What I Learned This Lent

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This Lent I had big plans. Big plans. I was going to stare down those things that held me back from being who God made me to be. I was going to conquer those habits, those sins, those pesky human weaknesses once and for all. 

And once again, I am reminded that I don’t conquer anything. He does. On his time table. 

I just finished the beautiful book The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life by Seth Haines, and of the many books I have read over this Lent, it was the one I needed most. 

Because it reminded me of what I need most. Divine Love. Putting it first. Putting all creation, all created goods second to that love. Drinking from it when I feel pain, loss, and fear. It is always there, waiting for us.

Have you ever noticed when God is trying to hammer home a point, when he really wants you to understand something he sends it in multiple ways? This ordering in our hearts point has been every where I look. I found it as I finished Searching for and Maintaining Interior Peace by Fr. Jaques Philippe, where he quotes several saints and spiritual directors that echoed this message of turning to the Divine love quickly after we fall. From Fr. Francois Libermann:

When we always see the same faults in ourselves, let us remain in our lowliness before Him. Let us open our souls to Him so that He may see our wounds and our scars that it may please Him to heal us when and as He desires...

The more we are dependent on him, the more our souls acquire grandeur, beauty and glory, so much so that we can heartily glory in our infirmities. The greater our infirmities, the greater, too, our joy and happiness, because our dependence on God becomes that much more necessary.

From Padre Pio:

Peace is the simplicity of spirit, the serenity of conscience, the tranquility of the soul and the bond of love. Peace is order, it is the harmony in each one of us, it is a continual joy that is born in witnessing a clear conscience, it is the holy joy of a heart wherein God reigns.

When I started the Bible in a Year podcast with Fr. Mike Schmitz, right out of the gate, the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis echoes this truth too. All sin comes from enjoying a created good, a part of God’s creation, in a disordered way. The apple was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and it was desired to make one wise. 

All sin is just substituting something for that apple: kids, jobs, sports, or as Haines writes, a coping mechanism like food, shopping, drinking, Netflix, Instagram – and putting it ahead of our God. But it can never satisfy, because our hearts were created to love and be loved by Him. 

Then we are like Adam and Eve after they ate the apple. We hide from God in our shame, and we see our vulnerable state, our nakedness, and try to cover it up. Before we know it, we move farther and farther away from God if we are not aware of what’s happening.

But when we can quickly turn back to the Divine love, to God who wants to brush our sins away and keep loving us, then we stop feeling shame, and our hearts are filled to the brim once again with Divine love. When we recognize that to be weak is the human condition, we can quickly turn to compassion for ourselves, and compassion for others. Because when we are filled up by Divine love, we have more for everyone else. 

Basking in that love has been the joy of this Lent. Even when I fall, even though I caved and ate popcorn last night at 10 pm, the awareness of how much he desires to be with us and walk with us and how much he loves us is so clear right now. Nothing can stand in his way if we open the door to God, not even our sin. 

Talking about sin is always unpopular (see John the Baptist’s head on a platter), especially with teenagers. They see the world upholding all these created goods that are good in themselves but are valued above God in our culture. So we go back to the beginning, to the Garden. God created you for love. He wants to walk with you. He wants to spare you the pain of evil. But when we keep choosing to eat of it, when we live our lives for ourselves, by ourselves, instead of trusting him, trusting that he will take care of us, we end up shutting him out. So we just keep opening the door. We just keep sitting with Divine love, asking it to fill our hearts. And it really does satisfy, and it has been filling me with peace and joy and love and that grandeur Fr. Liebermann wrote about.

So if that’s all I do this Lent, if I turn back to God quickly and lovingly after I fall, if I keep sitting with him and drinking in his Divine love, then it will be more than enough. It will be everything. 

Yes, I Have Six Kids

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The other day I had my 36,429th conversation with someone that went like this:

“Wow, you have six kids? That’s a lot of kids.” 

“Yep. It is.”

“Wow, it must be so hard.” 

“Well, sure it’s hard. But they’re worth it.” 

Then I point to my license plate that says ‘Think Big’.

