Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, April 28, 2002
Some time last summer, when I first began dreaming up sermon topics for this congregational year, I realized that it had been a long time since I had used the opportunity of a sermon to explore the current principal activity of my life, which is parenting. When I checked back over past titles I found that in my eleven years with you, I've preached on the topic twice, and the titles tell something about what stage my parenting had reached. On my return from maternity leave after giving birth to Hannah, I preached "In The Eye of the Hurricane". In the spring of 1996, with children aged one and a half, three and ten, I preached a sermon called, "The Interrupted Life".
But in case you're under even the slightest delusion about how enlightened I've become in the intervening years, I want to assure you that today's title, "The Zen of Parenting", has to do with aspirations, not achievements. In fact my father, who receives our newsletter, made a special point of phoning me this past week to say how much he wished he could be a 'fly on the wall' and listen in, and he laughed a little wickedly while recalling to mind some of the un-Zen-like episodes he has witnessed or heard of in my particular spiritual path of parenting.
Nevertheless, he agrees with me that all of the central opportunities of a classic spiritual life are available in the walk with children, if we can open our eyes to see them. We are called to hold love at the center of what we do. We are called to study and practice patience, forgiveness, crime and punishment, power, suffering, grace, creation and relinquishment. How could this not be a spiritual path? It's there for us very clearly when our children are babies and young children, but it doesn't seem to disappear even when they're in their fifties. Our influence lessens or even vanishes, but our urgent concern for our children never leaves us, and the role of mother or father stays with us until the day we die. I have also long realized that there are parenting roles played often and well by aunts and uncles and friends of the family. The spiritual path with children is available to all of us, whether or not we give birth, as long as we choose to be a committed figure in a child's life.
I first bought John and Myla Kabat-Zinn's book on mindful parenting shortly after it was published in 1997. I brought it up to Maine with me as part of my summer reading, when our children were eleven, four and two-and-a-half years old. I didn't connect very well with the book, partly due to the constancy of interruption because of the ages of the children and their demands. But it was also partly because the idea of mindful parenting as the Kabat-Zinns portrayed it seemed wildly out of my grasp. Their ideals sounded so earnest and their convictions so settled, and I found that in the reading I felt continually inadequate, unable to live up to this ideal of parenting as a spiritual path. I plodded my way through it, and then it sat gathering dust on the shelf for a few years.
Then this fall I read an essay called 'Mothering As Meditation Practice' by Anne Cushman. She offered many of the same reflections and at one point even quoted from the Kabat-Zinn's book, which is what prompted me to finally pick it up again. But Cushman gave me something that resonated much more with my own experience. She offered the rueful sense of humor that I, at least, have to hold onto if the ordinary, enormous task of parenting is going to be my primary spiritual path.
Cushman writes, "[When my baby was two weeks old], I decided that what I had embarked on was an intensive meditation retreat. It had all the elements…: the long hours of silent sitting; the walking back and forth, going nowhere; the grueling schedule and sleep deprivation; the hypnotic, enigmatic chants ('…and if that looking glass gets broke/Mama's gonna buy you a billy goat'); the slowly dawning realization that there is nothing to look forward to but more of the same. And at the center of it, of course, was the crazy wisdom teacher in diapers, who assigned more demanding practices than I had encountered in all my travels in India -- like, 'Tonight you will circumambulate the living room for two hours with the master in your arms, doing a deep-knee bend at every other step, and chanting, 'Dooty-dooty doot doot doo, Dooty-dooty doot doot doo'. Or 'At midnight you will carry the sleeping master with you to the bathroom and answer this koan: How do you lower your pajama bottoms without using your hands?'
Like all great spiritual practices, these were exquisitely designed to rattle the cage of my ego. They smashed through my concepts of how things should be…and pried open my heart to the way things actually were…And with every breath of my 'baby retreat', I was offered the opportunity to…be present for a mystery unfolding."
That's the key, of course, to the Zen of parenting: the recognition that we are invited, every day, to be present for a mystery unfolding. Which is not to say that it feels like that all of the time, or even most of the time. The long reflective hours nursing a baby in the night seem very long ago to me now, and there is little evidence of unfolding mystery when listening to the sibling squabbles or the teenage self-righteousness or the sulky refusal to come to the dinner table. Nevertheless, we know that out of all the important work we do, out of all the ways our gifts and talents are put to use, the raising of children is the one central to our lives, as individuals and as a whole society. So how can we best learn to be present to 'the mystery unfolding' with our children, even when it seems obscured by the din and chaos they bring along with them?
