Children: What is this quintessence of dust?

In this world, in this time, our philosophers suffer under the same siege of transcendental naval-gazing as Prince Hamlet. Man delights not them. Far better, they think, to leave the dog-eat-dog systems alone, and abolish Man. They teach: Soak up the sun while it shines, for it is going out. They warn: Do not, at any cost, bring another human into the world; there’s not near enough sunshine to go around as it is, and Man is nothing more than another selfish, consuming beast, who by chance developed a larger cerebrum than he did a thorax.

But, in truth, any mother who has held in her arms the child of her husband knows far better. We know who Man is, and against all logic, in spite of his weakness, his helplessness, and his unending, squalling consumption, we love him. We want him. We move heaven and earth to bear him, feed and clothe him, and bring him the choicest of everything. We do all this instinctively, against the advice of those more learned than we. Why?

Because it was our marriages of love which made him. Children are love incarnate—the solid, eternal stuff of love. Much more than a feeling, love is born and suckles, learns to speak, and abides to bring joy and unending sunshine to her parents. Behold, children are a heritage of the Lord! Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!

You love Man because you can’t help yourself. He is the image of the God of Love, and he is loveable. Your daughters and your sons, even with their cries, demands, diapers, and rebellion, are terribly, permanently loveable, and you, their Christian mothers, were given the Spirit of Love when you became one with Christ in your baptisms. It’s in your blood to love them. It’s what you were born to do.

But these basic, maternal instincts aren’t the half of it. This world has turned against itself, and Mankind is set on its own destruction. As ferociously as we love our children, we cannot elevate them in the eyes of the world to anything more than beasts, consumers, voters, or tax write-offs. But Christ is Man, and beloved of the Father. And it is Christ’s Manhood that elevates our precious children in the eyes of God. Man is loveable because Christ is Man. Life is good, because Christ lives. Love is possible, because Christ first loved us. And Eternity is in our grasp, because Christ has risen from the dead and is coming again, and in His Father’s house are many, many rooms. Room enough for every child ever born, and more.

Don’t let them confuse you, sisters. Mother on. 

Latch-key ambitions

More inflammatory rhetoric, on this boring, boring Saturday.  

There is never a good time for a mother to return to “the workforce.” Children are far louder about needing you when they are babies, but they never stop needing you. They merely become a lot more polite about expressing how terribly they need you the older they get.*

Yes, there comes a point when children no longer need help doing the more banal tasks of being alive. (Someday, I will not have to summon the sitzfleisch for toilet training! HOO-FREAKING-RAY!) But there is never a day when suddenly a child can accomplish by himself the terrible and the beautiful tasks given all men to accomplish. There is never a day when a child, boy or girl, man or woman, stops needing his mother, not to coddle and coo, but just to be there. The child needs his mother as a structure needs its pillars, and as the ocean needs its boundaries.  

A daughter never stops wanting her mother, especially if that daughter is blessed to become a mother herself, as everyone here well understands. A daughter, be she married or virgin, never stops needing the consolation and shelter of her mother’s voice, presence, and help. There is never a good time for a mother to take on work that interferes with her ability to be a blessing and help to her adult daughters and to be fully a grandmother.

A man will leave his mother and father and hold fast to his wife, and in things both salient and subtle a good wife supplants a good mother in the life of a man. Thanks be to God. Even so, a man never stops being his mother’s son. If a mother takes work that interferes with her sons’ lives and happiness and well-being, then so much the worse for everyone. If a mother takes on work that makes her relationships with her daughters-in-law unnecessarily strained, that mother has cut and cauterized those heartstrings that once held her sons.

You absolutely cannot have it all. Should you go scrabbling after a sense of worth, you will find yourself begging for scraps of love in all the wrong places. Stay home, even when your house is empty. They need you there.   

