more of my writing:

I’m the author of Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting (Liturgical Press, 2014) which is available from Liturgical Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

I’ve also written 3 short volumes for Little Rock Scripture Study: Mercy: God’s Nature, Our Challenge, Dashed Hopes: When Our Best-Laid Plans Fall Apart, and Grief: Finding Hope in Sorrow.

I write a nationally syndicated column for Catholic News Service that runs monthly in Catholic newspapers, winner of the 2018 Catholic Press Award for Best Family Life Column. I also write for Blessed Is She (daily devotions and seasonal books) and contribute to the Christian Century’s blog network.

Why “Mothering Spirit”?

I started this blog shortly after my first son’s birth in 2009. As I rocked him in the church’s cry room one Sunday, the choir sang a hymn about God’s Mothering Spirit. I’ve been captivated by connections between faith and parenting ever since.

This blog is for YOU:

  • If you’re yearning to deepen your relationship with God in the midst of family life
  • If you’re longing for hope in grief after infertility, miscarriage, or loss
  • If you’re looking for prayers for pregnancy or books on parenting
  • If you love reflecting on spirituality, Scripture, prayer, and big questions of faith

I also speak regularly at churches, conferences, and retreats. I’d love to hear from you if you’re looking for a speaker for your event! Learn more here.

I love to hear from readers (even if it sometimes takes me a few days to respond with kids underfoot). Drop me a line at motheringspirit@gmail.com. And blessings on all your callings!

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About Laura

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

Mother, writer, wonderer.
Seeker of God in chaos & life with kids.
Author of Everyday Sacrament & Grieving Together.
Glimpses of grace & gratitude.

thismessygrace
The baby is learning how to move in a new way. Wai The baby is learning how to move in a new way. Wait—don’t scroll past. He has truth to teach at the end of his small hands.

Watch him rock back and forth, cusp of crawling, practicing and testing, a seeker and a skeptic—wondering is this safe? Am I strong enough?

If he does not stretch to move and learn and change, he will stay safer. I have watched 5 babies now, and I know what comes next: bumps, bruises, wails, the first piercing cut into smooth skin.

But nature drives him forward. He must both trust his instinct (the desire to move, reach, explore) and overcome it (the fear of unknown, the unpredictable fall). Watch him lean and learn, stretching further each day.

We are cusping on change, too. You can feel the tense stretch, the uncertain lean, the frantic push back to what was safer (for a few, far from all). We are testing and probing, flailing and falling, pushing back up and trying to figure out: how did we get here? Where do we go next?

At least once a day, don’t you want to sit back and holler at the top of your lungs, frustrated and fearful, yet driven to keep going?

And we have to go, have to grow and move and change. It is the only way forward, with lunging arms and knobby knees and bruised foreheads from where we’ll meet sharp edges. This is the sweaty work of change: uncertain, costly, but demanded. Deep-down right, but hard and humbling all the way.

Watch him as he goes. It will take a long time—a lifetime of trying and falling. But he is determined. He is pushing me, too.
True confession: I never noticed Epiphany. We thr True confession: I never noticed Epiphany.

We three kings, endless rounds at church. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh; got it. Magi made it to the manger; let’s clean up now.

I mistook it for a child’s story, a charming end to Christmas. I missed all the angles of light it waited to shine.

Scripture offers a thousand doors by which to enter any story. If you think you’ve got it All Figured Out, turn around and try another. The Word holds infinite mysteries we have not yet uncovered.

You might discover truth you never expected—an epiphany waiting for you.

(And if you want to dig deeper, I’d love for you to join us on retreat this week!)
Spent the second day of the year staring at these Spent the second day of the year staring at these two hard, glorious truths. Winter makes the most beauty from the coldest nights, and what looks like death is often the beginning.

I stared up into frozen trees for five full minutes, looking like a fool, and I stared into tiny roots of the dying seed for even longer.

Here was God whispering the same truth, with wind blown ice crystals and wheat stalk seeds. You can only glimpse a sliver of the creation you are becoming. Just wait till the wild full bloom is born.

#newyearprayer #catechesisofthegoodshepherd
A viral poem. A premature baby. Birth and death, m A viral poem. A premature baby. Birth and death, masks and murder, a jarring jumble—like nearly every day in 2020.

But still the joy of new life at the center, even with the hard world edging all around.

I expected none of it, all the news that turned the year upside down.

But neither did I expect the truth and hope I found from so many here.

I tagged a few of the friends and voices I have been grateful to listen and learn from this year, changing from what they are teaching me.

Let their words & work & witness encourage you.

Drop your favorite accounts in the comments below, so we can follow them, too?

Here’s to hope, brimming on the horizon. The new year won’t change everything, but it will change us—and we can change each other.
Reminding myself today, to bear light & hope into Reminding myself today, to bear light & hope into a weary world. 🕯
It took all of Advent for me to notice us behind t It took all of Advent for me to notice us behind them.

Beholding in our own exhausted joy.

We never could have prepared for the suffering surrounding that birth. We had no idea how much harder everything was about to turn, on the cusp of the world about to change.

It took all year for me to see that they were showing us that way, too.

Through the impossible.
Through the dark.
Trusting together.
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