Yesterday I wrote in my beautiful twee linen-covered one-line-a-day journal: “While I was peeing Micah yelled the whole time on his bed outside the door, while Miya kept knocking the door by licking old baby vomit off the glass.”
On a certain level, common sense dictates that such a situation does not admit time for prayer. When you sleep in 90-minute increments, maybe you can let justice, charity, and solidarity slide. I haven’t done anything to prioritize them since the baby was born. Of course I haven’t.
But on another level, I believe that spirituality and social justice aren’t actually separate from our “real lives” or our daily struggles. I believe it’s an eminently practical matter that our selves and our families are not truly separable from any others. I believe there are groups, systems, and forces invested in actively keeping us apart from our neighbors, and I believe reconnecting with our neighbors is reclaiming our humanity, our thriving, our lives.
Months ago, when I threw out the tagline for this newsletter, “spirituality and social justice for tired people” meant something different. I was chronically ill and chronically tired, but I was also a full-time spirituality and social justice nerd. Now I am an all-time mom and a naptime writer, and I understand the audacity of that tagline in a new way. It’s not just that it’s hard to wrap a tired mind and a full schedule around spirituality or social justice. It’s that so much conspires to convince us we can’t tend to them, can’t even consider them, at all.
This is the time of life when I’m supposed to “settle down.” This is a neighborhood where blending in would mean letting my nuclear family become the center of the universe. I allow myself to be consumed with spit-up, gift wrapping, and the exigencies of getting outside for a walk with a dog and a five-month-old before darkness falls—and I could keep allowing it for years, decades. We live in a valley, and it’s easy never to gaze beyond the next mountain.
In the Episcopal Church, we confess every week “that we have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” I think it’s a good practice in general to admit that we’ve missed the mark, even when we’re not sure how, or how we could’ve done better. There is a way to admit mistakes and limitations without succumbing to shame, and a humility in remembering we have shortcomings despite having done our level best.
But lately when I pray this, I know exactly what I am confessing. I’ve done less than my level best. The list of what I have left undone is long.
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