There are three things that hold the center of the practice for me, and all of them, I hate to admit, are much more easily named than practiced. The first one is listening. What I mean by this is something more than simply paying attention when our children speak to us. It has to do with listening not just to what they say, but to who they are, with the willingness to realize that who they are might not fit precisely -- or even vaguely -- with our expectations.
I heard once of a tribal people in East Africa, where the birthday of a child is counted not as the day of birth, but as the day on which his mother first became aware of the baby -- whether because she was already pregnant, or because she began to wish for a child, even if not yet conceived. The practice then was for the mother-to-be to spend time sitting alone and listening within for the song of the child. And when she began to hear it, she would sing it until she knew it well, and then teach it to the father, and both would sing it in the evening before sleep; and it would be taught to the midwives before labor, so that as the child was born, the first sound to greet it would be the singing of this song.
What a lovely way to think about our children -- each one with a primordial, unique song all his own, all her own, and our task to listen so carefully, so attentively, that we hear and learn the song. That's the way we're called to listen to our children, to listen to their words and beyond their words, to the sadness or excitement of their voices, to the sudden long silence, to the look on their faces, to the struggle to bring to the surface something that can't quite be articulated.
But the listening isn't easy. We are not with our children in the long amplitude of a meditation retreat, all metaphors aside. We are with them in the crazy pace of our days, crowded with work and with the duties of the household, crowded with our own needs and preferences and exhaustion, crowded with the wear and the worries of the world around us, to which we also wish to listen. Even the simplest level of attention, listening carefully when a child speaks, is not always easy.
One of mine, for instance, almost always finds something urgent and exceptionally long-winded that must be told, in all its detail, right after the lights have gone out and the good-night kiss has been given. Her sister has a way of talking to herself as she works on a drawing or putters around the house, and often the transition from talking to herself to talking to me is invisible, so that I continue to hear it as background music until she indignantly says, 'Mom, I was talking to you!' And then of course there is the repetition. There was a summer some years ago when both girls were endlessly entertained by knock-knock jokes: that is, by telling knock-knock jokes, the same three or four of them, over and over and over again. That stage is blessedly receding into the dim past, but repetition is still with us. My girls' school is working on a production of the musical Annie right now, and if I have to listen, attentively, to one more rendition of "It's a Hard-Knock Life," I think my head might explode.
And yet listening is what we are called to do on this path of parenting, and we are called to notice when we have failed to listen. Several times each day I catch myself with my own mind chattering away, busily planning a phone call still to be made or pondering a conversation I had earlier in the day. And I suddenly realize that one or another of the children has just recounted a whole episode from the day, or asked a question, or shared a poem fragment, and I missed it. I wasn't there for 'the mystery unfolding' in that moment, and have to recall myself, call myself back, in exactly the same way that we call ourselves back when our minds wander during meditation. We have to listen: not because everything our children says is revelatory or even interesting, but because it's our listening that allows them to discover their voices. It's our listening that allows them to sing their own song with greater and greater strength and certainty.
The second thing I think is essential on this path of parenting is our ability to see that we ourselves, as parents and caregivers, are a part of the unfolding mystery we witness. Who we are, in all our wisdom and our weakness, is also a part of the path, and our children learn much more from who we are than from what we tell them. We know this; but too often we hold it in mind fearfully, worried that our many failures of patience or flares of temper or confusions will damage our children. What I'm beginning to believe is that even these many failings of ours can be grist for the mill of our spiritual awakening, and that of our children, if we see the failings honestly and respond to them faithfully.
I remember a time some years ago when I had lost my temper and yelled ferociously at Maris, when she was only three or four years old. After she had run weeping to her room and I had calmed myself enough to feel guilt and remorse instead of rage, I apologized to her, dried her tears and watched her trot off happily to her own pursuits. I, of course, proceeded to sink into profound guilt about the episode and what a rotten mother I must be, and was still anguishing over it several days later when I recounted the whole thing to a friend, who has the wisdom born of raising six children to adulthood.
She pointed out to me that despite all my woeful self-castigating, Maris had in fact learned several important things through my failure: that I had limits, and that she could push me past them; that everybody gets mad and yells sometimes; that relationship is still intact after the yelling; and that mistakes can be recognized and apologies made. Everything we are is grist for the mill; all the unskillful choices we make can be slanted and changed by how we deal with them; the failure in this moment can be redeemed by the awareness we bring to the next moment.
As time goes on I trust this wisdom more thoroughly. Despite all our inflated expectations of ourselves, none of us will parent our children as perfectly as we hope to. But we give them a gift beyond value by teaching them how to acknowledge and repair failure when it occurs, how to ask forgiveness and forgive ourselves, how to live in the present moment and let the past recede.
