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  • Traveling with ChildrenMothering and Ethics of the Ordinary World
  • Laurie Zoloth (bio)

Vol. 10, No. 4. 1995.

Making Reservations: The Journey as Leavetaking

Here is the picture of the seeker on the spiritual path. A person walks alone, the way is difficult, the terrain dramatic. Without knowing the gender of the person depicted by the text, do we have any doubt that the seeker is male? …

Such texts always leave me muttering about who is watching the four-year-olds near the water, who is bouncing the babies to sleep at the edges of the gathering, who is washing the plates after dinner, who is dying the cloth for the sacred raiment. The work that must support the quest is invisible. And the oldest construct in theology and philosophy is this very invisibility. Yet for women it is this work that frames the world and the critical struggle to find moral meaning, especially in light of the starkness of the absence of this feminist perspective in traditional text.

The spiritual quest is written as a quest away—a journey away from the ordinary to the sacred, away from the demands of the daily to the purity of the holy. Yet in the struggle to encounter what God wants of us, I must find meaning, holiness in this life. It cannot mean that God wants flight from what I can know as most holy—the birth and breath of my children.

Judaism has been criticized with extraordinary vigor for the lack of attention to the female voice in the text, and this critique is justified. The challenge, then, is to construct an ethics of ordinariness without sentimentality about the daily moral choices that are made by women and to reflect on the theology that is partner to such an ethics. In this construct the notions of ethics and spirituality are inseparable, neither possible without the light of the other.

We are drawn into the process of public discourse by the sensational acts at the outskirts of human community: the pregnancies by radical technology, the rescue of the particular child. Yet the daily acts of choice that thousands of women make, and see as choices of faith, are far more difficult. What would the shape of ethics or spirituality be if we focused on the ethics and theology of the moral gesture of raising children who are in our lives and through whom we carry the obligation to the past and the next generation?

This article began as a conversation with colleagues, feminist scholars of religion and ethics, about why we couldn’t seem to get our articles in on time. It was all the interruption! The chicken pox! The field trip! And here we were, trying to write important things about The Good, each of us balancing the teaching and creation of theological reflection with the teaching and the creation of the babies and children who we mother. Usually, this second work is seen as that distraction that takes us from the rigor of the first. The parallel universe of the mundane is the messy, tangible, and embodied that surrounds all of our theory. …

What is at stake in this argument is not the simple recognition that the work of the female role needs to be honored or seen, although this has been a key feminist insight. What is at stake, rather, is the claim that the paradigm of the faith journey as usually envisioned … is just not the one that describes an accurate story of women’s lives. The very notion of spirituality as otherworldliness, as taking place outside the home, understood as a leavetaking from family, as rooted in autonomous journey, is a different vision than the one we carry in our daily lives. But there is a countervailing notion: that it is the bonds of obligation, found within the family, and within the ordinary, that generate the renewal of daily meaning. …

I do not mean to heroicize mothering uncritically: The family is complex, both liberatory and conservative. Chicken pox happens, and much, much worse. The ordinary difficult obligations, dependency, tragic loss, and tragic angers are often precisely what people want sacred refuge from. But I want...

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