Embodied. Lee Ann M. Pomrenke
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Название: Embodied
Автор: Lee Ann M. Pomrenke
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Религия: прочее
isbn: 9781640653108
isbn:
Being childless by choice can be a faithful way to live as well. Several friends who are teachers have chosen not to become parents because the nurturing of young lives they do for the better part of most of their days is clearly enough. A friend who is a woman of color has mentored into adulthood so many undergraduate students that they would need the auditorium at the predominantly white college where she was a vice president in order to fit all of her “children” into one room. A third friend welcomed into her home two young men whose parents passed away; their relationships were already established through the church’s youth ministries, but she took their relationship much deeper. They call her Mom and visiting her is “coming home.” Each of these loving people mothers with a constancy that reflects God’s consistent care for us.
Before Jesus was born into the world, God’s mothering identity was a metaphor we would not likely notice in scripture very often. We do not have to stretch it to make it fit every part of the Bible; all analogies break down at some point. “Lord” was the more common way of addressing with respect the all-powerful God in the Hebrew Scriptures. In those fourteen generations of waiting between Abraham and Jesus, God is not often described in ways that resemble a mother or father. In fact, at some points God tries methods of discipline that I shudder to think of a parent using with children they love. Sometimes we are not mothering either. We are doing good work that needs to be done for future generations even if they will not be “our” children.
If we check the verbs—of our actions and God’s—we might just be parenting without the title. God heard their cries, instructed, lamented, grieved, cried out, warned, and disciplined her children in between redeeming them from slavery in Egypt and sending them into exile in Babylon. She yearned for them to listen and to turn back to her. These may not be the actions mothers are most proud of, but they can certainly be used to describe some of our activities. When the identity of parent is breaking down for God or for us, perhaps we are in a waiting period, when that deeply invested, caregiving identity is not primary but it is certainly not gone, just like for our friends who are not recognized as parents, yet are behaving in parental ways. To name that waiting and the variety of parental actions will allow many people to know that they are seen by their faith community and by God. For clergy women to give ourselves permission to speak honestly about the Wait can be a gift for open, mutual pastoral relationships.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
Clergy Women:
1. Which words or actions of others were most helpful to you, during periods of waiting for children?
2. How do you understand the Wait to become a mother to have affected your spiritual life or relationship with your congregation?
Support Network:
1. What has been your understanding of God’s involvement in pregnancy or adoption? Have any of those ideas changed through reading this chapter?
2. Which of the ways God “became a parent” named in this chapter surprised you to think of it that way? Why?
3. Does it shift any of your expectations of God or your pastor, to acknowledge the pressures of the Wait?
In many families there is a parent who is treated like the president, and one who is the vice president. If the president is unavailable, the vice president will do. If the president is there, however, she (and it is most often “she”) is the one the children go to for help, solace, or affirmation. The caregiver who bears that honor and responsibility may shift and change as our responsibilities outside the home change, but we all know who the president is in our family right now. This language and comparison came from a parent educator in the public school system, but the same could easily be said of our congregational life. Everybody knows who is at the center, and the Central One sets the tone for all the other relationships. Here’s a clue: It is often the primary caregiver, the one doing the mothering.
Trust
None of us are born attached to our parents or caregivers. We are born needy, certainly. When a child’s needs are met consistently by a primary caregiver, the child seems to establish a trust and bond with that caregiver (so often the mother). This bond is not innate; it comes through consistent care and affection, which is a great deal of work, especially in the middle of the night. It takes deep commitment to love and care for a child no matter what. Every. Single. Time. Parents must respond while carrying our own wounds, losses, upheaval, and even postpartum depression.
Postpartum depression can affect birth parents or adoptive parents, as it is intertwined not only with hormones and brain chemistry, but also with our own shifting identity. The reality of holding our children’s lives in our hands is terrifying and more demanding than we could have imagined. Depression tells us we are not up to the task. Scripture portrays God having some of these responses too, regretting making humankind in the first place in Genesis 6:6–7: “And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” God’s emotional responses to humanity can seem unpredictable too; sometimes anger surfaces quickly, or sadness. Postpartum depression is complicated and multilayered, but these details might connect God’s experience to human responses of new parents. The Holy Spirit can speak through the honesty of others who have been through it, and even through the screening questions at our doctor’s appointments. Thanks be to God that we are not alone.
While parents adjust to our new roles in an adoption, our children are navigating how to respond, too. Adoption psychologist Nancy Verrier describes a “primal wound” in the lives of adopted children whose first central relationship (with their birth mother) was broken. That severed attachment can become a defining characteristic, showing up later as a sense of loss, anxiety, or uncertain identity. Perhaps not all adoptees experience it: we all respond differently to our circumstances. Yet that this theory exists at all testifies that the relationship with our mother is central for most of us, to who we become and how we relate to others. Congregations might consider how their attachment to a founding pastor or one who shaped their most significant years echoes in this theory.
When my husband and I adopted our elder daughter, attachment was the primary initial focus of our lives. Prospective adoptive parents are counseled on how to establish that they alone are the ones their child should attach to in their new life, which can seem harsh to grandparents, friends and other caregivers. Parents must be the ones to meet all their child’s needs for physical affection, emotional comfort, and basic needs like food. No one else, for six months, we were told. It was not a threat, to heed or feel guilty about (there are circumstances outside of our control). It was advice from those who know how delicate and difficult it can be for humans to form new secure attachments, to trust and live as though this new relationship will be forever. To СКАЧАТЬ