Parenting: A Spiritual Practice

A little over two years ago I gave a talk here entitled “Parenting: A Humbling Experience.” Sarah later challenged me to touch on more of the spiritual dimensions of my experience of parenting, and so I have been thinking about this ever since then. Although my ideas about this are still very much in flux, I agreed to present some of my thoughts and experiences today and decided to entitle it “Parenting: A Spiritual Practice.”

First I’d like to talk a bit about the word “practice.” I am a social worker and am a therapist in private practice. Physicians and attorneys as well as some other professionals have “practices.” Actually I kind of like the term practice, because it means that no matter how skilled or how many years I have worked or how much of an expert I might think I am, I am still “only practicing.”

So what about a “spiritual practice”? What is that? It seems to me that in our Western culture when we talk about religion or spirituality we tend to focus on belief. Recently Sarah Voss challenged us to share our beliefs about God. Some of us may have left other religious denominations because we didn’t believe their particular doctrines. Here in the Unitarian Universalist Church, we pride ourselves in being a creed-less religion where none of us has to profess any particular beliefs in order to be a member.

However, belief is only one part of spirituality and I would suggest, not the most important part. The more important part, in my view, is practice. What sorts of spiritual practices are important to each of you? I think this is an important question and one we do not necessarily ask enough.

When I was growing up, I was immersed in the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of these practices included abstaining from meat on Fridays, (now I practice this every day as a vegetarian of sorts) Other practices included praying the stations of the cross, praying the rosary, giving up candy for Lent. One can believe but not do these practices, or one can do these practices but not believe. When I left the Catholic Church I thought it was hypocritical to practice without believing, but now I am questioning that notion. Perhaps the practices primarily have value in themselves and in their effects on our lives and on our spiritual journeys.

What are some of the spiritual practices of our Church? Lighting and extinguishing of the chalice, singing hymns, especially singing a blessing to our children as they leave for R.E., perhaps even drinking coffee could be seen as spiritual practices. What would be the point of such practices? Some of this is obvious. Lighting candles about important moments in our lives helps us to be mindful of some of what is going on in our community. It strengthens our sense of belonging and contributes greatly to our ability and interest in supporting each other. It helps us to create and sustain our church community. Singing a blessing to our children reminds us of how important they are to our community and to our future. It lets them know that they are loved and remembered and that they remain part of our gathering even as they leave this building. It assists us in staying in connection with them and with the generous members of our group who volunteer to teach them. I am sure that each of you could easily add other thoughts about how these spiritual practices and others are helpful to us.

What might be some of the goals or purposes of spiritual practices in general? I am a Star Trek fan and there was a recent movie entitled “Nemesis.” In this movie the hero is a star ship captain, Jean Luc Picard. His nemesis is a villain who has the identical DNA of Jean Luc, as he is actually a clone of him. The villain argues that Jean Luc would have turned out like him if he had had the same life experiences, and that he the villain is proof of that. Jean Luc makes an impassioned plea for becoming more than we are, for going beyond both what our experiences may have tried to talk us into, and to go beyond our programming, or our genetics.

The philosophers of old have argued for the development of virtue through various practices of living, some of them quite difficult and arduous. These notions are not so popular today but might fit well with those of us who might define ourselves as secular humanists. One does not have to believe in God in order to practice telling the truth, or being authentic in our dealings with others, or showing respect to those who hurt us. The subtitle of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography is “The Story of My Experiments With Truth.” So, one of the Mahatma’s important spiritual practices was to conduct experiments with truth in his life.

So what are some of the spiritual practices that are especially significant in parenting? I would suggest that they can be divided roughly into two categories. The first are practices which primarily assist us as parents in advancing spiritually, and the second are those which are designed to primarily assist our children in doing so, but which end up assisting us as parents equally well. I will spend most of the time I have left sharing some thoughts about the first of these, and end with a few thoughts and one example of the second.

I believe that each of us has within us some barriers that keep getting in the way of us becoming more loving and better than we are, or of advancing spiritually. What are some of these issues? Anger, impatience, prejudices of various kinds, greed, various attachments, a desire to control, giving our own egos much more importance than they deserve. You can add to the list as you see fit.

