Living faithfully in noise and busyness

In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore. Jossey Bass, 2006.

Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s book arrived in my mailbox two days after we moved houses. The irony of the title was not lost on me as I struggled to find a place to read in the midst of boxes, paint cans, and children asking where their belongings were.

This was a challenging book, but it articulated many thoughts I have about parenting and put parts of life with children into a new light. In the Midst of Chaos is not so much a parenting book as a book for parents, to help us consider how to live faithfully amid the noise and chaos of family life.

The author begins by considering the usual ideals of the spiritual life – quiet devotions, solitude, silence – and admits the difficulty of these practices in the midst of living with children.

Miller-McLemore suggests that daily family life can become a way to help us grow in our relationship with God; that the chaos can be spiritually transformative when we engage in caring for children as practices of faith. I was reminded of Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Romans 12:1 – “Take your everyday, ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life – and place it before God as an offering.”

Practices of faith in family life described in this book include play, reading aloud, dividing labour, making decisions about where and how to live, doing justice, pondering, and sanctifying the ordinary.

Stories about how families decide where to live and how to practice justice are very insightful, as is the discussion about play that questions organized sports, violent games, and video games, and looks at ways of redeeming culture. The final chapter on blessing and letting go is particularly strong because of the author’s description of “mundane grief” – the sense of loss felt as children grow and separate from parents.

Competing pulls

A recurring theme is the anxiety of living with multiple vocations – particularly the competing pulls between family and work, which Miller-McLemore says may be “the primary spiritual challenge of family life.” In the last year, this has been something I have considered at length after hearing a prominent Christian human rights lawyer speak about her multi-faceted life and how every day she has a “spectacular crash” in one area or another. I struggle to balance my own vocations, while hoping to avoid such crashes, and feel conflicted about the impact of my work on my children.

Miller-McLemore suggests that the traditional ideal of endless maternal sacrifice is not God’s intention and is not good for people. This escalating expectation for what parents provide for their children fails to care for the caregiver, she says, and also often leads to a lack of caring for other children in the world. She suggests that all disciples of Christ need a public vocation beyond family life. This is something the author has pondered long and found conscious ways of embodying in her family. She proposes “mutuality,” characterized by shared household labour and the involvement of children in decisions, worship, household responsibilities, and the life of faith.

This book does not offer three easy steps and is, in fact, disturbing in the honest questions it raises. To her credit, Miller-McLemore shows how she grapples with issues without placing a greater burden of “shoulds” on the reader. As a professor of pastoral theology, the author provides gentle wisdom about the busyness of our modern family life, but her academic language and feminist beliefs may be a stumbling block for some readers. There is also very occasional profanity.

In the Midst of Chaos is an ambitious book, sometimes too much so. Miller-McLemore’s grandest ambition, however, is one all parents would do well to emulate: her goal as a parent is “helping children become compassionate faithful adults who love God, and care for themselves, others and the world around them.”

Susan Fish juggles vocations as a writer and mother from her nearly-unpacked home in Waterloo, Ont. She is a former MB Herald columnist and the author of Seeker of Stars.