Parenthood as Spiritual Practice – with Bonnie Miller-McLemore

[00:00:00] What's up friends, thank you for tuning into The Theology Mill today. This is a podcast from Wipf and Stock Publishers and I am your host Zach Mickel. Today you'll be hearing a conversation between me and Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore which was a really fun conversation. Bonnie has quite the job title. She is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Professor of Religion, Psychology and Culture Emerita at Vanderbilt University.

[00:00:27] She earned her PhD from University of Chicago. She spent over 35 years teaching and writing, continues writing, published a ton of chapters and articles, 18 books I think if I'm counting correctly. She's pretty well known, very well known really in women and childhood studies among kind of the theological guild but also especially practical theology, feminist theology.

[00:00:54] So be sure to check out her Amazon page. I think she also has a personal website. Maybe do a quick Google search and you can find all the different sorts of things she's written on. Today though we are talking about, in this interview, her book which is called In the Midst of Chaos, Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice is the subtitle.

[00:01:16] And by the way, if you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to get your hands on a copy of that book, it is on an extreme sale with Fortress Press right now. I'm speaking in August 2026. For right now at least, the book is $5.50. So you definitely want to grab a copy while it is, I think, over 75% off which is a pretty screaming deal. So, but as always, I really hope you enjoy the episode.

[00:01:44] Thank you for listening so much. This was just such a fun conversation, so I hope you enjoy.

[00:02:21] Okay, Bonnie, Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLamore, welcome to The Theology Mill. It's so good to meet you and to have a chance to talk about your book today. Thanks. Nice to be here. So we're going to be talking about your book which is called In the Midst of Chaos, Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice, which is a delightful book. We were just chatting about how it's actually, it came out in 2019, but it was a reprint of a first edition that you published in 2007.

[00:02:50] So I have the 2019 edition, which by the way, this cover design is gorgeous. And the cover image, I really, really like. Yeah. The publisher Fortress, I think, did such a good job packaging this book. It looks really, really nice. Thanks. Also, yeah, I want to say, so I published a book in 2025 on fatherhood, and I had not read this book before I wrote that manuscript.

[00:03:19] And it was Natalie Carnes who kind of reviewed my manuscript in really nicely, in a really nice way, basically said like, hey, you're missing out on this whole kind of feminist literature on family life that you would really benefit from. And that might kind of tweak some of your ideas on sacrifice. And she mentioned your name in particular, yours and a couple others as folks that I should really read.

[00:03:45] And so I picked up this book after the fact and really, really loved it, especially, I think my favorite chapter maybe was the last one on blessing and letting go. I thought it was some really interesting and helpful stuff. So thanks for writing this book. Appreciate you coming on the show today. As we kind of kick things off, I wanted to ask, because this book is in a series that I think is kind of around practices of the Christian faith, right?

[00:04:13] So you really oriented the book around several different practices kind of contained within parenthood. So I want to ask you kind of what led you to sort of frame it in that way. Obviously, it's part of this series, so it kind of makes sense that you would frame it that way. And then kind of what, in your view, though, makes those practices spiritual? Because that seems to be a big part of your argument is kind of revisioning parenthood itself as like sort of a spiritual practice,

[00:04:41] even though we tend to think of it maybe not so much that way. Yeah. You know, I'm so glad to hear the reference to your book and look forward to looking at it. Ironically, I think one of the books I bumped into as I was writing mine was a father who had written, I want to say, a decade or more ahead of me, also with three children, as I have.

[00:05:09] And so I do think this theme of surviving with your faith amid all of the, as I say, chaos of parenting. You know, I'm not surprised to find you in 2025 still struggling with these questions. And I have to also say the original cover of the book, I love because I'll hold it up and they can't see it. But basically, it's a back door with just piles of shoes.

[00:05:39] And when my kids saw the book, I think one of them said, is that our back door? No, but it does replicate it. Yeah, the question of practices, I think it's partly because around the time that I was writing this book,

[00:05:58] there was just a huge growth in conversation in the academy that was shifting our attention from theories and doctrines and ideas and faith as a confessional statement that's, you know, verbal and cognitive to this idea that religion is material,

[00:06:21] that it's embodied, that it is best understood in what we do, not just what we say or confess. And so that discussion was widespread, not just in my discipline of practical theology, but you could see it percolate in other areas, theological studies and religious studies, you know, maybe influenced somewhat by the social sciences that we're studying, like anthropology and sociology.

[00:06:50] And that was just creeping even into like biblical studies or historical studies, you know. So, but I think secondly, practical theology is my discipline. And it has pushed back in some ways against, again, that same idea that's more a modernist idea, that religion and theology is all about theoretically organizing our ideas about God.

[00:07:19] And instead, practical theology has been consistently interested in how our faith evolves in the midst of everyday life. And, you know, the discipline got a foot in the university in the 1980s. And at that time, I was more in the area of pastoral theology or religion and psychology and pastoral care, but under the umbrella of practical theology.

[00:07:47] So this book, in some ways, is a practical enactment of some of the theoretical ideas that shaped me as a scholar and a teacher when I was teaching in seminary and in a university divinity school. I love your second part of that question, how is it spiritual?

[00:08:08] Because when I would talk about this book in congregational context, one of the questions that came up that's similar is, is this question of, boy, this makes it sound like everything is spiritual. Because, you know, what isn't spiritual? And in a way, there's some truth to that.

[00:08:28] I was trying hard to reclaim the very mundane, and I'm not alone in this, but sort of concrete dailiness of, you know, places as places of enacting faith. And it isn't as if everything we do every minute, especially as a parent, has, you know, faithful or spiritual implications.

[00:08:57] But I do think with attention, we can turn some of these, you know, mundane activities into moments of spiritual engagement and reflection. And, you know, the book is, doesn't talk about that theoretically, it just tries to show how that might happen. And there are other people that I draw on that have talked about, for example, laundry.

[00:09:24] What could we see that as a faithful act? And I think, secondly, I really wanted to give parents a sense of relief. Because when you are parenting, or let's say you're a very busy minister, it could also apply to other life situations.

[00:09:49] Your life is constantly interrupted with unexpected demands as a minister, for example, or as a parent, you don't have a lot of solitude, silence, and retreat. And it's not that those aren't really important. And I don't want to make busyness, you know, as if that's a good thing.

[00:10:12] But I did want to honor, and I think maybe more profoundly, the way I wanted to honor the way my children and the demands of caring for them were forming me in a very faithful, powerful way. And I drew on other scholars who had talked about, as an example, getting up at night to care, you know, waking up, constantly being woken up.

[00:10:38] And, you know, there's other writers who have talked about that as an aesthetic practice. And you almost, it hones you to constantly be on demand to attend to a younger person whose capacities are still growing, emerging, and being shaped. And I think a lot of religious education is all focused on how we form children. And it's such an interesting question to ask.

[00:11:08] How are our children forming us? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, the late nights also, I think, expose, maybe expose certain weaknesses in us or certain selfishnesses in us. At least that's been my case. Yeah. And I can attest to the shoes by the door, such like the whole shoe situation and how chaotic that can be. They pile up. Yeah, trying to maintain it all for sure.

[00:11:33] I'm curious, the laundry you mentioned earlier, is that Kathleen Norris? Is that who you're thinking of? Okay. Okay. She ended up, I think she probably got invited to do a series of lecture and she has a really small book just completely on laundry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty amazing stuff. I like talking with people about that because some people just hate laundry.

[00:11:58] And I'm one of those people who actually, I would rather do laundry than, you know, cook and plan and cook dinner. Yeah. Yeah. Because for me, there is something about laundry, you know, but that's not for everybody. You know, it's a nice, suggestive, paradigmatic instance or example. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:22] So, I mean, this is just one of a few books that you've written on family life, which you also wrote an earlier one called Also a Mother, Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, which I haven't read, but really the title is quite provocative. I'm very interested to read it. But I'm curious kind of how this book or the one we're talking about, In the Midst of Chaos, how does that sort of build on some of your earlier work on family life?

[00:12:48] And does it in any ways kind of depart from those other works of yours? Yes. You know, I didn't know I was doing this. In retrospect, I could say I have kind of a trilogy that began with Also a Mother. And that was written as I first started teaching. My children were four, six, or maybe younger, two, four, and seven.

[00:13:13] And it was in the 1980s when literature on women began to emerge in a variety of subject areas. And I was eager to read it because in my graduate work, maybe this is hard to believe for contemporary listeners, but I did not read a book by a woman in any of my graduate work.

[00:13:40] And, you know, it's a sad commentary on, but we've come a long way. And I was eager to read literature by and about women, particularly by and about mothers. And that book was an effort to express what a mother's voice might have to say about the dilemmas of work and family. And in particular, maybe the same question that you're asking about spirituality. What is theological about that question?

[00:14:08] And from there, the next two books in the trilogy depart, Let the Children Come, Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective is a subtitle. And then this book was the third book. They kind of depart in that the shift was from let's listen to women and mothers to what about if we really respected children's voices and agency?

[00:14:36] And it was also both books, I think, were supported because there was an emerging discussion called Childhood Studies, not just in religion, but in religion and beyond. That I think for the first time was thinking about children as agents, as people with voice, as people who we should, you know, orient ourself around.

[00:14:58] And so both of the books, the middle book on Let the Children Come is somewhat like also mother written with more of an academic audience than in the midst of chaos. In fact, maybe writers who are listening will understand this. I was I didn't know it, but I was writing two books at the same time and it went to review at the publisher. And they were basically saying, you know, you got to pull these books apart.

[00:15:28] And so in the midst of chaos kind of grew out of Let the Children Come because I had never had a chance in that more theoretical book about how we construct childhood or what are our ideas that we've inherited and that are changing about children and childhood.

[00:15:47] I had in that book, I had in that book, I didn't really get a chance to talk about a book that might be more useful in terms of parenting and how parenting is challenging and also a rich, formative spiritual practice. If thought about in that way. So this book kind of grew out of that middle book. Hmm. OK, no. Yeah, that's all very helpful. Thank you.

[00:16:16] Kind of digging a little deeper into the spiritual nature of parenthood, family life, childhood. I would say I think for a lot of us, I know for me, sometimes it can feel like family life and especially the care of children. It feels almost like antithetical to having like a rich, robust spiritual life.

[00:16:36] And I think a lot of that is because like our exemplars for what a rich spiritual life look like are often celibate men, which is not so helpful for a lot of us. But I'm curious, yeah, if you if you would say more maybe about kind of what does it mean in your minds for for parents to kind of contemplate in the chaos? Is this saying you have in the book that I really like?

[00:17:00] What does it mean for parents to kind of contemplate in the chaos of family life and how my parents kind of re-envision their spiritual lives in light of the chaos that they're sort of living on from a day to day basis? Because I think that's a hard, especially for like new parents. I know it was for me when I and even still like my oldest is six now.

[00:17:22] Even still, it's like, OK, what exactly does spiritual life look like now that I'm in this very new and different season where I don't have an hour every morning to, you know, open my Bible and pray? I still remember. I don't think we had kids yet. But my husband was a clergy minister to small congregation south of Chicago. And I think he and I did a an adult ed on prayer.

[00:17:49] And, you know, some of the suggestions were and I think, well, they were just not going to work for busy parents. And I don't think we had kids yet. I wish I knew exact, but I remember that one of the suggestions was like, get up an hour earlier. You know, and you're just like, that is not going to happen if you really are stressed. And I will say parenting is exhausting.

[00:18:16] And I think I do remember a couple moments when I would share these ideas in a congregational setting. And to say that you need to honor what you're already doing, you are already being faithful servants and ministers in your family setting with your children, would bring some of the audience members to tears.

[00:18:39] I think because they felt seen, heard, and relieved rather than dismissive. This book emerged in part while I was, I have the story in the book. I was teaching a course on, I think, spirituality and pastoral care. And I had assigned a book by Henry Nowen.

[00:19:01] And he is a beautiful, profound and widely read author who I think writes to a wide audience. And so he's much to be appreciated. But the book lifted up the desert fathers. Yes. You know, as you said, we're celibate and in the desert. And it lifted up silent solitude and prayer.

[00:19:27] And at the time I was reviewing it for my class to which I'd assigned a class on pastoral care and spirituality or something. I'm sitting in the bathroom on the toilet watching our two kids in the tub. And I'm sort of, you know, skimming the book, trying to get ready for class, trying to make sure the kids are, you know, not going to go under whatever.

[00:19:52] And I realized, oh, my goodness, we have to rethink, you know. And so I kind of pair other ways to think about, like conversation instead of silence. And I talk a bit about, actually in that moment, one of my children was gaining words.

[00:20:13] And just the amazing beauty of participating with him and the relational development versus, you know, the relational side of it versus solitude. And just trying to honor those components as potential places for prayer. You know, that may not be the time in your life when you can go to a mountaintop.

[00:20:41] And I guess what I would say to sort of push back on my book, you know, on my book is that you still need those places of quiet. They're invaluable. So I'm not really dismissing that. I'm maybe adding to it or trying to push back against a tradition that has prized practices that are difficult when you have young children. And, you know, I also remember watching like C.S. Lewis.

[00:21:11] Oh, I think it was the story of his life. And, you know, somebody brought tea into him while he was writing, you know. And I just thought, wow, that's not the life. Yeah. He didn't have little kids. And this was, you know. Yes, I do think just to say there are other ways to think about this that haven't been as prominent in the history of Christian thought and spirituality. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:39] I mean, taking maybe more of kind of a theological or maybe just theoretical kind of turn in the conversation, I want to ask you about a couple of different kind of sources that you draw on. So the first is Martin Luther is someone you kind of turn to as a source for sort of rehabilitating our understanding of parenting as something that's kind of spiritually formative for us as parents.

[00:22:03] So what contribution would you say Luther offers for sort of a theology of parenting, if we want to frame it that way? Yeah. Yeah. You know, as a practical theologian, we don't usually get to grapple with these major figures in the history of the Christian tradition.

[00:22:22] And I wish I was more of a Luther scholar, but I was absolutely delighted to be pointed toward by other people who are scholars, some of his writings on the family. And, you know, the big theme that he was developing was pushing back against a very clerical, religious sense of calling that you had to be in ministry as a priest or a Catholic sister ordained.

[00:22:51] And his whole idea of the priesthood of all believers was the big framework. And then underneath that, he himself, I think, in part to demonstrate was got married, had children, you know, and inherited children, had a big boisterous family.

[00:23:10] And he writes out of that about finding, I don't know, his words, and he's a very verbose, you know, doesn't mince words kind of writer. And, you know, just while he's diapering his kids as a moment of sanctity that he's trying to honor as sacred.

[00:23:31] And so he is one of the many who tried to honor the everyday as a site of religious calling and spiritual activity. And he wasn't alone. You know, I think as I was doing some of the research and writing, it's helpful to not ignore that this was part of the Protestant Reformation, but there were Roman Catholics who were also making similar kinds of arguments.

[00:23:59] And although I'm not that familiar with his work, there is a similarly, I think, 16th century, similar era, Francis de Saul, who was making a similar kind of case. So there is definitely a stream in the tradition. Luther was really important. And one of my headings was what a friend I have in Luther. Yeah. I was, you know, when you find these folks in the tradition,

[00:24:29] this really was, for me, a boost to helpful for my own thinking about what I was doing. Yeah, absolutely. And they're kind of diamonds in the rough. Because like I said, I mean, some like the saints of the Catholic Church, for instance, so many of them, like the vast majority of them are celibate men and women and, you know, priests and religious.

[00:24:48] So it is so refreshing to meet people in the tradition, at least on the page, who, yeah, maybe come from different kinds of lifestyles that maybe we can relate to a little bit better. I want to talk about sacrifice, because I know this can be pretty tricky theoretical terrain. But you don't hesitate to kind of jump right into it in your book, especially as it relates to parenting, of course.

[00:25:16] But in doing that, you advocate for a model of what you call mutuality. And I don't know if that's something you're drawing from others or from somebody else. But I'm wondering if you could kind of help us understand what you mean by that term mutuality, and what, in particular, in kind of a parent and child relationship, that sort of mutuality might look like. Yeah, I am drawing on a bigger conversation.