Yes, this being there, this being a mother, is a cross for women. Being a woman is a much bigger deal than all that is stored up for fire would have you believe. But this being doesn’t look like much. It looks like years and years of patient waiting, of quietly resisting the erosion of your body and mind, and a lot of missed chances to contribute to the Social Welfare. It means submitting to being consumed and being all things to all your own people, instead of one comfortable blip to a myopic People that just barely exists. It means reflecting however imperfectly the Church who gave you birth unto life everlasting, until your days accumulate in the death of your flesh to the glory of your soul. But, look: we Christians know what to do with crosses. We do not flee from them. We do not decorate them with flowers, soak them in essential oils, and put them in storage to be borne when we have the inclination. We pick them up, splinters and all, when they’re given to us, trusting in Christ who promises that His yoke is easy and His burden light.

Regardless of what she does with her life, the Christian mother never ceases to be a mother to her children. Children are made to thrive in the warmth of a mother’s faithful, long-suffering obedience to Christ (and her faithful repentance of failure), even when that mother draws down a paycheck. But, think it over. Your children want you when they're small; they will want you even when they’re grown and busy and distracted (sinners are we all, and thus do we take for granted that which is best for us). And when the times comes for you to leave your children on their own, when your angel comes to bear you unto the bosom of Abraham, knowing that you wait beyond all shadows with the angels and archangels for that glorious Day wherein you will breathe again and be reunited to your people—that even in death you have not ceased to be their mother—gives your children courage to mourn as those who have hope. They will not stop needing you, even then. Be alive for them while you can. 

*Again, I know there are Reasons why some of you cannot be home, and that those reasons are good. Especially you, dear friend whom I love. Christ redeems my "good works" right along with yours, that we might have no cause to fret. Thanks be to God. 

Some inflammatory rhetoric, because I'm getting bored

It would appear that, generally speaking, one who detests the more normal functions of a woman's body, even if she who detests such functions is herself in so-called possession of that body, is fundamentally un-poetic. Which is to say, out of touch with the metaphysical, with who Woman is as She was created and as She exists even now as the Bride of Christ.

The Bride feeds her children from her Body. So, then, because this is what Woman does, this is also what women do, insofar as they are given to do so by God. To do otherwise when it has been given you to do is to deny your existence as a woman, and to become Something Else.

There are really but two choices for a woman who desires to be fully a woman: to remain a virgin and thence serve her neighbor out of love for Christ; to marry, chastely submit to her husband, and serve her own people out of love for Christ. Either choice is equally good, for the Woman is both virgin and mother, and thus, to have Woman reflected among us today, we need both virgins and mothers in our society, all working in their given roles to the best of their abilities as they have been blessed by God.

However, to try somehow to be both is aberrant and plain weird, because, then, what exactly are you?* There has been but one perfect reflection of the Virgin Mother: Mary, who bore unto us Christ, our Lord. The rest of us can't have it all, because "all" hasn't been proffered to us. We must choose. And if you are married, then you have chosen to have children insofar as they are given to you (Wives have the option of not having children? What does that even mean?). And once you have borne a child, then you have chosen to feed that child from your own body and to pour yourself out as a drink offering over the child, because this is what your Mother does for you. You cannot continue as if you were a virgin, just as the virgin cannot feed a child from her body. And yes, we live in a veil of tears, and it's difficult to die to yourself and to become your child's mother. I daresay, that very exercise is much of the point, for it is this exercise which makes a mother more like the Woman. As such, it is God's gift to women, further evidence that He loves us and counts us among His children. As if we needed any evidence beyond Christ's blood! But see how our cups overflow! Do you see?

Carry on.

*My friends, I know there are Hard Cases. I am sad with you.  

Blessed are ye that hunger now

It is sometimes difficult to see, but it is nonetheless true that those of us living this CSPP life have more in common with folk who confess the real presence of Christ in His supper, even if those folk use birth control, than we have in common with Michelle Duggar.

Get you a pastor

OK, here's something I'm going to get full-on preachy about. Every human needs a pastor. Theology professors need pastors. Sextons need pastors. Pastors' kids need pastors. Pastors' in-laws need pastors. Pastors' widowed mothers need pastors. Pastors' maiden uncles need pastors. Pastors need pastors. Popes--they who believe, teach, and confess themselves to be the Vicars of Christ on earth by divine right!--need and have pastors. See where I'm going with this?