I have plenty of friends that have 1, 2 or 3 kids that believe to the depth of their soul that that is all they could handle. Family size is incredibly personal. But as individuals make decisions about this, they tap into the collective culture to form their decisions. Let my 36,429 conversations be a case study – the collective culture holds that having a lot of kids is unfathomable. My question is: why? Why when women can make any choice they want do we not include raising humans as one of our best options? 

And I think the answer is that our culture pits having children and being fulfilled against each other. Children keep you from success, money, pleasure, status, and lifestyle according to the culture.

Even though we live in an age that tells women they can do anything, become whoever they want to be, choosing to be a mother at all – let alone a mother to many – seems implicitly off the table if you want to succeed. If you really have the desire, fine have one, maybe two. But any more and you are directly robbing from your quality of life.

One of the biggest places I see this is among intellectuals, especially writers. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lesson’s podcast is one guest after another bemoaning the fact that for a woman to create art, she has to pull herself away from the family on an existential level and go to her inner life to produce great work. I call this going to the desk in my room while my kids are at preschool and working. Or like other working mothers, hiring a babysitter. It is how I freelance write, it is how I have written now two novels and one food memoir. Sure, I get taking a writing retreat or weekend occasionally, and while I love taking them it is just that, a retreat from daily life to focus on work. My kids don’t keep me from my work in writing, my kids enrich my life which in turn makes me a better writer. How could finding deep empathy for six humans (seven if we’re counting spouses), championing their strengths and advocating for their weaknesses not make me a better student of the human condition? And isn’t that where good writing starts? 

When I was a new mother, I read a collection of short stories about motherhood by Helen Simpson called Getting A Life that was hailed as an amazing work. I remember I was excited to read about this rich and hard experience I was immersed in. What I read started with a portrait of a mother of two young children through the eyes of an ambitious young girl on her way to an interview, who was walking by their house just as the young daughter had stuck something up her nose, while a baby who was “dark red as a crab apple” cried in the mother’s arms. The girl observed the mother’s ‘ragged cuticles, the graceless way her heels stuck out from the backs of her sandals like hunks of Parmesan, and the eyes which had dwindled to dull pinheads.” The portrait was sad and lonely and ugly, so unlike all of the beautiful mothers I had known throughout my life. When the mother sighed and said ‘this was the hardest year of her life’ the girl didn’t offer compassion, or female empowerment, or empathy, she just “started to sprint, fast and light”. The message was clear: having small children sucks your soul, and if you are full of dreams, you should run.

I stopped reading after the first story.

This didn’t speak to my experience at all. I had two young children and possibly felt on rough days that these were the hardest of my life, but that wasn’t the whole truth of it. It wasn’t the whole story. And the lack of humanity given to the mother, the young child, and the baby was glaring. The vignette left out so much nuance – the dimples on babies’ hands, the way they smell after a bath, the way their eyes light up when they’re happy – that sustains mothers on their hard days. It was such a superficial, distorted portrait. Like writing about teenagers as all pimples and smelly socks and leaving out what it is like to observe bourgeoning athletes, intellectuals, humorists. One write up of the book called it the ultimate contraceptive.

It doesn’t matter that the author had no children herself (she went on to write three more books about motherhood, go figure) or that the portrait was radically inaccurate (probably because she had no kids). There is no question that among the intellectual communities, children hold you back. One article writes that ‘militantly childless women passed it around to their friends that were thinking about having kids’. In such an environment, why wouldn’t young women be scared to have kids? Let alone have more than one or two. 

I know the strangers who see us or the acquaintances that learn that I have six kids have been living with a culture who proclaims this fear, who have been taught from reading their intellectual newspapers and magazines and literature that children equal the death knell to the interior, creative life. That they equal empty bank accounts and ‘eyes which had dwindled to dull pinheads’.

How do I explain to one of these incredulous strangers what it is like when your three-year-old son who has Down syndrome learns to plant kisses, and you watch their older siblings rush to line up for these kisses with the same enthusiasm they have on Christmas morning? That during the age when they should be self-involved and self-centered they will volunteer to play with their three-year old brothers? That during a pandemic, they will have each other, and it will be such a gift. Last time I checked, these things made my eyes sparkle, and filled my heart with stories to tell.

