mommy faith

“Faith... happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements.” ~ Dynamics of Faith, pg 4.

Right now, two books are informing how I pray: Tillich's Dynamics of Faith and The Power of a Positive Mom, by Karol Ladd, “bestselling author". Ladd's book is pretty much exactly what you'd imagine a parenting book for Christian moms to be, which is a relief after pressing through another three paragraphs of Dynamics and emerging with one sentence that I think, maybe, I understand.

Tillich frames faith in a few different ways: first, it is "the state of being ultimately concerned" – of not just thinking that something is true, but involving yourself in a practice that simultaneously takes the you beyond your self and engages the entirety of that self, so that you become a self you could not be apart from faith. I am most who I am, I am only the person who I am (rather than being only mostly the person I am) when I am connected to the source and the object of my faith.

I like this notion of consuming faith better than the idea that I give up all the things that matter to me, but that are not God, in order to be faithful. Although, if God is infinite, then maybe that is what I'm doing; maybe the things that I don't have to give up are, in some way, the material of God. To the degree that my love for my husband, parents and son is not grasping, not rooted in fear, then maybe when I love my child, I am participating in God.

Certainly Ladd doesn't see a conflict between love of God and love of one's children. But it scares me that I love my son much more than I love the other children at his day care, because: are you supposed to? You're not supposed, are you? But I do.

I know that, historically, women have been considered less spiritual than men, and that often this was intertwined with this idea that women somehow embodied sex and the associated shame. But I feel like it's maternity, and not sexuality, that is hard to reconcile with my faith. My love for my son specifically makes it hard to really identify God as my ultimate concern.

It occurs to me, though, that my love for my child in particular may be a part of the total personality, the centered self, that carries out the act of faith. Faith may be the process through which I devote to God not only a piece of my life, but my entire self, including the part that doubts that I could match Abraham's faith, that is sometimes relieved for the abstract nature of God and His demands in my own life -- since no one today, no matter how devout, would leave it up to me to determine whether or not God was telling me to kill my son.

That doubt, that wondering about why God would demand that, that desire to evade a God who would demand that – those are all elements of the centered self that I am concerning ultimately and totally with God, not things I just set aside in order to pursue Him. And it is that self, doubts included, that is made larger and more through my encounter with God, and that is able to love my family and son with that new largeness.