Some search for God in the contemplative routine of a monastery. Bonnie Miller-McLemore found the divine in piles of laundry needing folding, the sounds of her sons carousing in a playground and “the stench of a dirty diaper, wiping the bottom of a child.”
“I would stand there caught in the intimacy of eye-to-eye, face-to-face, body-to-body contact with this small being, overwhelmed by a flow of love toward my sons that somehow did not feel restricted to them,” she writes in her new book In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice.
The book is Miller-McLemore’s third about the spiritual potential of parenthood. Previously issued were Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Drama and Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective.
“These are not self-help pop psychology books where you finish them and feel worse about yourself because you aren’t the perfect parent,” said Miller-McLemore, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Pastoral Theology at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. “I’m hoping to provide affirmation and release, not pressure.
“I want to help people see the potential for deeper moral commitment and conviction in what they’re already doing.”
Though religious and spiritual searching tend to be associated more with solitude than Little League games and family chores, Miller-McLemore cites Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation as a “remarkable beginning” to another perspective that feminist theologians have been exploring in recent decades.
“There is some deep ambivalence in traditional Christianity to family life,” she said. “There is a lot of celebrating of celibacy and Jesus exhorting his disciples to leave their families behind.
“But there is also the Jesus who welcomed children, blessed wedding wine and valued family.”
As part of the Reformation, Luther renounced his vow of celibacy, married a former nun and they together raised six children.
Miller-McLemore says Luther wrote of having to “rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights …” He declared the duties as “adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels.”
In a perfect world, even adults without biological children share in the duties and personal development of bringing up children in the community, Miller-McLemore said.
“Adults are better and spiritually deeper if they’re in some relationship with children,” she said. “Most religious traditions make the point that you love your family but you don’t stop there. You build on that for the common good or wider community.”
Media Contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu