It's October in Vancouver, and the apartment is bright with the clarity of autumnal morning light. My weeks-old son nests in my arms, my still atrophied body holding his tender frame into mine as he eats hungrily, one small fist curling open and shut as he holds it aloft. His breathing slows and I watch as his feeding loses urgency and he gradually falls off my breast, deep in slumber. My milk pearls, iridescent for a moment before it falls down in a stream. I shift position so I’m able to cradle the baby comfortably for the duration of his nap and gaze upon his upwardly tilted face, his open mouth with that knot of hard skin at top lip’s peak, breathe in the honeyed loveliness of his breath. Knowing that to move would be to wake him, I realize my phone is out of reach, as is any book I might read. I realize that I don’t begrudge that one bit, and am grateful for this invitation into a quality of attention that is at once spacious and precise, grateful for our bodies yielding to one another in rest—a balm for the ache left behind by his leaving the warm home of my womb.
*
I can hear things escalating downstairs, anticipating the inevitable scream from the younger brother just before it comes—the only possible response from a two-year-old whose physical strength is no match for his older, tractor-grabbing brother. Up in the hallway upstairs I am fully within earshot but just out of sight, and so continue to lie on the floor scrolling on my phone, even as I feel irritation rising through my body. "And yet when faced in the harsh light of day with the task of staying present to the squabbles and the milk-spills, to the sheer ordinariness of it all, I fall into a fog of inattention, choose to hide—diving instead into an ocean of phone-facilitated distraction."Just last night I had wept in the darkness to my husband about the fleeting nature of these days—these years—feeling the tenderness of our older son starting kindergarten in the Autumn, the start of his moving out of our cocoon in small and significant and good and tender ways. Just this morning I had resolved to fully savour these moments at home together—maybe we could do a craft, maybe we could explore in the woods, maybe . . . . And yet when faced in the harsh light of day with the task of staying present to the squabbles and the milk-spills, to the sheer ordinariness of it all, I fall into a fog of inattention, choose to hide—diving instead into an ocean of phone-facilitated distraction.
*
When our older son made me a mother in 2019, the last thing I expected was that I would choose to stay at home with him for the bulk of his early years. I had worked hard to qualify as a lawyer, worked hard on a graduate degree in theology, and had ideas about how those two vocational streams of my life would intersect. While we did long for children and had struggled to conceive for a while, my first reaction when seeing the positive pregnancy test was one of panic: I resented this intrusion into the vocational plans over which I felt suddenly protective. I wept in the office of a mother whom I deeply respect at Regent, who assured me with eyes shining that my tears, born of a deeply feeling heart, were holy—a gift to my unborn child. And sure enough, in the nine months that our son grew in my womb, something else unfurled too—a space capacious enough to hold all my conflicting emotions, only to find that they were utterly subsumed by love for this son whose eventual birth would tear open my body and my heart with a terrifying, overwhelming brilliance.
"For someone who had always traded in words and inhabited the world in a fairly cerebral way, my son invited me into a way of being that was viscerally tactile. . . ." After a delivery that pushed me against ever-widening contours of pain, there he was: a wriggling mass of wet limbs on my chest and I gave an involuntary cry of wonder as he felt his way with his mouth towards my breast. How on earth did he know to do that?! That moment of awe, the whole experience of birth in which I transcended hitherto known limits of both my fragility and of my power, remains a sanctuary within my imagination. For someone who had always traded in words and inhabited the world in a fairly cerebral way, my son invited me into a way of being that was viscerally tactile, and I found that the vocation of caregiving invites—demands—a focused kind of attention that was new to me.
When our son was five months old, we moved to the prairies where my husband grew up. My husband and I shared childcare as I finished my MA in Theological Studies remotely, and as I neared the end, I decided that after graduation I would stay at home with our son. There was a rightness about that choice for me and for our family, even as it remains something I hold in tension with the privilege I know we had in being able to make that choice.
As I entered into a season characterized in many ways by a sense of cloistered hiddenness, I was grateful for Ronald Rolheiser’s articulation of the vocation of caregiving as a “domestic monastery”—a place to learn in painfully inconvenient ways that our time is not ours but God’s and a place to lay down any ambition for visibility, accolade, or status. The Desert Mothers and Fathers are known for their maxim “stay inside your cell, and your cell will teach you everything you need to know” and Rolheiser paraphrases this wisdom by saying: “stay inside your vocation, your commitments, inside your legitimate conscriptive duties, inside your church, inside your family, and they will teach you where life is found and what love means”. Somewhere in those early days I heard author and Regent alumna Julie Canlis tell a story of asking Eugene Peterson to please give her a spiritual practice that could serve as an anchor while in the thick of caring for young children and trying to finish a PhD. He asked her what it was that she was doing the most, to which she responded that it was nursing her newborn. “That then, is your spiritual practice,” he said.
I took this to heart and continued to think of it often. And slowly, through the kind of pain that accompanies any good growth—the pain of the chrysalis, of the labour ward, of the moment just before dawn—I began to notice my vision, imperfectly yet indisputably, being transfigured.