[00:25:44] And I think the background is that, and this, you could even blame some of this on reformed Protestantism, not completely, because it's also in the Jewish tradition and the Catholic tradition. But there's a strong trajectory of really lifting up sacrifice and putting yourself last.

[00:26:08] And in fact, you can even find in some of these early church and reformed church theologian statements about, I had to put it so strongly, but hating yourself and loving the other, or condemning self-love.

[00:26:26] And in fact, even this word narcissism, which is a problem, but there is something about mature narcissism, of mature love of self, that I'm trying to reclaim. So I'm pushing against that trajectory and joining others who have said, you know, even if you go back biblically and you look at the commandment to love others as yourself,

[00:26:54] even there, there is what you could describe as a mutuality, where you aren't excluding self-love, but you're seeing that self-love is deeply related to the capacity to love others. And that without a love of others. And that without a love of self, it's hard to sustain love of others.

[00:27:16] And that they really, those two ought to be in sort of dynamic relationship to each other rather than antagonistic or oppositional. And sometimes this requires, you know, a reframing of how we understand the cross and atonement. And, you know, I won't go down that long theoretical debate, but it's a really important question in the Christian tradition.

[00:27:43] And so another word for mutuality that is in the tradition and maybe more prominent in Catholicism is the word keratos, which has in it the idea that, you know, you love others as you love yourself, that there's more of a dialectic between the people in a loving relationship.

[00:28:09] When it comes to children, I talk somewhere else, not in this book, but about sort of transitional hierarchy and a move towards mutuality because children are not fully capable of doing some of the loving acts that we assume that are even sacrificial. So I don't eliminate sacrifice. It's so key.

[00:28:38] I have to say parenting is a constant sacrifice of time and energy and giving. But what I loved is a Roman Catholic theologian, Christine Goodorf talks about the hope that you are moving towards a greater mutuality as your children grow. And that that is the goal, not an ongoing sacrificial parental stance.

[00:29:06] You know, and I'm not the only one who's critiqued this very popular book, The Giving Tree, because it epitomizes, you know, the story as it evolves. The tree gives so much that they end up as a stump, you know, they're just chopped down.

[00:29:24] And that that's kind of a problematic story that maybe doesn't represent the more maybe complicated, but maybe in my view, better way to think about the give and take of loving in a family context. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:29:45] I think I think, too, that that kind of model just overlooks or or yeah, I guess just sort of overlooks the like repression and restraint or the repression and and sort of resentment that can like really fester when your whole life is just sacrifice for other people. Even if it's your children, right, it can be so many lost opportunities and just so much labor involved that I think it can be.

[00:30:16] All right. Like you said, there's so much sacrifice involved, but can also be dangerous to lean like too much, I think, on that sort of language or that sort of understanding of your own parenthood. Also, I realized I skipped over Mary. I wanted to talk to I wanted to talk about Mary because we talked about Martin Luther and the other one I want to talk about was Mary, because you kind of turn to her as sort of a model. All right. Mary, the mother of Jesus, especially the passage in Luke 2, right, which talks about Mary.

[00:30:45] It says that she treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart when Jesus is a child. So, yeah, I'm curious, like, what does this passage sort of say to you or what does it evoke about the spiritual life of a parent? Do you think? You know, one of the gifts of my vocation as a scholar, teacher, writer is space to think.

[00:31:09] And I sometimes would just get things in my head and they would I would have to figure them out. And I think that reflection on Mary may have even begun, you know, during Advent, hearing those words and thinking, wow, that is interesting. What does that mean?

[00:31:34] And, you know, just a little research shows that of the four gospels, Mark is a little more attentive to women's voices. I mean, he's still been critiqued as not giving them very much voice, but at least there are passages like that one where, you know, it suggests and I, you know, that Mary might have been the first theologian.

[00:32:00] You know, she's in terms of the Christian tradition on Jesus. And even though in this chapter, I don't extend the reflection further, I started, I think, elsewhere writing about what could be in that word ponder and certainly a sense of awe, but certainly a sense of anxiety, knowing what is coming.

[00:32:26] Because you have these prophecies around the birth that she's very aware of. So just trying to wonder the many things that she was thinking, you know, that Luke doesn't tell us. And the same phrase is not just used at the birth, but after Jesus doesn't show up on their journey when he's about 12. And finally they find him.

[00:32:55] And again, that reflection, you know, what could she have been thinking? In this chapter, in this book, when I talk about Mary, I also have a chance to use that word ponder and talk a bit about attentive presence, which is so demanded as a parent of young children, using some other authors who wrote about what's entailed.

[00:33:24] You know, what does that call out of us to be so watchful and present as a kind of, again, a formative practice that we're doing daily when our children are young. And so Mary gave me an opportunity to kind of pull in some of that reflection as well.

[00:33:48] Yeah, it almost reminds me of what's the Jewish way of interpreting scripture and that scripture is a living word. And that, you know, what's it? Midrash? Is that right? Midrash. Midrash, where you have the written word and that's the, you know, that's the text, but that it's not done.

[00:34:12] It's still, you know, so there are times in my work where I will want to take a biblical text and wonder about the other stories that are within it, behind it, that we might think about. And I know a lot of Protestants have not had a chance to think a lot about Mary. That was the other thing I would notice during Advent was, you know, it's a lot of men, you know, the three wise men and the shepherds.