That's right, the pastor's wife needs a pastor. For all the boo-hooing spent on this pseudo-conundrum, I am mystified that the totally obvious provision our Lord normingly and our Confessions normedly make for it is endlessly overlooked. Which is to say, "And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." What? No special asterisk here for that extra-special person, the pastor's wife? As usual, Bob Dylan said it best: "Everybody must get loosed*" (*or bound).

I have not set out to say here that the pastor's wife's husband cannot be her pastor. Most of the time it is he who brings her God's Word of Law and Gospel, baptizes her children, and feeds her from our Lord's Altar. That's fairly straightforward most of the time. The place the pastor/husband thing is most likely to get tricky is the confessional. After all, against whom does the pastor's wife sin most? Whose sins are the second closest to the pastor, and therefore the second easiest and hardest for the pastor to judge?

Even yet I will not say that her husband cannot be her Father Confessor, for the complications I have cited are merely practical. He can be. Sometimes he should be or has to be. Sometimes she asks him to be. But often, he doesn't have to be, and often, this benefits both man and wife. Furthermore, the pastor needs a pastor, and here's where things really start coming together: the pastor and his wife and their kids can have the same pastor. They can go to confession as a family. Although it is still private, it is a pilgrimage of discipline they can make together, a blessed humility they can share, a divine comfort in which they can be united. And when the pastor's family needs someone to meet them at the hospital, to pray for them in their distress, they know whom to call: their dear pastor. Not just the guy at the next closest church or Dad's buddy or the circuit counselor no one else in the family knows. They can call a man who is Father to all of them.

If this doesn't sound right; if a Father Confessor isn't what the pastor's wife is looking for, then she's not looking for a pastor. She's looking for a therapist or a friend or a cheerleader. Any of those may be something she needs, and she would do well to secure them. But she definitely needs an ear to swallow her sins up in death and a voice to breath forgiveness and life into her, whether or not she feels she needs it or is comfortable with it. She definitely needs to make confession and hear her sins absolved, whether or not she perceives that confession will help her with her perceived problems. For her true problem is always sin, and the true cure is always Holy Absolution.

So, pastors' wives, get a pastor. Make sure your kids have a pastor. Your husband also needs a pastor.

Expect only good from God in every situation

During a recent meeting, my Father Confessor made available to me the "Preparation for Confession" questions based on the Ten Commandments. Although such a sophisticated Christian as myself knows her sins well, it had been a while since I'd looked over the questions. Shockingly, I ran into this: Do I expect only good from God in every situation?

Ahem. No. Well, yes, in some very pious, spiritual way. But not when it comes to this rotten afternoon and the grinding noise from the dishwasher and my achin' back. Not when it comes to thinking about what an EPT with two lines would mean (less the immeasurable gift--that old thing). Not when it comes to my fear of something much worse than the normal wear of a pregnancy. Not when it comes to my worldly-wise impulse to quit while I'm ahead, to take my five healthy kids and still functional body and tragedy-free procreative history and run.

So there it was, another sin to confess, another infidelity of which to repent. Expect only good from God in every situation--no matter what has happened to me before, no matter what I've heard about happening to other people, no matter that as a Lutheran of Lutherans I am an excellent theologian of the cross and know better than to think God will conjure me a sparkly pink Panzer if I trust him enough. The theology of the cross does not mean that I should cry all night about the mud pie I'm going to make myself for breakfast. What sick freak eats mud pies when she hasn't even bothered to check the pantry for Cheerios?

Purgative speech

Some people are jerks for not blogging any more. No need to mention names. At least we have our memories:

"Maybe it is gossip, but I need to vent." No you don't. You don't need to say evil things about people. You are not a pressure cooker. It is not building in you. Gossip does not "get things off your chest." It puts things into your heart. It is what comes out of the mouth that makes a man unclean.

There is purgative speech. It is called confession. It unburdens a man. It is never about annoying co-workers. It is about the penitent's lack of love and patience. It is not about the inequity of life. It is the envy of the penitent. The difference between gossip and confession is the difference between date rape drugs and anesthesia.