There is something about being brought to my knees—literally as I get down to do puzzles, clear up spills and wipe runny noses, and metaphorically—that leads me toward and shapes me through the intuitive delight and curiosity of my children. Something about this close-to-the-ground gaze that sharpens my antennae and so my reverence for the small, the mundane, the seemingly insignificant: soft clusters of purple alfalfa flowers in spring that our goat loves to eat, toes buried in a pail of cool oats in the heat of summer, the collection of twigs our oldest gives me to store in my pocket as kindle for a campfire. To our sons, the world is a luminous place. And I revel in the invitation that they unknowingly extend to me: to align my vision more and more with theirs.
Somewhere in the fog of the newborn stage with our youngest, I read Anne of Green Gables together with beloved Regent professor Maxine Hancock and a wonderful group of women. As a new Canadian citizen it was a good induction into the heritage into which I had been grafted and I was glad for the excuse to read it. But after we finished, I hungrily devoured all eight books of the series, only to start again when I was done. There is something utterly profound about Anne’s vision, and I think my deep attachment to her is rooted in a longing for my vision to be shaped in a similar way.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the hardships of her early life as an orphan, the universe that Anne inhabits is an enchanted one, and she brings this enchanted vision to her life at Green Gables with Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. While Marilla in many ways epitomizes Puritan pragmatism and sensibility, the gift is to watch how Anne and Marilla bless and shape one another through their very different ways-of-being in the world. While Marilla gifts Anne with a sense of order and stability, Anne gifts Marilla in turn with a vision that sees all creation as sacrament. “It’s as if the year were kneeling to pray in a vast cathedral full of mellow stained light, isn’t it?” says Anne to her friend Diana one New Year’s Eve, “it doesn’t seem right to hurry through it, does it? It seems irreverent, like running in a church.”
While Marilla is not often one to betray emotion, she gradually comes to see Anne’s imagination—which is to say her sacramental vision—as that which reveals what is most true about the universe, at one point thinking that “perhaps . . . it was better to have, like Anne, ‘the vision and the faculty divine’ . . . of looking at life through some transfiguring—or revealing?—medium, whereby everything seemed appareled in celestial light, wearing a glory and a freshness not visible to those who . . . looked at things only through prose.” There is a lovely echo of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “dearest freshness deep down things” here, another poet who saw all of creation aflame with holiness, “charged with the grandeur of God.”
". . . in any moment spent in these hidden, unglamorous days at home with young children, there is a choice: to lean into a luminous quality of focused attention or to retreat into that fog of inattention." When artists marvel at the world,” writes author Catherine Ricketts, “they give our ordinary lives back to us through eyes of wonder.” This is what L. M. Montgomery does through Anne, and—I would add—what the very young can do for us too, those whose vision has yet to become marred by habituation, cynicism, or regret. My children, together with Anne and others who share their gift of a sacramental imagination, give my ordinary life back to me through the eyes of wonder. And on good days, I remember this.
Because of course, in any moment spent in these hidden, unglamorous days at home with young children, there is a choice: to lean into a luminous quality of focused attention or to retreat into that fog of inattention—to pretend to need the bathroom just so I can lock the door for two minutes and disappear into my phone.
More often than I like to admit I choose the latter. But I also believe that every time I do make the choice to stay awake to the profound within the ordinary and the particular before me, I am helping to curve that long arc of my vision (to borrow Dr. Martin Luther King’s image) ever more slightly toward the sacramental. Toward a hermeneutic of tenderness, as it were, that has public as well as personal implications, inasmuch as it rdoes not, cannot, despise the alfalfa flower or the gently parted lips of a sleeping child but recognizes their indispensable, beautiful place in the family of things. As Ricketts writes, “if we practice a discipline of loving contemplation in our most intimate relationships, will [not] our vision be trained to regard all people through the eyes of love?”
I’m thankful that I don’t have to go far to receive this gift of having my vision trained, but that to the contrary, all(!) that is required is to stay inside my vocation for this season, to recognize the spiritual practice that beckons me from within the life I actually have.
On good days, I remember this.
One thing facilitating this training of my vision these days is our sons’ love for the texture of the light just after sunrise and just before sunset, and specifically the way it transfigures everything it touches—living room walls, kitchen cabinets, strewn crayons, and empty water glasses. Twice a day we are accustomed now to hearing a cry of “golden light!” and together we either run to the loft to get the best view of its transfiguring beauty or my older son goes around the house taking pictures of everything upon which the light lands. Barbara Brown Taylor once said that beauty is so woven into who Jesus is that just to touch the hem of his garment is to be healed. Is my vision not being ever so slightly healed every time my sons draw my gaze toward the lucence of a kitchen cabinet, aflame with God? I feel sure it is.
*
On one of the hottest days of last July, some Regent friends, Harman and Christine, stop at our farm for the night on their way from Vancouver to Ottawa. As the light begins to soften and a merciful breeze cools the air, we linger around the table unashamedly talking about everything one might expect Regent folk to talk about. At the end, Harman shares with us his love of Reepicheep in Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Voice thick with emotion he echoes the faithful mouse’s words as he determines to sail for Aslan’s country in the far east of the Narnian world, come what may: “My own plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world into some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.”
I know Reepicheep’s resolve to be mine too. Thanks to good guides like my sons, like Anne, I pray I will keep tuning my gaze toward the glimmers of golden light before me, in the hope that every time I do my vision will be baptized, all over again. In the hope that such a vision might more and more cultivate that hermeneutic of tenderness through which to view my sons’ faces, a spray of purple alfalfa. And so, perhaps every face, every flower. On a good day at least.