[00:34:41] And unfortunately, in the Catholic tradition, Mary has been idealized in some really unfortunate, unhelpful ways. And so, you know, just trying to give her a different kind of presence in the tradition.

[00:34:56] And other women's theologians were, I think some of my work on this began when I was invited to contribute a chapter to a volume on Mary that other women in biblical studies and systematic theology were rethinking her as well. Yeah. So that discussion was influencing my use of her in this book.

[00:35:20] And, you know, I shall also say just quickly that I'm in a Protestant tradition that is sort of American-born Christian Church Disciples of Christ. And one of its tenets was kind of to go back to the early church, which meant going back to Scripture.

[00:35:38] And so even though I'm not like a Southern Baptist where I know all the Scripture by heart, but I think for me it's definitely a constant source of thought for me. Yeah, sure. Okay. Okay. I think, yeah, one of the things I've noticed with my own kids, particularly, you know, my oldest is a good bit older than our next two,

[00:36:03] but just how early, in my own case at least, at least how early I noticed this sense of justice within my children, which kind of took me by surprise. I almost thought that was something that's more, I mean, I think it is, in a lot of respects, something that is maybe cultivated by parents or by, you know, adults in a kid's life.

[00:36:27] But I was surprised to see this kind of come up almost naturally without any nurturing around it at such an early age. And one of the ways it came up was, like, when we would drive by people who were, you know, begging for food or money. And she would always want to know what was going on. Why did they need food? Why did they need money? Could we go get them a burger or whatever?

[00:36:52] And then she really wanted to, like, she was like, can we start making, like, bags of food that we can, you know, non-perishable food that we can keep in the car to hand out to people that we drive by? And it's, like, it was really kind of beautiful, but also convicting to see this in her. But I want, yeah, so I want to kind of ask you, because you devote a whole chapter in the book to justice, especially justice within the family, of course.

[00:37:20] So I'm curious what you would say about, like, how parents might sort of cultivate a sense of justice in the hearts and minds of their kids. And then also, like, especially like a sense of justice that extends beyond sort of the inner circle of just kind of one's own family and close friends. What might it look like to sort of cultivate that? Because I think, you know, seeing that in my daughter, I mean, you don't want to, like, indoctrinate your kids, right?

[00:37:50] Or, like, politicize them or something. But you also don't want to squelch that sort of natural compassion, of course. And you want to cultivate that. So what would, yeah, what would you say about all of that? Yeah, I like hearing the story of your daughter because in some ways it points to something that I think I'm, you know, deeply believe, which is that the capacity is already there.

[00:38:15] That there is sort of, maybe this is too naive or optimistic, but hopeful, that there is an inherent compassion that children already understand. I guess I see this some even in my grandkids. I mean, sometimes there's a lot of antagonism between siblings, but there's also sometimes a real sense of ability to empathize with the pain of another.

[00:38:41] And, you know, so in some ways doing justice in the family is partly just nurturing what's already there. But it does take nurture. You know, one of the other things, I don't know if I put this in the book, but I feel like I've said it a thousand times to people or my kids who are now parenting kids, that when I would see one of my children putting down another of their siblings,

[00:39:10] I really developed a phrase that is so, was so valuable, which is, you cannot make yourself feel better by making your sibling feel worse. And it won't work anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And so even cultivating, which is not probably the hardest forum, you know, non-antagonism between siblings is so important.

[00:39:36] And I guess one of the things I'm saying in this chapter is that the family is a microcosm. What you do in the family will have implications for the wider justice in the world. And there needs to be justice within the family, which is really difficult to orchestrate. Because families have been, at least in modernity, designed with great inequities.

[00:40:00] You know, forcing men primarily to work 60 hours, which is, you know, if you have young children, probably not appropriate. And forcing women to work zero hours and, you know, paid work and be full-time parents. That's also really difficult. And so this chapter advocates for a model of shared responsibility within the family.

[00:40:23] And then extending that over time to your children as they evolve into more responsible family participants. So that even that is an act of embodying justice around the household labor that needs to be done. And it's never perfect. You know, I mean, I have to say we failed in so many ways and everybody finds different ways to do it.

[00:40:50] But, you know, there were things that we did that were just really insignificant, again, for justice inside the family. Which is, you know, we made our kids take turns going to the grocery store so that they would actually see, you know, that the food doesn't just magically appear in the refrigerator. You know, if we're not planting and harvesting, at least we're showing this is what you do in a modern society to get food. You know, so those are minor things.

[00:41:18] And it is a transitional process in terms of justice and internal to the family. I'm so moved by the story of seeing people who are homeless. I think congregations and many of the listeners, and I'm not right now active in a congregation,

[00:41:36] so, you know, but congregations can be really important places for families to participate where they'll have more opportunity to join in actions that are doing justice in the wider world. And I think one of the things that I talk about in that chapter is the difficulty of this. You know, you have so many responsibilities internal to the family.

[00:42:03] You know, how do you then be an activist socially for justice in the wider world? And, you know, drawing on examples of parents who have tried different ways, whether, you know, living in a poor community where the commitment is to be joining in and lifting that community. Some parents have done that, and it's difficult.

[00:42:31] But just kind of talking about ways in which parents have tried to do this. A couple parents talk about the difficulties as children get older. You know, it's a lot harder to take, you know, maybe not, but harder to take a 14-year-old to a food kitchen or a march for justice on some issue than it might be a 7- or 8-year-old who's at that point more willing to be formed.

