Hi friends,
I hope the summer is treating you well. Our family trip to Seattle got cut short because of covid, but we had fun while we could and I’m glad to be back in Austin, spending time with more family and savoring the slower summer days.
In book news, The Contemplative Tarot comes out in about six weeks. I feel like I’ve been waiting a hundred years for the time when people will actually be able to read this book, and I’m so glad to be close to that time. If you haven’t preordered it yet and want to, here’s where you can do that. My publisher and I are planning some fun events for mid-September to celebrate the book release, including a virtual workshop or two and at least one in-person event here in Austin for any local folks who would like to come say hi to me and my gigantic baby bump (gonna be about eight months pregnant by the time the book is released – would honestly not recommend this timing but I’m making it work!). I’ll release more info on those as we get closer to the pub date. <3
"The innermost essence of love is self-offering. The entryway to all things is the Cross." – Edith Stein
Anyone who knows me or is familiar with my writing knows that I love the saints. I pick one to write about here nearly every month and my Instagram profile feed is dotted with thoughts on feast days. A not-great trait I’ve noticed in myself, though, is a subtle tendency to mythologize the saints. Many of the saints I’m naturally drawn to are saints who lived hundreds of years ago, and it’s easy for me to turn them into stories and forget that they were real people. In an effort to counteract this, one of the things I’ve been trying to do lately is learn more about modern saints. If I can see a photograph of the saint, I have to remember that they’re real and that I can’t flatten them into a character.
Here’s a photograph of Edith Stein, aka Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was born in 1891 in Breslau, the youngest of eleven children of an observant Jewish family, though she had become agnostic by her teenage years. Edith’s mother was determined to give all her children the very best education, and to that end Edith was sent to the university in Breslau. She studied philosophy and became a member of the faculty at the University of Freiburg. In 1921, she converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite, prompted by her reading of Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography (sometimes I wonder how many people Teresa of Ávila alone has converted to Catholicism, what a treasure of the faith). Edith continued to pursue her philosophical interests – empathy and affectivity, the spirituality of women, the education of girls – until she was arrested by Nazi soldiers in August 1942 and killed at Auschwitz. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988.
I spent my covid quarantine last month reading Stein’s Essays on Woman, and it was interesting and refreshing to read the writings of a more modern saint. Essays on Woman is a collection of eight essays; some are more spiritual in nature and some focus more on girls’ education, a particular interest of Stein’s. She was interesting to read because some of her views on women are old-fashioned (she seems to think women and girls are not interested in abstract thought, writing stuff like “abstract thought and creative action are of less concern to her than the possession and enjoyment of the good life,” which seems like such a strange opinion because she herself was literally a philosopher?) and some of her views are quite progressive for her time (she truly believed that girls should be well-educated, and ideally educated away from home: “An occasional breaking away from the home is desirable for many reasons: to release the girl’s personality from excessively close ties to the family; to avert the danger of a too rigid commitment to one’s family type; to initiate a great adaptability to varying characters and circumstances. . .”). But what I liked most were the things she had to say about motherhood.
My return to Catholicism was complicated and was prompted by a number of things. One of those things, though – one of the big ones – had to do with my life as a mother. I’ve always liked children and I’ve always wanted children. I had my first baby when I was twenty-three. I’ve always thought of motherhood as a valuable use of my time and talents. For me, it was never the lesser, easier option. It was always the point, and anything else I did was worked around motherhood, not the other way around. I liked the Catholic mothers I knew because they were the only mothers I knew who felt the same way about motherhood. And it’s always a balm for me to read Catholic writings on motherhood, because it’s often one of the only places I see motherhood being discussed in a positive light. Edith Stein is no exception. Stein, blessedly, did not believe that all women are called to motherhood; she never expected women to fit neatly into pre-prescribed societal labels. She did, though, believe that motherhood is an irreplaceable vocation. She also believed that there is a spiritual element to motherhood, that “to be developed in its full sense, maternity must be interpreted as supernatural as well as natural.” She understood the spiritual difficulty of motherhood, writing, “The soul of woman must be expansive and open to all human beings, it must be quiet so that no small weak flame will be extinguished by stormy winds; warm so as not to benumb fragile buds … empty of itself, in order that extraneous life may have room in it; finally, mistress of itself and also of its body, so that the entire person is readily at the disposal of every call.”
