Category Archives: Books and Articles

More from the book  In The Midst of Chaos

"Attending" is the sum of those acts by which we genuinely give ourselves to another by the many small acts that we do.  We watch out for, we notice another’s needs, we move to protect, we scan the horizon, so to speak, for danger to the ones we love.  Parents do this all the time for their children.

Attending to children not only changes the children, shaping their lives, it also shapes the lives of the adults who are giving their attention in care for their children.  Mothers ( and fathers too) learn virtues such as humility and patience, compassion, trust, etc. in the act of caring for their children.

I can attest to this.  I thought I was a very patient person.  Then my children’s needs and frustrations blew that notion out of the water.  I felt that I was back at square one learning patience all over again from scratch as I learned to deal with temper tantrums, homework, chores and the million little things that make life with children an adventure.  My attending to them grew parts of me that I didn’t know needed to grow. 

The author says:

Attentive love is part instinct, part effort, and part gift.  It builds on early, almost involuntary responses, as when a mother’s milk comes in on hearing a baby’s cry.  But it also involves hard work and constant discernment of what to look for, what to ward off, and how to scan the horizon for dangers. Yet for all this, understanding the other is never predictable or controllable.  One cannot command attention by sheer will power or muscular concentration.  Attention evolves out of joy, as Weil says, and its fruits come as a grace.  p.53,54

To close the chapter the author speaks of "pondering" as a way of seeking "renewal of faith within the ordinary boundaries of a day that is received as God’s gift."  Faith is what we do within our "normal time", not something we do in time set aside outside of our regular acts of living.  All the activities of living within a family "train our eyes to see God amid change and time" and are "formative of faith."

I really liked this chapter.  I guess you can tell by the two posts that I have taken to review it.  It reminds me a lot of Brother Lawrence’s way of practicing the presence of God as he went about his regular routines.

More from In The Midst of Chaos by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

Pondering – To think about something carefully over a period of time. To weigh things in your mind.

Mothers ponder.

We are not told details of Jesus’ early life through the eyes of Mary but we are told that she pondered the mystery and wonder of Jesus’ birth. Again, when she and Joseph must retrace their steps to Jerusalem to find their missing son, she must come to terms with an extraordinary child who has spent three days debating scripture with wise men at the temple and who then in obedience returns to grow to adulthood in her house. These were things that needed to be thought out. As the author states:

Here in the small word ponder is an image of a mother in turbulent spiritual waters, wading through the emotional swings of care, who…feels “stunned by wonder and stung by worry. (p. 47)

The author commends Luke for not trying to put words into Mary’s mouth. This was not a case of Mary being passively silent, just that there was too much to put it all into words. Instead Mary stored up the feelings and memories of these events, mused on their meaning, weighed the immensity of the events in her mind and sought a deeper understanding of them.

I like this bit:

Keeping thoughts in one’s heart means keeping them at the core of one’s being. Wisdom is located at the juncture of physical desire and mental aspiration – not when one transcends the body and world, as modern scientific rationalism and some Christians assume. Pondering connects thought and action. (p.48)

A bit further on she also observes:

Mary becomes one of the first theologians of the Christian tradition, turning over and over in her mind just who this child is and what God has to do with it. She does so in the very midst of her mothering – not when she moves away from it all. (p.49)

Essential to the way that mothers think and ponder is the way that mothers care for their children with “attentive love”. Parents attend to the needs of their child with a kind of “patient hovering” keeping the needs of the child at the forefront of their consciousness as they go about life.

One of the issues the author addresses is our increasingly busy lifestyles and the inevitable busyness that children bring to our lives.  Some of her thoughts on how we use our time:

Sometimes managing the details of work and family life feels like putting together a thousand-piece interlocking jigsaw puzzle….

Most parents today – single, married, divorced, women and men – work and care for kids….they do not live out their faith through one primary vocation…as might have been the case for their own parents. They pursue dual, triple, even multiple vocations, in venues more sharply divided from one another – the work-place and the home front – than during any other era in human history.

Our efforts to handle multiple vocations of work and family often force us to confront the terrible tyranny of time.

She goes on to say that we make changes in our life-styles to accommodate the fact that we are trying to “squeeze more in” to our lies in order to keep up with demands on our time. Then she goes on:

A chaotic family life can be a faithful life. But unrelenting, brain-numbing activity is not good for anyone. We have to be extremely careful about calling this spiritual.

…Some of our busyness is just that: a deadening busyness that distracts and destroys the capacity for joy and awe…

Rather than glorify all this running around as somehow spiritual and sanctified, it makes sense to question the pace at which we live and to consider how to slow down. We can and should change a life that is debilitating, scheduling less, facing our unhealthy addiction to an inhumane routine, and sustaining practices that help us discern how to say no to experiences and stuff that our culture says are essential for children….

Adhering strictly to strategies of simplification can impede the tumultuous richness of life by trying to clean it all up. Sometimes, realistically, it is impossible to simplify life with children. Instead we must find ways not to flee or control time but to live graciously within its entanglement.

From In The Midst Of Chaos by Bonnie J. Miller- McLemore Chpt. 3

This was an interesting bit out of a book I am reading , Discernment: A Study in Ecstasy and Evil by Morton Kelsey.

Many Christians have a strange attitude toward disbelief and disbelievers.  They treat them as the worst of sinners and shun them the way that many people shun the sick and the poor.  Yet if there is a meaningful reality which we humans can know and be touched by, and we are unable to find it, the trouble is with our understanding and with our experience; our morals are not defective.  Perhaps the reason for this attitude toward agnostics and atheists is the unconscious lack of belief on the part of many Christians in the last three or four hundred years.  Condemning others may well be the Christians’ personal reaction to their own unconscious doubt.  It threatens them to have to face and handle someone who does not believe as they say they do.

He goes on to describe practices that need to be evident in people who desire to help others, one of which is to be an example of the meaning to which they direct the person seeking meaning.  So, if I want to help anyone questioning issues of faith or the meaning of life, I must be living a life which has meaning, is authentic and consistent with my faith.  I will have had to have wrestled my way through some of the issues others face to a place of knowing who I am, some of what has meaning in life for myself and authentic faith lived out in action in my life.