there may yet be hope

I told Dan yesterday that even on ‘good days’ when I feel peppy and motivated, I need only take a few moments to reflect in order to begin to feel as though my life is pointless.

On Monday I awoke with the energy to venture out with Perpetua and visit the botanic gardens. It was a six+ mile endeavor round trip. And I felt successful for it. But for what? Walking halfway across the city so my toddler could smell some flowers? Does that not seem pointless?

Dan responded: ‘Is that any more pointless or tragic than someone going to work an office job they really don’t need?’

No. And granted, people feel there is worth, ‘a point,’ to that, because they’re making money. And as a mom on FaceBook bemoaned, capitalism values any job which makes money--and that’s all.

Mothers don’t make money. We form souls. We build love and foster virtues and nurture the next generation of humanity.

Sounds amazing. Feels meaningless.

I never, ever grew up thinking, ‘When I grow up I want to be a mama.’ No, it was always a career: teacher, singer, journalist, counselor. Mentors said I would be a ‘world-change agent.’

And maybe I will be, and maybe I won’t be. But on the few occasions in which some thoughtful person said, ‘You’re going to be such a good mom someday,’ I never took it as someone speaking a possible vocation over me. It was more like, ‘You’re going to do great things, and someday you’d also make a great mom.’

But being a mom is not socially regarded as a ‘great thing’ in itself. Even if we say it is, we really don’t believe it. We just don’t. We can’t. Society has biased us too much against it.

The noble, admirable, successful thing to be is a Mom+. A Mom + small business owner. A Mom + whatever. Working moms are respectable. Stay-at-home moms are living the good and easy life.

Once you become a mom, you quickly realize it’s the opposite. Working is a vacation. As a stay-at-home mom, you miss work. Working moms get breaks from the real work of mothering.

And it’s just so much harder, this difficult, bumpy, uphill road, because nowadays it is also a narrow and lonely road. You don’t have hundreds of other mothers plodding along beside you, helping to carry one another’s loads, encouraging one another, sharing life, speaking meaning and worth into this essential life-work of motherhood. You don’t have a tribe. Your children don’t have a village. It’s just you--and maybe a few thousand women who commiserate on the handful of FaceBook groups you’re a part of.

And just to be clear, these virtual communities do not serve as fulfilling substitutes for the real thing, the physical, constant, familial community for which our hearts are evolutionarily programmed to long. This maternal community has been a tragic casualty of modernity (arguably, as community in general has been), and we mothers suffer daily. Post-partum depression, post-partum anxiety, shame and guilt, isolation and loneliness, and the recurring sense that our life-work is pointless. Menial. Unrespectable.

We craft makeshift tourniquets for these terrible wounds: social media, escaping into Netflix binges, addictions, psychiatric medication, contrived community through playgroups and baby classes. In this last effort, we get perhaps closest to the echo of the feminine, maternal community for which we long. We begin the grueling work of building our village, earning and gaining trust, scheduling playdates... but still, we ache for the effortless, default community of a genuine village.

Imagine what that village once looked like! Generations of mothers all within walking distance. Daily visits with grandmothers and great-grandmothers and aunts and cousins. Maternal wisdom infusing daily life. Children growing up in an environment which normalized and cherished pregnancy and birth and child-rearing and family. Breastfeeding a visible and ubiquitous and essential part of life. Lifelong friendships. A village of people to share in sufferings and celebrations. People marrying and becoming parents and growing old and dying, all with their constant, trusted, beloved community surrounding them.

No flying hundreds of miles for weddings. No missed funerals. No relying upon FaceBook updates to witness the growth of a grandchild. No paying strangers to practically raise your children. No having to make new friends for every new phase of life. No shallow relationships. No transience. No lack of belonging. No social isolation.

No mothers feeling like they’re doing an unvalued job, largely on their own.

This is the community and the validation for which we modern mothers long, and for most of us, it is nowhere to be found. 