Yes, having a big family requires us to Think Big. But the fact that managing a large everything – kitchen, car, calendar, budget – seems SO HARD to people befuddles me. Women can be running large corporations or sales territories, mutual funds or medical schools, but managing children is seen as the hardest, dreariest task on the planet. 

Having a large family is hard, but meeting the challenges is exactly like meeting the challenges in every other hard endeavor. Time management, reaching out for growth and learning, talking with others to gain insights into problems, managing group dynamics, figuring out the most efficient ways to do routine tasks through streamlining and outsourcing. Most days I feel equipped to run a company because running my family feels kind of like I already do. 

Raising kids – any number of kids – is hard because their existence requires self-sacrifice from the parents. And if there is anything that our collective culture abhors it is self-sacrifice. They forget the other side of the self-sacrifice equation which is self-gift. This is where all the good stuff of life is to be found: joy, meaning, purpose, passion, commitment, loving and being loved, goodness, beauty, truth. Because to give self-gift for others always, always comes with your gift returned to you ten-fold.

And after listening to all this bad, all this fear, I have heard from so many women who are at the age of becoming grandmothers who have confided their disappointment to me that for some reason, their kids don’t want to have kids. I don’t think it is a surprise at all. The world has been shouting at them not too. 

For so many people, the goals of 1) avoiding suffering and 2) having control in their life end up creating even more suffering. And these are the people I want to encourage to think bigger. When you are open to the idea that a child is not the cause of suffering but joy, you are less afraid. You are open to so much love. Because that is what each child brings. The irony for women in our culture is that the things they are told will bring them fulfillment don’t actually fulfill them. And the things that do, like motherhood, they are told to fear.

Here is what I have found, 14.5 years in: having a big family is fun. It is the most interesting and amusing thing I could ever think of doing. Yes there are periods of white knuckling it, like stages with no sleep or a health crisis. But they pass and usher in periods of ‘my cup runneth over’. See the self-gift equation above. You get it back, ten-fold.

Memento Mori: One Year Later

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I wrote my eulogy when I was 22. 

It was part of a course I took for my job in investments, to help develop personal growth and time management. It was an exercise that was meant to focus you on your deepest longings, goals and desires. 

When I wrote my hypothetical eulogy, my dad had died three years before. So to me, eulogies weren’t hypothetical. They were real things like baseball scores and sunsets. 

It was perhaps a bit ironic that writing that eulogy made me want to quit my job and write. I realized once I got a job in the real world, and took that course, that my longing to think about what was true, to touch people’s hearts about what matters most, was the loudest truth I could hear. 

And that is the thing about eulogies. They make us listen to our deepest longings and dreams. And our world so desperately needs us to hear them. Writing mine pointed me towards grad school in philosophy and writing novels and being a mother. I can’t imagine going back to the girl I was before I thought deeply about my death.  

Tomorrow marks one year ago when the world shut down due to the Coronavirus. Over 500,000 people have died. Death is on our minds now in a more technicolor way than ever and so many people have had to grieve loved ones. Our lives have turned upside down in unimaginable ways and we are still not back to the normal before. I can barely picture a time when my car wasn’t covered in masks.

It was Lent then, as it is now, a season where we focus on memento mori – a Latin phrase that means ‘remember our death’. 

There is this paradox that exists where remembering our death leads us to living life more deeply. If we can remember that we are ashes and to ashes we return, and we realize there is a great God who loves, despite our limits and weakness, it can set us free. We are liberated from a paralyzing fear of death. With that clear picture, we can make the most of our lives. We can love others well. We can prioritize, discover what is most important to our hearts, and let the rest go. If we put our lives into the hands of the one who conquered death, it yields peace and joy for the present moment – always our tangent point to eternity – and the awareness of storing up forever treasures in Heaven by offering everything we have and everything we are. We get to put into perspective how this life is so, so short compared to eternity. 

St. Theresa of Avila said, “It’s Heaven on the way to Heaven, and Hell on the way to Hell.” 