Savior, when in dust to Thee

Women and mothers: we are our own worst critics. Living with ourselves all day and all night, often deprived of the company of rational adults who might function as buffers, or at least moderators of our excesses, we have ample opportunity to display and to deplore our vices—and to see our failings reflected in the child-mirrors that are before us all the day.

The seriousness of this sin cannot be dismissed. These are no mere mistakes, nor simple moments of weakness, nor unfortunate confluences of events beyond our control. My sin is my fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault. Most grievous!

Darkly alone amid the children’s clamoring, a woman can begin to feel lost in the cyclical grievousness of her own faults. Resolutions once made are broken a moment later by an impatient word, an angry glance, a downward spiral of despair. Confession itself can begin to seem a dreaded burden when the very selfsame sins comprise the list time after time, not even bothering to disguise themselves or to affect a more creative flair, but parading brazenly through in the same old rags, week after week. A woman’s heart grows heavy, and her words weary of reprising the tiresome theme.

But! Confession is an important word, a crucial word, a daily word—but not the last word. No, the last word is not confession, nor is it “just try harder…or at least sin a bit more creatively so that it seems like you’re getting somewhere.” The last word is sweet, sweet absolution. No matter how spectacularly awful or tiresomely trivial the offense, grace has the last word—if only we can shut our mouths and still our hearts long enough to hear it.

“Your sins are forgiven. Christ has made you whole.” Depart the confessional (whether that of a father confessor, of corporate confession, or of two minutes’ sobbing in the bathroom), go in peace, and sin no more. God’s mercies are new every morning—every hour—every moment.

Dwell in the exhilarating deluge of Baptism. Feast on His forgiveness. Pass the grace, please, and hold out your hands to receive a lavish portion as it goes by.

Sharable sharings

For my ice-bound friend, something to read. :) I liked the Writer's Almanac this morning, mostly due to the poem:

Having Confessed, by Patrick Kavanagh

Having confessed he feels
That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of the emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow's judgment—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.

There's much to say about this, but the babies are all screaming at the moment so I'll just let you draw your own conclusions.

In the meantime, a reminder:

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind? --Percy Bysshe Shelley ;)

Jesus Lutherans Doth Receive

It's one thing for those of us with wonderful Father Confessors to go on about how wonderful private confession is. But the sad fact is that if a pastor doesn't know what he's doing, private confession can range anywhere from awkward to awful. Most LCMS pastors have probably never made a private confession. Of those who have, many were probably in a drive-by setting at a conference where they import pastors from the next district to sit in classrooms and hear random confessions for an afternoon. Few have Father Confessors, and few make confession with any regularity or preparation.

I've been blessed to spend my adult life in locales populated with faithful pastors who make and hear confession regularly, so I have always had access to experienced and capable confessors. But there are plenty of places where such shepherds are hard to come by. You don't even have to travel out of the midwest. So it's fine and good to exhort people to confess and be absolved privately, but it's hardly fair to come down on the people in the Bronze Belt saying, "Lord, to whom shall we go?"

I've heard some ugly stories come out of the confessor hunt. One pastor who was asked by a friend of mine to serve as a confessor received the request poorly and fulfilled the task reluctantly and artlessly. That's not an excuse to quit going, but it's not exactly the pastor/pentitent relationship for which a pious soul longs--someone who wasn't really sold on this popish-sounding confession business would not stick with it under such circumstances. Another friend had a confession horrifically botched by someone who apparently had no idea what his end of the deal was. It still turns my stomach to think about it.

Worst of all, stop an average pastor or seminarian on the sidewalk and ask him about the seal. If he hasn't been taught exactly what the confessional is and has instead obtained all his knowledge on the subject from syndicated episodes of Law and Order, he does not get it. There are LCMS pastors out there who do not think they should (and have vowed to) keep the seal if, for example, a crime is being investigated. That is criminal on the part of our church, and it's not right to send people running off to a confessor whose ears are anything short of sepulchral.

It's not as easy as telling people, "You should go to confession. Any pastor can do it." Sad but true, LCMS pastors haven't been trained for it unless they've sought out the training themselves, and most don't know that they should.

But as someone said in the comments recently, don't let your pastor off the hook. It is his job, so ask him, and be patient if you're both learning together. Take him a copy of this and say it got you interested and would he please hear your confession and pronounce forgiveness to fulfill God's will?