I’ve been ignoring you. I don’t know why. I’ve been intoxicated by distractions. Debating politics. Watching Netflix. Facebook scrolling. “Relaxing.” I wake up every morning knowing I have a choice to make—to acknowledge or ignore you. To do the work of drawing near to you, or simply slip into the fog of life. It’s so easy to ignore you. It’s like silencing an alarm and rolling over, back into the warm, lazy comfort of sleeping in. Everything in my flesh says, “Just keep sleeping.” I’m undisciplined. I sleep in. I crave mindless activity. I insist on maximizing my comfort whenever possible. I opt for instantly-gratifying activities: Netflix over reading, sleeping over waking, arguing over holding my tongue, staying up-to-date on the things of this world over contemplating your Kingdom, checking my phone over opening my Bible. It’s so easy to cut you out entirely. So easy to utterly choke and starve my spiritual life. To be only a creature of nature, to conform to the pattern of this world, to content myself with who I am as I am, not striving for virtue or perfection or goodness of any kind.

The natural man is all I am. I can still see that, which counts for something. The thoroughly evil man does not know he is evil. Yet I can feel that awareness slipping, too. Contentment—not the genuine, life-giving contentment, but the slow-acting poison of complacency—is eating away at the branches and roots and fruit of my soul.

I can’t keep living like this. As just an animal satisfying my daily desires and impulses. The animals are without fault, but not I. I know the life I am called to live, and yet reject it. The words “No longer!” get stuck in my throat as the fear of my own rebellion grips my heart. I’ve proven myself weak and unwilling time and again. I know what I must do, I know the life of obedience. But I am too wretched to want it enough. My flesh is weak, my resolve wavers, my core infected by selfishness.

Somewhere, mingled in the deep recesses of myself, casting light on the shadow and poison of sin, your Spirit resides. He is not dormant, nor is he compromised. He stands poised at the threshold of my potential, eagerly waiting to actualize my true identity. 

“Child of God, be,” he whispers from the deep. Patient. Earnest. Simply, “be.”

“Abandon this half-living existence. Cast off the shackles of your own creating,” he says. “Let this mockery cease. You are not who you pretend to be. You never were. Put this charlatan to death. Execute your rebellious will, the bed of your pride and self-deception, the unruly beast competing with your Creator for ownership. You are not your own. In God alone will you find freedom from autonomy. You are shrinking under the weight of yourself, unable to defeat the monster you are on your own.

“Fear not. Take courage. You are not alone. I am here. The Lord will fight for you; you need only be still.

“You need only be.

Some advice if you were one of the many post-Election Day that said you wanted to break out of your liberal echo-chamber: follow at least as many conservative news feeds on Facebook as you follow liberal sources. Pay attention to what the one or two conservative professors you may have ever had are posting. Comment your questions when you see something posted that seems to challenge your ideas. For every liberal headline you see a friend share, look up the same headline as covered by a conservative source. Breaking out of your echo-chamber is going to take a lot more work than the one eloquent Facebook post you may have typed up immediately after the election. I hope those of you who made a goal of exposing yourself to different views and understanding "the other" haven't allowed your zeal to slowly simmer and get choked out by the inevitable bombardment of anti-Trump media that has ensued.

I’ve been thinking a bit about identity and what people worship. These last few days I’ve been touring around London, dining and bussing and tubing and photographing alongside any number of the 8.674 million residents and 47 thousand tourists each day. I’ve had, as you can imagine, ample opportunity for people watching. Businessmen and businesswomen looking oh-so-Londonite in their tailored jackets and tassel loafers; millennials sporting blanket scarves and oversized jackets and Adidas and everything else prescribed by the trending street styles; Starbucks baristas each with a different foreign accent and varying levels of pep; tourists attempting to fit into the London scene, even as their ceaseless selfie-taking betrays them.