[00:42:58] It reminds me of something I also say in my chapter on reading as a spiritual practice, which is there are studies that show that you don't necessarily have to, you know, force your children to read or force your children to do acts of justice. That children learn a lot about reading or doing acts of justice by watching you read or do those things.

[00:43:25] So, you know, there's lots of ways to think about this question. One thing I will conclude with is that when I was framing the book, I had to think, what practices should I include? And I had, you know, I drew on ones that we were more, I was more familiar with in my own family context. And it is a book where someone else would write about a different practice.

[00:43:53] And a good example would be, I don't have a chapter on hospitality. I had a friend who was so amazingly, you know, good at inviting us over for dinner and being a host. So doing justice was a question that was on my mind. And that's how it partly got into the book as similar to reading, because I love to read. I love reading children's stories.

[00:44:21] And I always had to think about that as a spiritual practice. And I do think it does illustrate the everydayness. If the dinner table is crucial, and there would be questions like your daughters that would come up there. You know, we might be talking about a theft in the locker room at the high school.

[00:44:41] And, you know, in a very racially integrated high school, some of the misperceptions of how that theft came out and talking about, you know, the wider economic political context that might be behind that. You know, so even that my kids may not remember that.

[00:45:02] But I do feel like even that brief dinner conversation was part of a spiritual practice of forming our children to think differently about, you know, some of the wider public issues. Yeah, no, definitely. I want to just really briefly pick up on something you said, which was the difficulty sort of keeping the family to some extent turned to the extent you can, right?

[00:45:31] Yeah, you only have so much margin. But keeping the family somewhat outward facing, right? And not totally inward looking. Because so much as a parent, like so much of your, I mean, I'm still a really new parent. But so much of your like energy and time is invested in taking care of your kids, providing them a good childhood, providing for them financially.

[00:45:55] There's just, it's such a big responsibility and occupies so much of your mind and your, just your, you know, day to day life. That it's tricky, like trying to figure out how to keep the house from being like just this sort of enclosure. But also like imagining the house as like a threshold as well as an enclosure. And then how to enact that, right?

[00:46:23] It becomes like almost this problem that you try to solve. So yeah, I'm curious, like you mentioned congregational life, but maybe kind of like for families who maybe want to start looking more outward. What are some ways you might imagine that they could kind of dip, begin to like dip their toes in and involve their kids in some of that justice work? Yeah.

[00:46:51] You know, I love that the two metaphors, family is enclosure, family is a threshold. And I think that just thinking about the family as a microcosm that is open, that where the practices internal of the family should ripple out to the wider context. And congregations are certainly one avenue.

[00:47:17] Thinking also about activities, you know, within the school and the school system. And or even in the extracurricular things that children get involved in.

[00:47:29] One of the, I think, hidden arguments in this book or that could be its own book or should it be its own article is a sense of disturbance that I saw in myself and then reflected around me of parents just indulging. That's maybe too strong of a word. It's all about your own children. Yeah. You know, there's something probably sociobiological about that.

[00:47:58] You know, our first loves are going to be those that are biologically related to us. That's almost a, you know, a fact in the evolutionary psychological studies that people have done. But the family needs to sort of counteract that.

[00:48:18] And I maybe witnessed this most powerfully around extracurricular, particularly sports, where people were just so invested in their own children's success. And so an argument or message in the book is, wow, it's not all about just your children. It's about all the children. And, you know, we rise and sink together.

[00:48:43] And if we don't think about the welfare of children at large, it's going to affect your own children anyway. Okay. So just kind of that message. How to get... I do think congregations are a great avenue for modeling this. But schools are a huge institution.

[00:49:05] And we happen to live in the Mid-South where we had a deep commitment to, you know, remaining within public schools. In part because they're publicly funded and they're not isolated in terms of class, race, and so forth. So, you know, I think that's one place that children may see other ways to get involved beyond themselves.

[00:49:35] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I love that. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. We talked about sacrifice a little, a good bit earlier. I want to kind of maybe extend that a little bit. And maybe I'll begin my question with quoting kind of a short little passage from your book. So you write in your book, Children make readily apparent that we must choose among many possibilities and then live well enough within the fixed parameters of these choices.

[00:50:02] They teach us about the need to surrender before our limits and cut our losses. They are often the best reminder of our ultimate fallibility and vulnerability before life swims and its ultimate end.

[00:50:15] So I guess my question is why, why are these experiences, these sort of limits, experiences of like limitations of like our finitude, but also our failures as parents and our, just our sort of inability to be enough or to be all that we need to be for our children or want to be for our children. Why is that sort of such a central feature for, of kind of a parent's life, do you think?

[00:50:43] And then how might that actually be kind of spiritually fruitful or, or, or good kind of a moral formation or a interpersonal formation for someone to have those sort of limitations and failures kind of imposed upon them? It's funny. It's funny.

[00:51:06] Parenting is a constant, you know, move from sort of one failure to the next. It's almost impossible to be a perfect parent. In fact, you shouldn't be. And how to live with that and how to, you know, how to live with your children reflecting back to you.

[00:51:32] Your failures, you know, that it's, it's, it's just going to happen. So I think it's sort of endemic and to parenting and, and maybe, you know, some of this is not as proximate because my kids are now grown, but they do have kids and I'm with their grandkids. And it's, and it's a constant test.

[00:52:00] You know, one of the words that comes to mind is patience, the extended amounts of patience that you have to have. And then, and I'm not sure if I, you know, bring this into the book, but, you know, a place for self-forgiveness when you're going to lose your patience.

