Rewilding Motherhood , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - K. Evans Shannon

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94 pages

English

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Women are often told by their communities that being a mother will complete or define them. But many mothers find themselves depleted and spiritually stagnant amid the everyday demands of being a mom. They long to experience a rich inner life but feel there is rarely enough time, energy, or stillness to connect with God in a meaningful way.This book takes the concept of rewilding and applies it to motherhood. Just as an environmentalist seeks to rewild land by returning it to its natural state, Shannon Evans invites women to rewild motherhood by reclaiming its essence through an expansive feminine spirituality.Drawn from the contemplative Catholic tradition and Evans's own parenting experience, Rewilding Motherhood helps women deepen their connection to God through practices inherent to the life they're living now. Topics include work-life balance, identity, solitude, patience, household work, and mission for the common good. Throughout, Evans encourages women to see motherhood as an opportunity to discover a vibrant feminine spirituality and a deeper knowledge of God and self.

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	14 septembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493432301
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0408€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Endorsements
“Shannon’s book is a witty, clear, and holy invitation to rewild historical views of motherhood. Her words poignantly reimagine a God who is both divine and motherly. It is a must-read for those who desire a spiritual awakening in their calling of Christian motherhood.”
— Christy Bauman , author of Theology of the Womb
“Evans takes us through the beauties, joys, depths, and pains of womanhood in this gorgeous and deeply personal reflection. Rewilding Motherhood is an invitation to take an inward journey into ourselves as women and mothers. Borrowing words out of her book, this is ‘a permission slip that doubles as a ticket to a more awakened spiritual life.’ With thoughtful, beautiful, and poetic prose, Evans points us toward a wilder, more liberative God, which in turn frees us to explore the divine feminine within us and the sacred mystery within our children.”
— Kat Armas , host of The Protagonistas podcast; author of Abuelita Faith
“Evans’s inclusive, communal perspective on motherhood is an invitation to shuck off cultural constraints and explore the women we’ve been all along. Weaving the sacred with the ordinary, Evans is our sister-guide for this journey of discovery. We are free to reconsider. Free to be mad. Free to embrace. Free to pray. Free to love from a place of wholeness. Rewilding Motherhood is the anthem we’ve long needed; this is a must-read for all who mother.”
— Shannan Martin , author of The Ministry of Ordinary Places and Falling Free
“ Rewilding Motherhood is the permission to explore what motherhood means outside of the traditional beliefs many of us believed were set in stone.”
— Tiffany Bluhm , author of Prey Tell: Why We Silence Women Who Tell the Truth and How Everyone Can Speak Up
“Evans’s prose leaves me breathless, like I’m standing above a rocky beach being buffeted by a storming ocean, soaking in the raw majesty and power. She shows her reader the cracks in our present reality, places where the Spirit breaks through. If you’re feeling disconnected or disheartened by the waves of parenthood beating against the rocks of your soul, this book is for you.”
— Amanda Martinez Beck , author of Lovely: How I Learned to Embrace the Body God Gave Me
“ Rewilding Motherhood offers balm for mind, body, and soul, giving you permission to nourish your spiritual life as you care for your children. Gentle and strong, curious and encouraging, Shannon is a wise guide through the wild terrain of parenting’s joys and struggles. Her words invite you to dig deeper, dream bigger, and search wider for the truths you have been seeking about God, your own life, and this sacred calling.”
— Laura Kelly Fanucci , author of Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting
“This soulful book is a strong, gentle embrace, welcoming us into an expansive exploration of the sacred spaces of motherhood. These reflections invite us to consider both our inner worlds and our larger communities, empowering all who possess a mothering spirit to have the unencumbered self-compassion to show up in our own hearts, minds, bodies, and souls, just as we show up for others.”
— Kayla Craig , author of To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers and Liturgies for Parents ; cofounder of Upside Down Podcast
Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2021 by Shannon K. Evans
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www .br azospress .co m
Ebook edition created 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-3230-1
The author is represented by WordServe Literary Group, www.wordserveliterary.com.
Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Dedication
For Irene, Nell, and Kay,
in honor of their motherhood
Contents
Cover
Endorsements i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page v
Copyright Page vi
Dedication vii
Introduction 1
Part One: Growing Inward 5
1. Forging Identity: Self-Actualization beyond the Roles We Serve 7
