More Beauty
“Redemption comes in strange place, small spaces
Calling out the best of who we are
And I want to add to the beauty
To tell a better story
I want to shine with the light
That's burning up inside.”
Sara Groves, Add to the Beauty
Many years ago in the throes of those first few days of motherhood I remember struggling with this new identity asking over and over, Who am I? What is my calling? I looked for words, images and stories about how to make sense of motherhood alongside my pastoral vocation even as I left parish ministry to became a stay-at home mom. I started to see that the cultivation for my own sense of vocation and identity would come from the season that I found myself in the moment. In a way, I was invited to build my own path, my own “program” or curriculum, and I did this through joining a non-Christian community moms’ group, auditing courses at Indiana University in the Gender Studies department, organizing with others around racial justice and immigration issues, and helping the churches to form a campus outreach — all of this as I toted the twins around, and eventually a third. God was continuing to grow me as a pastor, teacher, and writer through the experiences of my life-at-home in Bloomington. Home and vocation increasingly widened because the call to ministry never really ceased — it would continue to compel me through caring for my children and caring for the people in my community.
“[It] has got me thinking: what if there really is a different way? What if God intended the hug of a child to mirror the numinous moment others achieve through meditation? What if attending to the needs and the play of children – really attending, not reading the news on my phone or folding laundry while I listen with half an ear – was a window into the spiritual? What if all I really needed to do was simply be present? After all, God calls himself [sic] a lover and a parent, and perhaps there is something to learn in embracing my life rather than trying to escape it so I can have real communion with God.
It’s still a little shocking, but perhaps the most spiritual thing I can do may be to embrace my life as a mother. Not a spiritual, metaphorical mother, but a snot-wiping, baby-chasing, diaper bag-toting mother. Because sometimes it’s not the bible stories or the lectio divina, but the Help! and thank you that a relationship is built on. ”
My youngest, Ozzie and I reading a book together.
During those years I also began not only to look for different classrooms but different teachers. They came to me in the most unexpected ways, for example, once when I looked in the mirror. At one point, I chopped my hair. The kids would say that I look like halmuhni, their grandmother, my mother. It was inevitable, I suppose. It's strange how often throughout the day my mother, and my grandmothers materialize before me. I would say something in a certain way, or feel my body in a particular posture or doing a gesture, and I can see in my mind's eye my mother, and her mother saying or doing it, too, I am an echo of her. The way I stand or sit shoulders hunched or when I put on my makeup my face against the mirror or when I chase the dog out of the house, like my maternal grandmother. The tone of my voice or the inflection in a certain phrase, most likely and usually about food. The edge to a screech when I'm losing it with the kids. The quiet and calm that overtakes me in a moment of chaos, like my paternal grandmother. The manic way I tackle certain projects - obsessive and focused, like my mother.
I look at my hands sometimes and see the same hands in old photographs like at the birth of my younger brother. My mother is sitting in the delivery bed clutching him swaddled in a light blue blanket as I sit nearby, a 2 year old buzzing with barely contained excitement at the camera. Whenever I look at this picture my eyes aren't drawn to my bedhead pigtails or bright red Osh Kosh B'Gosh overalls. I see her hands because it shocks me how they look so familiar. They're really my hands. I notice her hands all the time now, and remember looking at them once when Ozzie was born, and how much they've changed with the years, and yet still maintain such strength and tenderness somehow simultaneously. It slowly occurred to me that my mother was one of my teachers, and I had ignored it or taken it for granted.
“The cook’s sonmat, literally the taste by one’s hands, is the key to good food, and this is what is passed down from Korean mother to daughter.”
A pair of hands hold another hand.
I write this on the other side of Mother's Day, a day I approach with such mixed feelings. There are all the ways I can’t help but be grateful to my mother for everything that I know and don't know of her sacrifices, and all the ways I am regretful that I wasn't somehow a better daughter or a better cook or a better housewife or a better student or a better everything. These are not necessarily feelings she has imposed on me directly or explicitly, and yet, I know that it is something that was passed on to me, and I have a feeling it was passed on to her from her mother, and her mother received from her mother.
Because we receive so much from our mothers. The right way to smother huge napa cabbage leaves the kimchi mixture crouched down on the floor over the blue tub with our hands wrapped in thin plastic gloves or how to measure out the water with our hands for cooking rice. Hours of piano lessons or Korean language lessons, and how to fold the mandoo so the edges match up perfectly or how to scoop perfectly balled up cups of rice into the bowls. How to walk or how to speak or how to stand or how to respectfully call our fathers from their offices or the backyard that "dinner is ready."
We also inherit our mothers’ insecurities with their bodies and their skin, their struggles with the all too pervasive inequities and inequalities of work and childrearing, and all the questions of how to survive and love all the layers of motherhood. But we acquire their faith, too, and their resilience, their persistence, their songs. My mother would go about the house singing old hymns and sometimes that old fashioned, operatic rendition of The Lord's Prayer, belting them out, every verse or simply humming them, like a continuous meditation throughout the day. Everything - not only food, but the laundry, the small vegetable garden, the sewing, everything she touched and shaped - complex flavors and spices brought together by her own fingers - everything was blended together by this thick substance of faith - hefty and dense like the doughy rice cakes we eat for New Year's day and on birthdays - permeated by a desperate hope for life and the periodic glimmerings of it as that life materialized in surprising ways. As each year goes by I am amazed and a little horrified at the ways I am becoming my mother. For good and bad. Whether we know them or not, whether we are cognizant of it or not, whether we want it or not, something passes onto us, something connects us to that bizarre, but beautiful force that perpetuates humanity. For all that we carry, for all that we are forced to bear in our bodies and spirits, for all that we are to be grateful, I pray that I will become more. More thoughtful. More hopeful. More faithful. More alive.
I learned very recently that Mothers’ Day did not originate as a Hallmark holiday. It started in the Methodist Church to honor all of the women who worked for peace and justice. It was an anti-war movement that focused on hydrating babies, ensuring sanitation, and building hospitals. It was about loving, caring and creating, and the labor towards goodness and beauty. For all those who mother, who call themselves our grandmothers, aunties, sisters, who make me see and know Mother-God, mother-shepherd, I give thanks.
