Spirituality, Mothering, and Public Leadership: Women’s Life Writing and Generative Directions for Spirituality Studies

INTRODUCTION

The history of Christian spirituality is filled with extraordinary models of holiness, tantalizingly different from contemporary everyday contexts such as the Desert Fathers who sit on pillars far from civilization, medieval women who find Jesus in an anchorage, Russian pilgrims who wander endlessly to learn how to pray, and young women who flee their comfortable homes to enter convents and then levitate amidst a soul-searing, heart-piercing union with God. I love to read and teach these classics, and as a practical theologian I seek to engage them in transformative and life-giving ways. But as I have studied and taught Christian spirituality for two decades, I, a laywoman, wrestle with the gaps between these texts and everyday practices: How do we address the hermeneutical silences that certain groups in particular encounter vis-à-vis classic texts? How do we, as scholars of Christian spirituality, retrieve, adapt, name, and/or construct a fund of spiritual vocabulary, imagery, and practice rich enough, resonant enough, moving enough, to speak to and to give voice to contemporary people? More specifically, as a mother of three children who permit little time for solitude or wandering over Russian steppes, I wonder: where do mothers find ourselves, those of us whose spiritual landscapes are not deserts or convents, our primary practices not often including pilgrimages or retreats? In a blog published in The New York Times, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg describes her parallel experience, a difficulty in framing everyday mothering as spiritual practice, vis-à-vis Jewish traditions of spirituality: “There is a not-very-implicit assumption that someone else, somewhere, is in charge of the sticky, cuddly, needy, emotional little humans who evidently impede a person’s ability to live a life of spiritual service.”¹ Noticing how few mothers people the classic texts of Christian spirituality, noticing the near absence of children in these spiritual itineraries, I ask: How articulate more fully the complexity of mothering as a dimension of Christian spirituality, as a spiritual practice? How might we identify and critically engage maternal spiritual wisdom (or lack thereof) from the Christian tradition?

Few recognized saints are mothers with some notable exceptions, such as Saint Anne, Saint Elizabeth, Saint Monica, Saint Birgitta of Sweden, Saint

Encounters

© 2017 Creative Commons: George L. Smyth

Louise de Marillac, and the American Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. Sister Donald Corcoran identifies “spiritual maternity” and “spiritual paternity” as the earliest model of Christian spiritual direction.² And yet, although “spiritual motherhood” is an important concept and practice in Christian tradition, we know far less about the concrete, everyday practices of mothering as experienced not by celibate elders but by laywomen embedded in the day-to-day care of children. While historians such as Carolyn Walker Bynum have uncovered significant maternal imagery in medieval piety³ and scholars such as Wendy M. Wright have brought attention more generally to family and spirituality,⁴ mothers’ own writing is poorly represented among “classic” texts in Christian spirituality. Even spiritual autobiographies by mothers too often hide or mute the author’s mothering life; this is the case with the Book of Margery Kempe, widely regarded as the earliest existing autobiography published in English, dictated by an English laywoman who had fourteen children but rarely ever mentions them in the text. This is not to diminish the power of monastic/contemplative traditions in nourishing the lives of laity. Nor do I seek to reinstate mothering as women’s vocation in any essentializing way. Yet, the omissions, marginalization, abstract romanticization, and silences regarding mothering reflect and yield a highly ambiguous conception of the spiritual worth of this fundamental practice core to human life; mothering is both undervalued and highly romanticized and there is a dearth of spiritual resources by and for Christian mothers. As Margaret Hebblethwaite wrote more than three decades ago: “So few of our major Christian exemplars in history have been mothers . . . . For the mother, it has to be a matter of personal experiment in a largely uncharted ground, and it is...