2. Maintaining Boundaries: Generosity toward Self and Others 17
3. Holding Tension: The Sacred Work of Integration 29
4. Reclaiming Solitude: Transforming Loneliness into an Inner Well 41
5. Following Anger: The Redemptive Power of Outrage 51
6. Staying Curious: Fearless Nurture of Our Spiritual Selves 61
7. Cultivating Patience: Holy Resistance in an Age of Rush 73
8. Heeding Intuition: Divine Movement through Feminine Wisdom 85
Part Two: Flowing Outward 97
9. Embodying Hospitality: Fertility That Embraces the Whole World 99
10. Becoming Gentle: Tenderness in Exchange for Criticism 113
11. Releasing Control: Permission to Stop Playing God 123
12. Valuing Work: Spiritual Teachings of Household Labor 135
13. Living Incarnation: Finding God in Our Bodies, Home, and Earth 147
14. Reimagining God: Making Space for a Divine Motherhood 159
Benediction 170
Acknowledgments 171
Notes 175
Back Cover 182
Introduction
Not long ago I had a dream in which my neighbor, who is both a fiber artist and a mother of two, was pressing fabric into a basin of shallow water—ostensibly dying the fabric, perhaps, but I can’t be sure. She was making art, one way or another, and she kept finding larger and larger containers to serve her purpose. Without frustration, without disappointment, she happily and with curiosity moved from vessel to vessel, seeking something vast enough to contain the wilds of her creativity.
When the basin failed to satisfy, she moved to a washtub; when the washtub did not suffice, she swapped it out for a kiddie pool; when the kiddie pool proved inadequate, she drained an Olympic-size pool in her front yard, stories and stories deep, astonishingly deep—we marveled together at how we hadn’t known how fathomless the water had been all along. She covered the bottom with a shallow film of water and meticulously laid out the fabric inside, careful hands pressing out the creases. The result satisfied her, and she left the work to soak.
But a drained concrete pool of treacherous depths is not a safe thing to have sitting barrier-free in a little Midwestern neighborhood. In the dream I saw two of my own children heading over to play and I ran after them, knowing the danger they were in. The ground was covered with hornets that I stepped on as I rescued my little ones, muttering prayers of thanksgiving under my breath for their safety as I guided them home across the street, leaving my neighbor, her art, and a perilous cavern of imagination behind.
I awoke from this dream with pieces of it implanted in my bones. Weeks have since yawned by, but I cannot shake the knowledge that there was something archetypal at play in the image of my neighbor’s labor. In dream language water represents the unconscious, and the act of exploring bigger and bigger containers for that inner world strikes me with incredible resonance—and not just for my own sake, but for the sake of mothers everywhere.
Because, if you think about it, this is what we do; we play at the edges of our unconscious, we explore the boundaries of our creative spirituality and suspect they go deeper than we can imagine. We long to give ourselves over to the mysteries of this inner life, and yet, we have responsibilities. We cannot neglect the physical and emotional needs of our children. We must be available to them, must protect them from all forms of danger. We can lose ourselves in the depths of our inner life, but only for so long before we must rein ourselves in once more. We make dinner. We do laundry. We tend to those in our care. We console ourselves that there will be a day when we can be baptized in the waters of Mystery, but today is not that day. Today we have children to dress and floors to sweep and eggs to scramble. The dream of the self that is spiritually alive—soulfully, creatively, holistically alive—is just that: a dream. We might touch it for a moment, but it is never ours to keep.
Few mothers I meet feel they are regularly in touch with that Mystery. Rather, most feel despondent about their spiritual lives, believing that somehow it is meant to be more than what it is but having no idea how to see that desire fulfilled. The path we took as younger women does not serve us now; there are no hours for silent prayer, no private moments to journal and weep, no time or energy for the community we used to have. So we put on a smile in the mornings, take our kids to worship on the weekends, flop exhausted on the couch in the evenings, and tell ourselves this might be all there is. And then we wonder why we can’t feel content.
But contentment is not the apex of what we were made for. The feminine wisdom inside us knows this, and it is clawing to set us aflame in wonder and love. Let’s face it, the deck has long been stacked against mothers thriving spiritually: our social, religious, and family structures together have forged a path that keeps us busy, preoccupied, self-denying, and obedient. These structures praise a woman who will give of herself but side-eye a woman who will belong to herself. The divine invitation is to be both women at the same time.
After all, we were women before we were mothers. But now there are days—maybe years—when we feel more like mothers than women, when the role of mothering subsumes the person we once knew ourself to be. Motherhood is an imposing figure in the room of the soul, and womanhood often bows in deference to her. But we are women, first and foremost. We were our own before we were ever any