[00:52:19] And, and, and the, and the place for apology, apology, you know, to your children and your grandchildren when you're inevitably going to fall short.

[00:52:34] I was helped in some ways because I, you know, prior to writing this book, I had done some clinical training and was doing some pastoral counseling and was reading a couple psychoanalytically influenced contemporary psychologists who talk about good enough parenting.

[00:52:54] And what's really nice about that term is that this was D.W. Winnicott, a British child psychologist, and he was talking about this continuum of sort of indulging at one extreme. You're hovering, you're always present, you're trying to do everything for your kid and, you know, complete neglect where you're absent.

[00:53:23] And that there's this wide middle ground that you're trying to find as good enough. You know, that's neither of those extremes. And there is a pretty wide middle ground. And I was also reading another self-psychologist. He's in the psychoanalyte tradition, Heinz Kohat, who in his clinical work talks about the value of empathic failures.

[00:53:50] And, of course, in that setting, the clinician, the therapist makes a mistake. And then it becomes part of the analytic process of conversation of why that was so wounding. Well, you're not going to do that with the child. But in his theory of development, he makes a place for failure that failure opens up, this is hard to believe, but room for the child to grow.

[00:54:16] And when you're not present, hovering, they have to figure out how to do things. And that maybe isn't a bad thing. So all of that is sort of within your question, I think. And certainly the question of finitude, that's a whole other one.

[00:54:34] But, you know, I think when you birth a child, this goes back to my reflections and also a mother, that right then, you know, you're bringing to life someone who will die. And your own finitude is so, I, you know, for me, and it's not true for every person who goes through pregnancy. But it was a, you know, it's a real relativizer of life's beginnings and endings.

[00:55:02] And it still is as I age, because it's really clear to me now that I'll only see my, I hope, you know, this is in the best of all circumstances. You know, I won't get to see my grandchildren's full flourishing.

[00:55:20] And, you know, so I do think being in the family context, you know, it's always a sense of life's beginnings and endings. Yeah. They're so present. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think, too, like, part of what I was after in that question, too, is, and this maybe reveals the selfishness of my own parenting.

[00:55:48] The way that children sort of dramatically restructure your life. Yeah. Not just, I mean, certainly in the, like, day-to-day sphere. But even more so, I would say, for me, like, in the, sort of the plans and prospects you have for yourself in your life. Yes. How much those have to, just have to shift or be, or have, like, very real and concrete constraints on them.

[00:56:13] So I'm also interested, like, what would you say about, I don't know, if spiritual integration is too kind of psychiatric of language for it. But, like, how might you envision sort of a spirituality of living within those kinds of constraints, if that makes sense?

[00:56:34] Boy, I think that's one of the hardest things is that children, so many doors do shut. Things you don't get to. I still hear my husband, Mark, regret, and even now, what we cannot do because of commitments, obligations we have made to care for children, grandchildren in this case.

[00:57:03] And that you give up, that, you know, I know that word sacrifice. And that it does take me back to some of my work that I have done more recently on calling. One of the chapters is on missed callings and playing with Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken.

[00:57:31] You know, it's not like a hero. He really, people focus on all, like, this heroic figure at the end of the path that took the path untraveled. But what is the poem really lifts up is the regret and the loss and living with that, that there were callings that you give up, you know. And I do think one of my struggles was I kind of refused.

[00:57:58] So one of the things that I lived with, both in the Also a Mother book and in the Vocation book that I've written on lies that we tell ourselves about calling, is that I end up living with conflicting callings and multiple callings. And, you know, how do you do that? And that's really a difficult life challenge that parenting accentuates.

[00:58:26] I think it's one that everybody faces about choice and loss. But definitely children make it acute and just living with the pain of and the frustration.

[00:58:46] And, you know, I think, again, in the Also a Mother book, I do talk about the good enough and the idea that we were cheating on every front and failing on every front, you know, in moderate ways. You know, so we didn't, we weren't, we weren't just full-time workers all out. We didn't do a full-time job even if we got a full-time salary. We didn't, we couldn't.

[00:59:09] And we also, you know, had to cut corners around like what the ideal of full-time parenting, which I do argue in other places is okay, you know, to realize that parents are going to have other interests. It's not a bad thing for children to live with and to know about. I think that's my hope.

[00:59:35] Like I hope, and I, you know, that I was modeling to my kids that I had a deep love for them, but I also had some love for some other things. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So, but it's, yeah, it's really a good question. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:59:55] I, I think there's, yeah, there's the finitude piece and then there's the failure piece you were talking about too, of kind of living with your own failures and the way that that like reveals also, I think the limits on your control of the situation, your control of your kid's childhood.

[01:00:10] I think there's this real temptation to like, try to like very carefully curate your kid's childhood and your practice of parenthood and then post about it on Instagram and show everybody how magical your family life is. Yeah. Maybe that's because that's how people post. So we think that that's actually realistic and that that's what we should be striving for. Yeah.

[01:00:33] But I think, I think that kind of brings us to your last chapter, which is the one I mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation, which is this chapter on blessing and letting go, which I really, really loved. So you're sort of ending with all these, these meditations on what it means to bless and let go of our children kind of gradually over time as they grow up. Why do you suppose, I mean, perhaps it's a bit obvious, but I think we could dig deeper and certainly in your chapter you dig deeper.