I sat this afternoon from an upper floor of the Tate Modern Museum watching the sea of little people milling about. As I watched, a young woman beside me mused out loud to her companion, “Isn’t it strange looking at everyone from up here? Just a thousand little bodies with a thousand little minds with a thousand times as many thoughts.” A thousand thousands of thoughts, indeed; all interlocking in the minds of their hosts, gradually building upon constructed ideas of self, purpose, meaning, worth. (It’s a jump, I know, but I was in a musing mood.) The thought struck me, as it had the day before: Everyone worships something. This is clear enough when observing the priest leading Evensong at Westminster Abbey, or the tourist who shuffles into the area designated for private prayer in St Paul’s while the rest simply line up for entry tickets, or the Sikh walking through the Underground with his hair neatly wrapped in a turban. But it is just as true for the thousands of anonymous little people seen from the 6th floor of the Tate. The hurried businessman, the animated mannequin, the barista just off his shift, the blundering tourist.

We all have two desperate needs: to determine what is unique about us, what constitutes our very own identity; and to submit ourselves in worship of something greater. These needs work powerfully and synchronically upon us, compelling us both to discover and to adore that which resonates with the deepest parts of us. We have an innate and irresistible motivation to discover who we truly are. And in the pursuit of ourselves, we necessarily look outwith. Some philosophies claim fulfillment is to be discovered within; despite being wrong, their proclaimed insight is observably not what all people intuit. We have a hunger for the fulfilment of all our voids, and we intuit that what we do not have must be outside ourselves. We pursue food when hungry, and water when thirsty, and we pursue that which can complete and define us when lacking a sense of who we are. We pursue something higher than us, something greater than us, something which we recognize as True, and Good, and Beautiful, and altogether worthy of our esteem, and we say, “There! That’s it. That is me; or at least, this is part of what makes me who I am.” We find progressivism; I am a Progressive. We find Patriotism; I am a Patriot. We find money, fashion, travel, science. From the moment we learn to compare ourselves with others, we rush to stake out some territory and plant a flag labeled “Me.” And as we push that stake deeper into our designated territory, that thing which defines us becomes The Thing which defines us. Inevitably, we all begin to worship something.

The result is a mess of innumerable altars erected for a multitude of faceless idols—but the instincts which bring this about are still good. Our sense that we must discover our true identity, our compulsion to expend ourselves in devotion to something outside ourselves, our tendency to gravitate toward something we can confidently call Good; these are basic instincts, as natural and efficacious as the instinct to eat or drink or sleep—efficacious, that is, when directed toward their intended ends. In God, we simultaneously and perfectly discover who we truly are and Whom we were always intended to worship. The instincts which drive our existence, leading 8.674 million Londoners and 47 thousand tourists and the remaining billions of people around the world into so many gilded rabbit holes, achieve their true purpose in leading us into relationship with the One True God.

I have taken courses on social action + justice, feminism, the prison industrial complex, immigration politics and ethnic relations, human rights history, the psychology of sex + gender, and sociology (as taught by an extremely liberal professor). I have spent years working with an organization that promotes the protection of women and children in the face of domestic violence, as well as a number of far more partisan causes such as LGBTQ marriage rights, women's reproductive rights, etc. I have called myself feminist and liberal and social justice-minded. The dominant influence within my professional and educational background has absolutely been liberal and progressive in nature. And, though I no longer call myself a "liberal," I am grateful for the knowledge and perspective my previous training has given me, and I find myself aligned still with a number of causes most commonly championed today by liberals.

I say all this to serve as both a disclaimer and contrast for my present declaration: I am a Neo-Patriarch.

Lord, show me the extent of my love for you--even through the testing of trials. Deepen my love for you; nourish the roots and grow them far below my conscious awareness. Expel the toxins of complacency and pride and self-indulgence. Cause me to take seriously your call to discipleship. Prepare me to accept the costs of following You unhindered. Wake me from this state of restless sleep. I’ve been living half alive, experiencing only fleeting shadows of joy and imitations of satisfaction. In You only do I find rest, life, joy, satisfaction. You are my all in all. May I sacrifice in my life what I confess with my lips, that my worship might not be the spoiled fruit of a failing tree, but the pleasing fruit of a tree watered by ever-flowing water.