The third thing I think is central to the Zen of parenting is the notion of relinquishment. This is a part of any spiritual path, but it seems to be more poignantly at the heart of the path we walk with our children. The most obvious part of relinquishment has to do with the immense, almost unbearable vulnerability that pierces us as soon as we love a child. In his poem "The Pity of Love", W.B. Yeats captured this perfectly:
A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love:
The folk who are buying and selling,
The clouds on their journey above,
The cold wet winds ever blowing,
And the shadowy hazel grove
Where the mouse-gray waters are flowing,
Threaten the head that I love.
As soon as we begin to love a child, we realize that the love opens us up to irreparable damage, should harm ever come to this beloved one. Harm does come in our world, and despite all our efforts at protection, we know we might be powerless in the end to keep our children safe.
Author Ann Beattie writes, "Do everything right all the time and the child will prosper. It is as simple as that, except for: fate, luck, heredity, chance, the astrological sign he was born under, his order of birth, his first encounter with evil, the girl who jilts him in spite of his excellent qualities, the war being fought when he is a young man, the drugs he may try one too many times, the friends he makes, how he scores on tests, how well he endures kidding about his shortcomings, how ambitious he becomes, how far he falls behind, circumstantial evidence, danger when it is least expected, difficulty in triumphing over circumstances, people with hidden agendas, and animals with rabies."
I recently went off on a very brief meditation retreat at the Buddhist center in Barre, Massachusetts. In order to go away even for one night, let alone several, an elaborate choreography had to be worked out due to my spouse's travel schedule to Washington, DC, so this short time for meditation and contemplation had been long awaited and planned for. But on the drive up I found myself feeling vaguely anxious instead of eager, and as soon as I sat down to meditation I found myself flooded, not with equanimity and peace of mind, but with disaster scenarios with my children at the center. Someone would fail to be at the bus stop on time and a murderer would pick them up instead. There would be a fire in the middle of the night and no one would wake up in time. Nick would let go of a hand in a crowd and my child would never be seen again. A car would careen out of control; a drunk driver would cross their path; a catastrophic illness would strike. This is not usually how I spend my quiet moments, and it was shocking to find myself having to pull my mind back from the imagined disaster over and over again.
But finally my mind did quiet, and the meditation retreat did its work. I realized, again, the vast world of possibility that is out of my control, and the need to rest gently, as gently as we can, with the fragile hearts that beat within in us in fear for all that might befall those we love so deeply.
I realized also that there was another sort of relinquishment making itself felt, something that lay more quietly below my disaster scenarios. I realized that my children are growing up, sprouting long limbs and astounding vocabularies right before my eyes. Already I have lost my children in the sense that they are not who they used to be: the babies I nursed and cradled, the toddlers with their big bellies and earnest swaggers, the little boy who sucked his finger as he listened to the bedtime stories. How many years ago did Sam stop wanting a bedtime story? When did Maris lose that persistent lisp when she tried to say the letter 'r'? When did Hannah stop asking for 'Rockabye Baby' at night?
Our children leave us again and again and again, shifting into the new and older versions they're becoming, shedding the old self almost like a snake drops off its old skin. They don't want us to hold them to what they once liked or wanted. They don't want us to hold them to the behavior that was once so predictable. They don't want us to hold them back. They don't want us to hold them, one day. At the dinner table recently, Sam, who is over six feet tall and almost sixteen, was remembering something about his habits and patterns when he was five or six and announced, philosophically, 'Boy, I was a weird little kid!'. And I found myself leaping to the defense of that little kid he was, not weird at all but a little boy, my boy -- and suddenly realized how strange it was, defending a past self to this large and confident teenager that the little boy has somehow become.
In an essay in Tricycle magazine, Neil Gordon writes, "[It] is not by accident, nor by biology, but by definition that love and loss are inextricable. To love children deeply is not only to risk a catastrophic loss; to love children is also to lose them over and over again, on a daily and momentary basis, not as they die or move away, but as they simply grow. Moment to moment they become other than they were…"
And this bittersweet realization is the spiritual gift of parenting, because it wakes us up to the transience and golden grace of every moment. Our children are not the only thing changing day to day. Everything changes day to day, only so much more subtly that we forget that this is the way of our world. We get to love that world with unlimited passion. But our full hearts will also break in the loving, because nothing can be held onto and frozen, least of all our quicksilver children. We love them utterly, as they fleetingly walk with us and then beyond us to their own horizon, leaving us with our puzzles and our regrets -- and our profound gratitude for the chance to walk this path. AMEN.