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January 21 - January 26, 2022
us face-to-face with parts of ourselves we would have preferred not to meet at all.
I suspect there is no loneliness in the world more painful, and shame filled, than that of a woman who has just hurt her own child—unless perhaps it is the loneliness of the small child who has suffered at the hand of his mother. We can create hell in the space of a moment, and we meet the devil in ourselves.
I identified with this so powerfully!
He has taught me that in order to be an effective and loving disciplinarian, I must first be able to control myself. So I am learning self-discipline right along with him. He requires of me an inner strength that I don’t always possess.
But I have learned that when I “lose” it—and I know it does happen to all of us at times—it is usually because I have not taken the time to slow down and pay attention to whatever is going on inside me.
The issue, then, is not whether we can mold our children to do our bidding, but whether we can learn to ride out life’s ups and downs without losing our own bearings.
What he most needs from me then is not an emotional hurricane of equal fury, but just the opposite—a living example of the kind of strength and clarity that will ultimately show him the way to make constructive use of his own energies.
Thoughtful parenting requires time to think. Yet many of us don’t have time in our lives for thinking. We need to make time. Even a few quiet moments alone early in the morning will enable me to lay the foundation for a day of living and loving from the heart. I meet my children then with heightened awareness, having already sorted out my own needs and priorities and achieved some sense of inner balance.
I have a great incentive to keep working at it, for I remind myself that it is not what I do as a mother, but who I am as a human being that will make a deep and lasting impression on my children. I can bring peace to my children only when I possess it myself.
I encourage my children to try their wings each time I stretch my own.
“So much of what we need, so much of what we want, is to be savored, cherished, cared for and cared about. So much of what is missing is tenderness.” Our children do not need any more possessions to be happy; they need only to feel sure that they possess our hearts, our attention, our acceptance of who they are.
Taking care of the invisible means paying attention to my own physical and spiritual health, to the inner workings of my marriage, to the emotional security of my children, to our need for fun and play, to the quality of our relationships. I remind myself that the slow, open-ended hours I spend with my sons are not without purpose; they are, in fact, a precious gift, islands of repose in the midst of life’s onrushing stream. The secret, I think, is this: When we take care of the invisible, we find ourselves cared for in return. Supported and refreshed, we find the strength and forbearance to
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In Hebrew, the word shabbat means to rest. For me, Sabbath has come to represent as much a state of mind as a day of the week. It means time out for the soul, time to lay aside my daily cares in favor of spiritual refreshment. It is a way of separating time into different parts and experiencing it in different ways. I do not feel that I am losing any time by spending Sunday morning in church and Sunday afternoon with my family. On the contrary, I am taking time back.
Honoring the soul’s need for Sabbath time, I relax into the here and now. I make room for the presence of spirit.
Surely in those first moments after birth, when we come face-to-face with these diminutive souls entrusted to our care, we do catch a glimpse of God. We know what it is to be blessed. Our children arrive, as Wordsworth wrote, “Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory… from God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
When we live in a way that is consistent with our own beliefs and ideals, we give our children a gift. We bring spirituality into the here and now.
For children, spirituality is not delivered in a church sermon, nor is it an acquired skill, like reading and arithmetic. It is part of who they are, the core of their being and the source of their wondering about the world.
Our whole relationship to truth, to a spiritual life, to the world itself, is contained in our gestures. Children learn devotion by example.
What do I lose when I try to do too much? The answer is simple: Balance. For me there is nothing worse than the feeling that a day has flown by
without any moments of real connection between me and my husband, me and my children, me and my own inner self. Yet how easily that happens. We want so much to do for our children, to give them every opportunity to learn and grow and succeed. At the same time, we want to live our own lives fully, to be productive and creative and useful. Sometimes, though, we lose touch with our need to feed our inner lives and with our need for solitude, silence, and intimate time together.
When I keep my balance, I feel empowered, for I am guided then not by fear or pressure, but by the small quiet voice within that whispers, “Enough.”
If my sons learn compassion here, they will bring compassion into the world. If they learn here how to trust, they will learn to trust the world that waits beyond our walls. Then, when the time comes, I know I will be able to trust them, too, and let them go. Loving them, I grow. Growing, they learn to give love back.
But just as meditation practice asks us to return over and over again to the breath when our thoughts stray, so does peace practice ask us to return over and over again to what we know in our hearts to be true: we are here, each of us, to bring peace into the world.
For peace is not passivity, but rather an active commitment to an elusive, little-traveled path. The way may not always be obvious in the instant, but we can be patient and seek it out; we can pay attention and see where the path of peace needs clearing. For me, practicing peace has been about talking less and listening more; letting go of being right, and learning just to be; tuning in to what is not said, but felt.
The point is not to get it right all the time, but rather to be gentle and compassionate with ourselves, even as we learn to treat others with compassion. We pay attention, we get distracted, we pay attention once more, we lose our way again. But still we can come back, over and over and over, to what we know—this path of connection, this path of love, this path of peace.