[01:01:00] Why, why, why do you think it's so difficult for many of us as parents to kind of relinquish control over our children and, and then to sort of like entrust them to God's care as well as they grow older? Yeah. I, I, just to pick that word that you've used control, you know, I think it was fascinating for me to run across other people who had reflected on the reality.

[01:01:27] That you can choose to have a child, but you cannot, you do not choose the child that you have. Yeah. And I've seen this so acutely with my grandkids. Certainly I've experienced with my own, and with my own self and my personality, you, children are born who they are. And you have, and you have in some ways, very little control over that.

[01:01:52] And you have to live and work with the child that you get, which may or may not match kind of who you are and your own preferences. And, um, allowing for that, why, you know, to your question, kind of why is that difficult?

[01:02:09] Maybe, um, I think some of that is our own, um, we, we are so connected to our children that they, sometimes there's even kind of a merger. You know, they are us. And we want to either save them from failures that we have made, um, or we want them to, to fulfill what we didn't get to fulfill. You know, they kind of have to live up to what we want for them.

[01:02:37] And at some point, it's really important to let that go. And, and I think the metaphor that came out in the chill, the Let the Children Come book of children as agents and children as gifts. And there's this whole beautiful stream in the Christian tradition, and not just the Christian tradition, but also the Jewish tradition out, out of which Christianity grew, of really children are not ours. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:03:06] They are given to us, and we have to relinquish them. And how important that is, you know, both in their school achievements, their extracurricular, their choices for, you know, higher education. And it's, it isn't easy to do. And part of that is that merger projection that goes on, because we are deeply connected. And in fact, if you birth your child, you were physically connected to them, you know.

[01:03:35] And now they're other. And that is a really complicated, I think, human dynamic. I love the word blessing. What was fun about this chapter, and maybe anything that you write is that, you know, you pick something, and then you just find all sorts of more things than you realize that you knew were out there. Blessing is such a powerful act.

[01:04:03] And it's such a powerful act in scriptural traditions, all the way back to Hebrew and Old Testament scriptures. And it's also, you know, through the New Testament. And then it certainly is part of our daily life and our liturgical life. You know, a benediction is a blessing.

[01:04:24] And I began to think about how, you know, just the leave-taking of our children, whether it's when you put them to sleep, which is a leave-taking of sorts, or send them to school or to a caregiver. And that we tend to have words we don't think about, but we're blessing them usually in those acts of transition.

[01:04:47] So kind of reclaiming that word as a daily mundane part of children's and family life. And then this thing of relinquishment and letting go. Wow, that's, you know, fortunately you do it slowly. And there are poignant moments of doing it that entered into that chapter. Certainly for us.

[01:05:15] And I've got a grandchild that's going to get on a school bus. And, you know, their parents may not experience what I experienced because they're just so glad that somebody else will get them to the school. But I just, I ran across a poem that's in that chapter that just caught my own emotional, spiritual-like sense of, wow, this is monumental.

[01:05:41] Likewise, taking my first son to his first dorm room had a similar poignancy. And, you know, every step you have less control over their lives. And, you know, you still have responsibility. So living with that lack of control and responsibility is a question that parents, you know, I struggled with and lived with.

[01:06:10] And we, you know, I have to say maybe I'm blessed with a personality that's a little less controlling than some. And that helped me a lot. But that's just who I was. I had friends who were very, you know, and everyone has to find their way through this of, you know, dictating where their kids might go to college, for example.

[01:06:34] And I sometimes regret, wow, maybe I should have forced, you know, one of my sons to do this or to do that. And I can say now, as a 70-year-old, it may not all work out, but it mostly all works out, you know. So even though one of our sons who I think, wow, he should have gone to a small school, you know, even though he struggled quite a bit at a large school and dropped out, it's fine.

[01:07:02] It's in the end, it's, you know, I didn't, couldn't control that. And he found his way, you know. So that may not be true for every life story, but it helps to know that there's, it's okay not to be controlling every bit of our kids' lives. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It's an encouraging word for sure. Well, I recognize that we're over time, partly because I asked so many follow-up questions.

[01:07:32] So thank you for your patience in sticking with the conversation. Yeah, this has been a really fun conversation. As I said, I loved the book. For listeners, again, the title is In the Midst of Chaos, Caring for Children is Spiritual Practice. Before we close, though, really quickly, I wanted to give you a chance if there's any, any books. I know you published another book much more recently. If you'd like to share about that or any books or just works in progress that you might like to share about here. Well, thanks.

[01:08:00] And I'm sure I talked plenty if that's why we went over time. I love this conversation. It's been fun. You know, this book, In the Midst of Chaos, and the one that is probably going to be my last book, are written for a wider audience. And the most recent book is called Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling. And it really tries to complexify the whole idea of how we're called and, you know, purpose and meaning in life.

[01:08:30] And the chapters are, you know, just some of the undersides that we should talk about. Missed callings, blocked callings, fractured callings. You can hear some of the echoes from this book. And the last chapter, it's, hadn't thought about this, very similar to the last chapter of this book. It's on relinquished callings. So things that you, you know, you give up. You spend your life doing and then you relinquish them.

[01:08:57] And so, yeah, there is a nice parallel between these two books that I hadn't thought about until we talked. Well, you just gave me the next book on my to-read list. So thank you for that. Oh, well, thanks for this conversation. It's really fun. If I write, it's to reach, oh, this wider public. And I'm really grateful for your help in that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Of course. Yeah. Thank you so much, Bonnie. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks. Thanks.