Love Grows Through Love

on motherhood and the sacraments

The baby I had last year celebrated her first birthday recently. It’s been such a lovely year, and so good to have a baby again. My other two children are 9 and 10, and in a different (and just as special!) stage of childhood. I’ve been reflecting on how different my experience of parenting a baby has been this go-around, particularly how much easier parenting feels for me now than it did ten years ago. There are practical reasons for this: I’m more experienced as a mother, my husband and I are more financially stable, we have extended family around, having older children + babies is (I think) objectively easier than having just babies and/or toddlers (fewer children isn’t always easier! sometimes more is better!). There are also spiritual reasons for this ease, though, that I’ve spent the last year thinking about. 

When my older children were very small, I was not at all a religious person. I was steeped in secular ideas of motherhood, ideas which I think now are actively unhelpful. So much of what I absorbed about motherhood, from both social media and from other women I knew, was more focused on the mother than on the child. I was constantly being fed messaging that encouraged me to think more about myself, to make sure that my own cup was filled, to hold on to some identity outside of motherhood. Mothers who gave too much to their children were to be pitied – what would happen to them when their children were grown? To be honest, it was incredibly stressful, though I didn’t recognize the source of the stress at the time. I don’t think I was a bad mother when I was a new mother, but I spent a lot of time thinking about myself and how to get my own needs met, and it created a lot of internal conflict for me. It felt like there was a battle between my needs and the needs of my children – it put me at emotional odds with my children sometimes and created an occasional resentment that was deeply uncomfortable for me. 

I’ve written often about mysticism here in the last few years, and I’m writing about it constantly in my private journals. I’ve always appreciated the mystics from a sort of romantic and aesthetic perspective, but I’ve also always found them to be a bit inaccessible. My fascination has been the looking-through-the-window sort, because I’ve never felt like I could do what they do or go where they go. The mystics preach a total annihilation of self, a dissolving of oneself into God. The desert father Abba Anthony tells us to “always have God before your eyes.” In Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, the experience of the innermost dwelling is described like this: “Like rain falling into an infinite sea, all boundaries between the soul and God melt. Union, by definition, transcends the subject-object distinction. There is no longer any lover left to enjoy her Beloved. There is only love. . .The soul who has dissolved into God reemerges with a vibrant wakefulness.” Pope Benedict XVI wrote in God Is Love that “Love is indeed ‘ecstasy’, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving.” This is the thing that has pulled me for the last year, and continues to pull me more and more. I’m obsessed with what that ecstasy, that dissolving, that ceaseless prayer, looks like in practice and in the context of my real life and relationships, particularly in my mothering. 

When I say that I felt like I could never go where the mystics go, it’s because I was never really trying to live a life so full of love and responsibility as to be impossible for me to handle on my own. I was always holding something of myself back in distrust and skepticism. But in the last few years, what has changed my mothering more than anything else is that I’m not trying to be just a good mother anymore. As Christians, we are called to something more than what the world calls us to. I’m trying not to be a decent mom but to be a saint. This is a perspective shift which has radically altered my experience of motherhood, because the saints don’t really talk about self-care or making time for oneself or being careful not to give too much of oneself lest one lose one’s identity. They talk about self-annihilation in the love of God and “liberation through self-giving.” This kind of terrifying love is not possible on one’s own. It’s only possible with the help of Christ and His sacraments, in which there is a supernatural grace that is found nowhere else. I have known this intellectually and felt it experientially and it is slowly (so slowly) changing the posture of my heart. 

As I said before, I think I’m a better mother now for all sorts of reasons. Mostly though, I am a better mother now because I have the sacraments. When I receive the Eucharist, when I go to confession regularly, when I tend to my marriage (itself a sacrament), I feel like I am drawing from a supernatural store of patience for my children. I am able to give more of myself to them without burning out or being overcome with waves of resentment because I’m drawing from the deep well of Christ’s love for me and not the shallow well of my own ability. It’s true that you can’t pour from an empty cup, but my cup is never empty. I’m not saying that I’m a better mother than anyone else, just that I’m a better mother than my own self was ten years ago.¹ I still fail all the time; I am filled with so many tiny petty sins. But the sacraments help to change the posture of my heart, and I’m able to get closer to the meaning of losing one’s life in order to find it. I look at my children and all I see is three exquisite little miracles and I cannot believe that I have access to the kind of grace that allows me to love them better, because they deserve nothing less than perfect love.

I’ve spent days sitting on this essay because I think that the idea of losing oneself in love (especially love for one’s children?) can be deeply threatening to people. This all probably sounds weird at best (and psychotic at worst) if you don’t believe in God or the power of the sacraments. (It also feels so obvious. There’s no take here besides hey did you know that sacramental grace is real and will change your life???) But the tagline for this Substack is “occasional letters on Catholic mysticism and the strangeness of belief.” This is mysticism. This is the strangeness of belief, at least it is for me. Not tarot.² Not astrology. Not hermeticism. Not any of the interesting woo-woo-adjacent ideas I’ve played with over the years. But the knowledge that the less I center my own self in my life, the more peace and contentment I feel. That it is a relief to let go of my self and hold onto grace instead, to get out of my own way in order to love others more fully. 

1. I’m also not saying that I don’t have hobbies or whatever – I still take time for myself, but I’m finding that I need and want less time away from my children than I used to and my children are more a priority in my life than I am and it has made my life so much more peaceful.

2. I’ve also spent time lately reflecting on The Contemplative Tarot, which came out about a year ago. Do I regret it? Not necessarily, though I do feel like the book was misunderstood by a lot of people, which I’m sure is due to my faults as a writer. I still think that tarot can be used in a benign way, but I also think it can become an idol. I do feel like it became something of an idol for me; I spent so much time and energy defending it, time and energy that would have been better spent elsewhere. Tarot really did lead me back to the faith in a surprising way, for which I will always be grateful, but it didn’t get me much farther than that. It’s interesting, but it’s not sanctifying.