When we talk about the first Christian family, we often talk only about the baby Jesus and his mother, Mary. This may be because the Gospels tell us very little about Joseph. We know he was a carpenter. Artists throughout the centuries have portrayed him as significantly older than the teenaged Mary; we often marvel at the stamina it took for Joseph to plunge head first into the confusing and exciting and scary situation presented to him in dream after dream by Godly angels. Our scripture for today, from the gospel of Matthew, comes after the Biblical stories that explain Joseph’s engagement to Mary, his understandable distress about her premarital pregnancy, and the first angelic appearance to calm Joseph’s doubts and explain Jesus’ role as Savior. This morning’s passage from Matthew tells of the flight to Egypt, when Joseph saved his son the savior by protecting him from Herod.
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I am not yet a mother, but my neighbors are. Through immersion in their worlds, I have come to learn of the vital importance of the binkie, the swing, the vibrating chair, the Miracle Blanket, Blabla knit dolls, and of course the Boppy. I already loved the decorating and lifestyle website www.apartmenttherapy.com, but because of all the babies surrounding me, I found myself trolling on their nursery pages, www.ohdeedoh.com, more and more.
I did not realize how far my immersion had gone, though, until one day we were on a walk and ran into another neighbor with a baby in a stroller. This stroller was gorgeous: red and black, lean and swift. The stroller also looked familiar to me. I found myself asking this neighbor, “Is that a Phil and Ted stroller ?!?” It was. My trolling on www.ohdeedoh.com had led to met to Phil and Ted’s website, where I had schooled myself on the wide variety of strollers and other infant products they sell. My friends, if I, newly married and childless, can be so affected by infant marketing that I can identify the new hip stroller on sight, how is such marketing affecting us as a country?
Riding my bike from my daughter’s day care, I keep thinking about how to deal with our longing for each other. It’s intertwined with my feeling of guilt. I still can’t fully accept that I feel so much better working full time than part time.
I know that she is very happy at the day care. She loves her friends there; she’s having fun and learning things that I never could teach her. But still. When I leave on Sunday mornings, she asks me, “Why do you work today? Why do you work when I’m off?” The only answer I can give is: “Because I’m a priest, darling. That’s how priests work.” Sometimes she clings to me and asks me not to leave. That’s when I leave my bleeding heart on the floor, loosen her little fingers as gently as possible, and cry all the way to work.
It just happened again. I put down a copy of my seminary alumni magazine, after reading yet another article about how clergywomen can “have it all”. In the nearly seven years since my ordination and ten years since I began my seminary career, the drumbeats insisting that clergywomen can be both full-time pastors and full-time mothers have grown steadily louder and more resolute. Not only can we do this, the voices chorus, but we should do this. Evidently we owe it to the church to model the ways in which the best congregation can live out the ideals of the Christian family. This means ministry and mothering overlapping in as many ways and settings as one can imagine. It is now de rigueur for women pastors to describe their intertwined work and family life after the arrival of a child by boasting along the lines of, “I brought her to work and breastfed while wearing vestments.”
I miscarried very, very early after I became pregnant for the first time. For one brief evening, my husband and I were naively dumbfounded and excited by the potential of a new baby in our lives. The next morning, I began showing symptoms of a miscarriage. Within a few days, we knew what we had hoped for was not going to happen. I can’t even begin to describe the feelings I experienced, but I can say that one emotion seemed to outweigh all the others—shame. I feared I had done something to cause the miscarriage. I felt as if I had failed somehow. I felt ashamed for feeling ashamed.
At the time, my husband and I were each new pastors serving little rural congregations 13 miles apart. I was vehement about keeping this news from our congregations. I already felt like I was living on display; to be that vulnerable with our parishioners (and, subsequently, two small towns) was unthinkable for me. I didn’t want our painful situation to be some entertaining news for the early morning coffee group at the local café. I protected myself fiercely, and soon found myself feeling increasingly isolated and alone (at a time when I was already feeling isolated and alone).
The mother can lay her child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us easily into his blessed breast through his sweet open side, and show us there a part of the godhead and of the joys of heaven, with the inner certainty of endless bliss (Ibid. 239).
When my husband and I signed up for our labor and delivery classes at Meriter Hospital, I looked forward to these sessions with both excitement and trepidation. It was unfortunate that we missed the last class, which was on breastfeeding. I never really thought it would be a big deal. After all, my mother never had any problems, and I knew women had been doing this for ages. The thought of taking a class on a "natural" biological event seemed a bit strange.
One Thursday evening several months ago, I met with a mothers’ group at the church. We call ourselves the Night Owls because we meet in the evening to accommodate mothers who work outside the home, although we have plenty of stay-at-home moms in the group as well. The conversation turned, as it often does, to the exhausting work of parenting, regardless of how one does it.
In a moment of candor, I said to the group, “You know, with both my husband and me working full-time, plus two kids, our life just barely works. As long as no one is sick, and all the cars and household appliances are operational, we really get along quite well, and I love our life. But there’s no buffer. So when a monkey wrench gets thrown into our lives, things just go to pieces for a while.”
The very next day, I stood in our bathroom, not breathing, and watched a thin pink line turn darker and darker—and said hello to the mother of all monkey wrenches.
I am a pastor and am also a mother of two delightful girls. Most days I can make those two professions work together pretty well, some days - not so much. My main coping mechanisms are coffee and humor. My main ally in this endeavor is my husband of 10 years. We are fairly relaxed parents. You know the type: We are the ones whose toddler eats right off the floor, while not wearing any socks. We are the ones whose six-year-old is wearing a pink paisley shirt, with a turquoise butterfly pattern skirt, pink polka dot socks and fancy fake high heels (‘high’ shoes is what we call them around here), despite the Wisconsin winter temperatures dipping into the low double digits.
This relaxed attitude about parenting has made my balancing act of life a little easier. I think this attitude started when my first born began attending school with me. I was a full-time student three and a half years into a four year M.Div. program when Meg was born (just in time to be baby Jesus in the Festival of Lessons and Carols). I took two weeks off completely and then finished the semester taking my exams and writing papers. Since I couldn’t imagine taking the whole next semester off, when February rolled around and classes started, I popped Meg into a sling and off we went. She slept and nursed and got passed around a lot. I often left her in one person’s arms and returned later to find she was ten sets of arms down the row.
Each Mother’s Day at worship, one of my first call churches in the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania gave out flowers to all the women of the congregation. The children came forward at the end of the Mother’s Day service and walked out into the small congregation bringing a flower to each woman there. Grandmothers and great-grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and women who were never able to bear children themselves all received flowers from the children that day. The first year, I noticed that because I was up front leading worship, none of the children thought to bring me flowers. Considering that I was helping organize the flower giving, I was not surprised, really. The second year, I noticed that one of the pre-schoolers became very confused. She would look at me and then ponder a flower, as if debating, “Does the Pastor count as a woman?”
And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. Genesis 2:1-2 (NRSV)
He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.
He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
Psalm 121:3-4 (NRSV)
I was sure I’d be back in church within one week of my daughter’s birth—not as a pastor, but as one of the faithful, gathered in the pews, free to worship God without fear.
