Fellow Beliefnet blogger David Gibson has written a beautiful post today about the celebration of the Epiphany and about Mary’s difficult role as the Mother of God. David writes:
I can certainly testify to the enormous struggle to keep a sense of spiritual balance as a married father of a young child, as opposed to the wholly different struggles as a single man. I was likely more self-involved then, but moments and even stretches of spiritual immersion and practice came much more easily. Now I’m a scattered mess. Reviewer Elrena Evans gets at this sense of guilt:
In a time when many feel the family is increasingly under attack, it becomes all too easy to elevate family above the status God intended–what Carla Barnhill referred to in her 2004 book The Myth of the Perfect Mother: Rethinking the Spirituality of Women as “the cult of the family.” But when we are led to believe that parenting is indeed our highest calling, where does this leave us when we feel like parenting failures? “None of us–no matter the depth of our faith, the extent of our research, or the number of nieces and nephews we have–truly knew all that would be required of us when our first child came through our doors,” Leyland Fields writes. “No words, in fact, could ever ready a man and woman for the lifelong work of parenting.” So when parents encounter the inevitable difficulties, we turn elsewhere for help, looking outside ourselves for guidance. The first place we look is the Bible. But what does the Bible actually have to say about raising children?
This is a question to which most Christian parents probably feel they already know the answer, but Leyland Fields challenges us to look beyond our preconceptions, beyond what many Christian parenting experts have interpreted from Scripture, and return to the heart of God’s word ourselves–much as she did. It is through an in-depth examination of the character and actions of God as depicted in the Old Testament that Leyland Fields finds truths to counter the myths in her book.
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