Maternal Spirituality, contd.

Okay, so I started to write a really long comment in response to the recent posts from Melanie and Mrs. Darwin, but the more I wrote, the more I began to feel that a new post was in order. The suggestions provided by Melanie and others are great--very solid suggestions, some of which, like praying with the little ones, are things I do. It is nice to hear from Entropy that she, too, feels guilty for getting distracted! And nice to hear about the "selectiveness" of blogs, which I did realize on some level, but there is such a feeling of unmodified reality on some blogs (the ones that I read are like this, but I know more "artificial" blogs exist), that it's easy to get lured in and assume that the serene spirituality of Catholic mommy bloggers is the norm rather than the impression gained from highlights!! C's mention of praying for ourselves instead of others was amusing, especially since there have been real occasions when having someone tell me that they would "pray for me" was rather grating--mostly because of how it was said and my own experiences in Protestant churches when I was younger. My newer religious friends (on and off of blogs) have helped me to see the difference between the judgmental prayer offers and those that proceed from a sincere heart (not that I can tell the difference always, but I do know that having a teacher at a Catholic school say that she will pray for you & your family after a dispute about how she has wrongly insinuated that your child was rude is not appropriate!). I have to admit that Entropy's comment about the VBS teacher raised an eyebrow because I wonder sometimes in what spirit people share their prayer intentions. . . But that comes from a cynical place, and we don't want to go there! I definitely appreciate Melanie's analysis of the Our Father, which draws attention to the neediness of that prayer. While I had certainly thought about the words and heard a wonderful homily once on the meaning behind the imagery in a daily campus mass, I had not really thought about it as asking for things for ourselves. If only these were the main things we asked for! I try to focus on the "Thy will be done" part to the exclusion of the actual things I desire, and it's not always easy. Especially since I doubt my impressions of what I think I "need." This makes me think again of "Et tu, Jen?" who, I believe, has posted on the "need" vs. "want" question, but more in the first fervor of conversion spirit rather than from the place where I now find myself.

But I reintroduced this topic in a new post because I want to come back to the issue that Mrs. Darwin picks up on: just not knowing where to fit everything in a day! It sounds easy--or at least, it sounds like it should be easy--or at least, it sounds like it should be the focus of our daily activities, but really, it's extremely difficult, and difficult to make the time. Like Mrs. D, I do sometimes pray a quick prayer when something strikes me during the day--especially anxiety! I like the praying for the time to pray suggestion, but another issue for me is something I only briefly touch on in the original post--the location. Specifically, I mentioned Mass at the end of my post. Prayer before Mass always seems the most natural and least self-conscious to me. Like I said--it's really the solitude I seem to be missing lately, and without the space and time to think, I just can't feel spiritually satisfied. That's where the question about maternal spirituality comes in--is it necessarily cluttered by things and events and shared with others? What I seem to be hearing in other mothers' experiences is yes. Before my daughter was born, I relished the daily Mass on campus. But all of the times I tried to attend daily Mass when she was younger were abysmal failures. The interesting thing, too, about going to the daily Mass by myself before she was born is that everyone else was safely squared away--my husband was teaching or working (depending on the job), my son was at school. Those were the places where they belonged and I didn't feel the need to be spending time with them--or, more accurately, the want, since I'm with them more because I want to be than because of a sense of obligation!! So I was able to spend this prayerful 25 min. or so twice a week.

Interestingly, what I'm describing is not unlike not being able to find the time to write poetry. The last time I wrote poetry was when I was taking a class, and then I generally wrote the poems the day they were to be workshopped in class. Poetry writing, at least for me, proceeds from the solitude in a given day--the ability to consciously look at the day, it's events, its images, put them together using experiences from the past or present in language that departs from ordinary daily experience and makes us see those experiences differently. I guess something similar is the rationale for this blog, really--to take daily experiences and try to see them differently, to add a little bit of analysis to the events of a given day or week. It somehow requires less solitude to write analytic prose than to write poetry or to pray (and I seem to be seeing those two as somehow analogous). Writing poetry usually made me want to get beyond myself and see things more objectively, which isn't quite the same as what I've been saying about prayer (at least the "objective" part), though getting beyond myself is also a goal for prayer. On the other hand, most of my most successful poems were the deeply self-conscious ones. I think I have exhausted this comparison, however! I can put aside poetry writing indefinitely, even though there is a poem that I began writing shortly after my conversion that I want to finish someday. . . I had a professor who once made the observation that women rarely continue writing poetry after they become mothers because they feel fulfillment and no longer need to write poetry (!). She was a wonderful woman, and this likely says more about her own attitude toward motherhood (she became a mother very late in life) than about female poets!! I think that the reason behind the phenomenon she mentions is simply not being able to find the time for contemplation! (or perhaps not having a suitable space) Which brings me back, in a rather circuitous way, to my subject.

How much of spirituality is determined by the meeting of personal preference (that is, busy-ness vs. quiet contemplation) and opportunity (time and location), and how much is discipline? I could likely ask the same question about dissertation-writing, I guess. (Notice I'm not asking that. . .)