There is such a peace that comes from prioritizing loving Him, and then loving others. From the understanding that he redeems not only the broken parts of us but the beautiful parts too. The whole story is not just death, but also the Resurrection.

The season of Lent is a reminder of our death, and a Pandemic Lent reverberates even louder. Through the last year I’ve thought of a quote a lot from General John Stark, (who happens to be my husband’s great-great-grandfather and my son Andrew Stark shares his name). He wrote a letter from which the line ‘Live Free or Die’ is taken, which New Englander’s recognize as New Hampshire’s license plate slogan. What I thought about a lot is the other half of the quote which often gets forgotten:  

Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils

And that seems to be exactly what we need to remember. 

The unfulfilled potential, the prisons we spend our life in, the fears that hold us hostage. The unexamined life where people stay unconscious to their hopes and dreams. There are worse things than death, like a life not lived.

If you haven’t already I highly encourage you to write your eulogy. Almost every growth course or life coach I have looked into has you write one because it is powerful. What becomes urgent when we do is what we give to others. Service, love, compassion, being present. Everything else fades and makes you want to eliminate it from your life. Selfishness flees and ego-driven pursuits become glaringly obvious under the searing fire of the truth.

I hope that this year has taught people a taste of what matters most. What sustains us and ways we can find joy in the present moment, in loving others despite a lot of limits on our lives. I hope everyone can say that they can’t imagine going back to being the person they were before the Pandemic, before they thought deeply about their death.

I’ve since written more eulogies. I wrote one for my funny, gregarious brother eight years ago who died of MS. My sister wrote a beautiful one for our sweet sister last year. I know death stings. Jesus wept when Lazarus died. But that isn’t the whole story. 

Death is not the worst of evils. 

7QT: The Happiness Edition

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It’s winter, it’s Lent, it’s a Pandemic (still) and I am…surprisingly happy. Here are 7 Quick Takes on the things that are making me happy right now:

1. Intermittent Fasting: I love love Intermittent Fasting. I recently listened to this book and it cemented it as a way of life for me. She only eats between 5-10 pm but I eat at 11 and 7, and somedays I might push it to 12 or 1 if I know we are going to be eating later. After our ski vacation where I did eat breakfast before we hit the slopes, and I ate burgers and fries and nachos, I wasn’t worried about if I gained any weight, I just eased right back into it this week and my jeans are loser.

2. A Writing Weekend: This weekend my husband is taking over at home and letting me go up alone to our camp in Maine to working on my second draft of my book. (He is skiing out west next week so it is a fair trade.) I am also going to be tuning into this Writing Workshop with Dani Shapiro. I have learned a lot about writing from Dani and her podcast Family Secrets is also really good. Her book Inheritance is about how an Ancestry DNA test revealed that her half sister was not actually her sister, and her dad was not actually her father. It is amazing that she has found so many guests on her podcast who have similar stories of finding out info

3. Good Food: I have a ritual where I make a big pot of pasta on these types of weekends and I am craving this spicy pasta alla vodka one. I’m looking forward to working and eating and picking my own show on Netflix.

4. Great Reading: I have been loving reading Searching For and Maintaining Interior Peace this Lent along with Adele. This is my second time reading it, and it is such a big part of why I feel so happy. His other books Interior Freedom and In the School of the Holy Spirit are also amazing.

5. Comfy Clothes: I have been living in these JCrew leggings – they are so soft and cozy and I also grabbed this pullover sweatshirt in black and green. They go so well with the leggings or jeans. I’m also eyeing these because we can’t have too many comfy pant options in our life can we?

6. More Good Food: I just made this Creamy Lemon Cod Piccata this week and I am obsessed. It is lemony creamy buttery goodness heaven and it is done in 15 minutes. I feel a strong need to share the love about how yummy and easy this dish is, like restaurant-quality. They say that sometimes constraints yield creativity and that’s how I feel about cooking in Lent which is not the intended purpose I know. I’ll just read some extra pages of Fr. Philippe’s book.

7. Great Writers on Motherhood: I really loved this article by Noelle Mering from The Theology of Home blog. It made me think and raised so many important points about the materialistic world view and how it tries to put a value on motherhood.