Yes. We'll probably have more.

I grow annoyed with constantly being asked, "Are you guys going to have more?" by people who know us.

Religious conviction, folks. That's what this is about. No, really. We actually believe on the basis of Scripture as witnessed to by the confession of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that God intends for married people not to hinder the procreative process. Furthermore, we believe that Christians are supposed to live according to Christian beliefs, even if these beliefs are inconvenient and style-cramping.

So quit asking. I've already told you this. If anything changes, I'm sure you'll hear about it.

Sanctuary

Dr Laura says that my bedroom should be a beautiful sanctuary. I couldn't agree more. But I don't know what I'd do with the piles of junk on our dressers, or how I'd justify the expense of a not-really-necessary nightstand to replace the Walmart barstool I used as a ladder to the top bunk in college which now stands on my side of the bed, or where I'd put the sewing machine that I'm going to start using any day now. I hope our marriage survives.

The bathroom? Ha! Not only is it impossible to convince my dear children that privacy is the nicest thing they could offer me while I'm in this room with the charmingly broken doorknob, but how would I dry off without a preschooler to bring me a new towel when I've stupidly tossed the old one in the laundry without replacing it?

Church, of course, is sanctuary by definition. And yet, as we've discussed before in this cyberspace, everyone with kids is on vocational call even during that hour. I've always got someone's arms to pin down when the chalice is within striking distance. And at home, too, personal piety is sacred only in a technical sense. If someone starts crying mid-petition, it's the petition (for better or worse) that gets put on hold.

But the confessional. There is a true sanctuary. No toddler can come crashing through that door. I am so thankful for my wonderful husband who gets me to confession as regularly as possible, despite the inconvenience to him, with additional sessions whenever I request them. He sees to it that my time there is completely uninterrupted and as long as I need it to be. And need I mention that the comfort of Holy Absolution is rather singular?

Nothing new under the sun: syndicated columnist edition

Of course pregnant women shouldn't read Ellen Goodman's columns. (Maybe most other people shouldn't either.) But Sunday's paper--what was left of it after our collage project--was lying on the table where we were industriously making, unmaking, and "recycling" Play-doh objects this morning. So, since my blood pressure has been holding steady and the headline said nothing about babies, born or unborn, I read one of her recent columns.

The gist of this column: we Americans are into "shopping" for religion, "U-Hauling our beliefs off [from one church to the next] in search of a better fit." Not surprisingly, Goodman presents this trend in a postive light.

She quotes a Donald Miller (religion prof. at U. of Southern California): "You are the artist of your own life when it comes to religion."

Now, my brain hasn't been working too well lately, but it seems to me this is an echo of something I read somewhere once...wait...it's coming back...some drama set in a Garden, maybe?

Wow. Once again, the relative poverty of the human imagination is demonstrated. We can't even come up with new sins and heresies; we just keep recycling the old ones, reshaping them a bit. (Kind of like that Play-doh.) I guess that's why pastors, after a few years of confidential counseling, start to feel like they've heard and seen it all. Sure, there are variations on the theme. But go ahead: try to invent a new sin, so awful that it's never been done before. Or try to indulge in some heresy that hasn't already been tried. (Um, on second thought, please expend your time and energies in a different way. But you know what I mean.)

That's why it's such a shame that so many people who are really hurting let fear and shame stop them from taking advantage of private confession and absolution. The women in the home Bible study that I (more or less) lead are just discovering the immense relief that follows the "you too?!" or "I'm not the only one who struggles with that?!" moments that sometimes occur, and the grace that follows. For many, it's only then that they will finally allow themselves to begin to hope and to heal. Knowing that others sin in some of the same ways that I do doesn't decrease my horror of my own sin, but opens opportunities to bear one another's burdens, uphold each other through tempation, and encourage each other with the truth of Scripture.

Sorry, Prof. Miller. I've often yearned to be more artistically inclined, but when it comes to my life, I'm sure glad Someone else is holding the paintbrush. I can't resist grabbing it sometimes, but all that makes is a big, ugly mess.