Another book I read this month was The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. The author of the book, Julie Phillips, looked to the lives of women artists and writers of the twentieth century to try and answer questions about what it means to be both an artist and a mother. What does it look like to create in a domestic space? What happens to one’s work when it is constantly being re-negotiated for one’s duties to one’s children? How do maternal identity and creative inspiration live together? Can they live together? Women have answered these questions in all kinds of ways. Some women, like Doris Lessing, abandoned their children. Some women, like Alice Walker, deliberately chose to only have one child. Some women, like Ursula K. Le Guin or Shirley Jackson, managed to find productivity in the midst of a big, messy family life. The thread that ran through the whole book, though, was the tension of wanting to keep a part of oneself for oneself while also being a mother. Is it possible? And if it is possible, is it good? What if you want to be a mother without being what Stein described as “empty of [your]self?”
For The Contemplative Tarot, I wrote about the Hermit in connection with the desert fathers and mothers. When I was playing around with tarot in the years prior to my return to Christianity, I thought of the Hermit as an archetype of solitude and inner peace but I never really thought about how the Hermit got to that place of inner peace. As I crept my way back into Christianity, I started to read the Christian mystics again, and I realized that the Hermit’s inner peace was hard-won. The peace of union with God only comes after the death of the self. Our Hermit is at the top of a mountain, but he had to climb the mountain first. In the book of Hosea, God tells the people, “Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her,” but, like the desert fathers, you have to enter (at least a spiritual, if not physical) wilderness before you can hear the tender words of God. The Hermit is an awakening, but it’s also an annihilation.
I think that motherhood is also this way, both annihilation and awakening. Motherhood does require a self-abandonment. It just does. Any woman who says otherwise is fooling herself. A pregnant woman must give of her body. A mother of a newborn must sacrifice sleep and free time and any other number of things. Any parent knows that you have to put your child’s needs above your own over and over and over again. The thing I’ve struggled with most as a mother is how much of my body and my time and my self I must give to my children, but I struggle with that because I’m a fallible and naturally selfish human being, not because I don’t think I should have to.
For me, what eases this struggle is seeing the annihilation of motherhood in the light of Christianity. For me, this is the place where self-abnegation means something. This is where the question of it – the question that runs through the entirety of The Baby on the Fire Escape – is answered. I think that motherhood is always some kind of annihilation, and for me that annihilation doesn’t make any sense outside the context of Christianity, because Christianity is where I find a model of true compassion. As a mother, I need the encouraging reminder that what I’m doing as a mother is spiritually fruitful, because being a mother is hard. Within the context of Christianity (and especially Catholicism), I find a life that makes sacrificial love meaningful so I am able to approach it with something other than resentment. Edith Stein said it in more poetic words: “Whoever wants to preserve this life continually within herself must nourish it constantly from the source when it flows without end – from the holy sacraments, above all from the sacrament of love. To have divine love as its inner form, a woman’s life must be a Eucharistic life.” Later, she writes, “[T]his participation in divine life has liberating power in itself; it lessens the weight of our earthly concerns and grants us a bit of eternity even in this finitude, a reflection of beatitude, a transformation into light.” For me, that makes the annihilation worth it.
There’s a quote from Louise Erdrich that I love and with which I will leave you:
“One day as I am holding baby and feeding her, I realize that this is exactly the state of mind and heart that so many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning – the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great yes, the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self merged and at least temporarily erased – it is deathlike. . . .Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies.”