Why don’t we simply move past these barriers and move forward in our spiritual development? There are lots of reasons. The barriers themselves may be comforting. We may get lazy. We may get distracted by the routines of life, by the hardships of life, by our own greed, by our own attachments. Or perhaps life gets too easy, and we continue in our bad habits because we are not sufficiently challenged to be motivated to change them. This is where parenting comes in to assist us.

Parents get sufficiently challenged every day. We find ourselves falling short over and over again. Our children will not let us get lazy about our unresolved issues, because they will find a way to force those issues to stay near the surface of our lives. One of these issues is particularly important and difficult for me: Anger.

Anger. What is this all about? How could this get in the way of spiritual development? Isn’t it said that there is righteous anger? Isn’t it said that Jesus of Nazareth himself turned over the table in the temple in a fit of anger? Isn’t it said that it is important to claim our own anger, and to express it in order to be emotionally healthy? Isn’t it one of the stages of grief? Don’t we have to be angry in order to move away from being a victim? Perhaps this is all true. However, it is also true that Anger gets in the way of our spiritual development. Wouldn’t Jesus have been justified in being angry at Pilate? Instead he asked the father to forgive those who killed him. Wouldn’t Mahatma Gandhi have been justified at being angry at his assassin? Instead, he acknowledged the divine in his assassin a few seconds after being shot through a simple gesture, like this. Are these qualities only for the saints, the super humans? I think not.

What does this have to do with parenting? Some of you who are parents may understand this. Our children have an amazing ability to test this anger business in us. Our children may at some point defy us, tell us that they hate us, purposely hurt us, and the anger rises within us. We can find no solace in the notion of righteous anger in dealing with our children. We are the adults. We are the ones who must show by example what our values are. And so we are pushed up against the wall, the wall of our ego. We are challenged to take another step toward further spiritual development. Is it a step I am prepared to take? I struggle almost every day with this, some days much more intensely than others.

To venture forward on such a quest is certainly a spiritual practice. To stay calm and loving when my daughter tells me she hates me is a spiritual practice. To come to terms with that surging anger, the desire to hurt, the desire to somehow be in control, to have life go along as I want it to go, to be able to set an agenda and keep it, to have time to myself; these are spiritual practices.

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer in a book entitled Parenting as a Spiritual Journey writes:
"My informants discovered, through their journey as parents, that while theology is what you say, spirituality is who you are. Children don’t listen much to what you say anyway. As for who you are, children help make you that person. Religion is passed down through the generations; spirituality is often passed upward."

So far I have talked mostly about those ways in which parenting helps us to stay alert, to keep ourselves from becoming complacent about the hard spiritual work that we need to do. But I also promised you that I would talk a little about the second category I mentioned earlier, those practices which are specifically designed to help our children grow spiritually and which end up helping us as parents at least as much as it helps our children.

I will share with you a nighttime ritual that I developed when my oldest son Jamie was one or two years old. (He is now almost 14.) When each child goes to bed I meet them in their bedroom and communicate two things to them one using American Sign Language and one in spoken English. I will share these with you in a moment. I still would like to think that having this repeated every night before falling asleep throughout their lives will help them to develop a healthy spiritual perspective. But I do know that it has helped me in my spiritual development enormously. First, it helps remind me of what I believe. Second, it reestablishes a connection with my children in case that connection was temporarily lost during the day. Third, it helps prepare me as well as my children for the “little death” of sleep.

[Ends with signing the following:]
You, my son or daughter. You, big sister and little sister. You. Beautiful, strong, and brave. I love you. Play, finished. Time sleep now. Good night. You, good girl.

[And reciting the following:]
You are very welcome here on this planet and in this family. You are healthy and strong. You are strong and brave. I am very glad you decided to be born and to be my daughter, so I can be your daddy. You have some important things to learn in this life, and it is your job to learn them. You have some important things to do in this life, and it is your job to figure out what they are so you can do them. You are also here to have fun and to learn how to love. I love you and I am proud of you.