Spirituality Is All Fun and Games Until Someone Has to Take Care of a Baby

I don't need a church for myself. I need one for my kids.

- “Stop! I won’t let you hit me!” - I shouted as my daughter began throwing punches in frustration - “If you’re so angry that you feel like you must hit something, go and hit that pillow instead”.
- “Hey, what are you doing? Stop that stomping right now!” - added my mom, who witnessed the whole scene.
- “I don’t care, stomping is fine for me” - I replied.

My mom stood there bewildered, saying nothing. She only spoke hours later, when my kid got upset again over something else and broke down sobbing in my arms.

- “Why are you letting her indulge in anger all the time?” - she asked - “Everyone these days is like, you’re angry! Good! Be angry! Just as if anger was something to be celebrated rather than overcome”.

This time I was the one who turned speechless. It dawned on me that nothing I could possibly say in that moment could help us reconcile our points of view. This wasn’t just about parenting scripts and strategies, it was a fundamental difference in our understanding what a human being is.

Does feeling angry make you a bad person?

One of my earliest childhood memories was wondering if my entire world was specifically set up by God to test me. I don’t remember how exactly I came up with this idea, but it could have been inspired by learning that all my misbehavior was “through my most grievous fault”, that Jesus had to die because of all the things I did, that I’d spend eternity in hell if I didn’t somehow fix it. At one point I wasn’t even sure if my mom and dad and brothers were in fact real people and not just actors in some elaborate game set up to determine if I was good enough. I knew I was falling short in so many ways of what everyone expected of me, and worried that one incorrect move, reaction, or response could send me directly to hell forever.

I had recurring nightmares of my house burning down in raging fire.

I must have been 5 years old at that time.

Oh, how I wished I could have overcome my anger back then! I solemnly resolved a thousand times to do better. And yet for some reason I kept making one mistake after another, always in the most inappropriate moment. I deducted the reason was, I was simply a bad person who deserved terrible things.

Who needs a church anyway?

Only in my late twenties I managed to unravel that belief. My childhood faith was already long unraveled at that point. For years I told everyone my God was too vast to fit inside of any church that I knew of. I could no longer stand sharing my most heartbreaking moments with some old judgemental guy so that he could decide if I’m worthy of coming anywhere close the divine. I could meet the divine personally face to face on my own terms, without having to rely on third person accounts of someone who’d read a book.

Spiritual, but not religious. Back then, I didn’t even know it was a thing. Going to church would not bring me peace or help me become a better person, so I sought consolation in nature, the next most sacred thing I could find. The sturdy peace of old trees, the curious whispers of medicinal plants, the unimaginable vastness of outer space, the impossibility of just being alive and experiencing the wonder of it all. The word God was too loaded with all that childhood baggage, but I had nothing against having a relationship with the Cosmos. Little by little, I’ve put together a spiritual life for myself out of bits and pieces from all parts of the world.

I learned to accept myself for who I was, with all the idiotic, embarrassing, and heartbreaking memories of what I’d done. I no longer saw them as a proof that I was a terrible person, only a sign that I’d been hurt myself too. Bringing all these things to light and holding them in loving embrace would loosen their power over me. I took good care of myself so that I could take care of the world. The only demons I knew were all in my head. There was no evil that would not dissolve when bombarded with love and understanding. My relationships got better, I became more capable of supporting people without taking their stuff personally. I stopped drinking just because I no longer had anything to run away from. I was home, I was safe, perfect just the way I was.

I’d probably stop right here if it was just about me

This all worked pretty well when I was independent and young. Then I had my first child, and this whole framework suddenly stopped making sense. Motherhood took me from my elevated spiritual point of view and threw me right into the messy, carnal reality of bodily fluids and sleepless nights. Debating enlightenment and the true nature of reality lost its appeal when I barely had time and brainpower to take care of food, diapers, and sleep. Observing my thoughts come and go for half an hour became impossible when my baby would interrupt me every few seconds. Nearly everything I’d read about spirituality at that point was written by childless men, and it all was so irrelevant within the new reality I found myself in.

I could no longer dedicate a whole week to some spiritual retreat like I used to. There was zero events I could attend with a tiny kid. Some people told me I deserved this time away from my littles to take good care of myself, that it was my ego talking when I felt like I should have them with me at all times. Prioritize yourself mama, you know you can’t pour from an empty cup!

But even if this was the case, don’t little children have spiritual needs too?

My daughter stared asking big questions around the time she was three years old. I thought I’d have some answers ready for her, but all my words landed flat. Kids that age don’t just grasp abstract concepts no matter how well explained, they need something real and tangible, some kind of a picture, a story, a song, a ritual. I thought I’d invent some on the spot, but this has proven harder than I imagined. You can’t just invent a whole mythology infused with eternal meaning out of thin air. I had to admit defeat and leave my daughter thinking that Christmas simply means that you put up a tree and get a lot of gifts. To create the magic of Christmas from scratch, you must first create a whole religious universe.

With kids, I began caring about the community aspect too. A paid event or retreat every once in a while was no longer enough. If my children are to build their whole world on the rock of the stories and rituals that we share, they would ideally share them with other people too. We would have some friends who consider important what we consider important, we would reinforce each other in our resolve of turning towards the light. To my surprise, what I was looking for began to look more and more like… a church?

Maybe all these church people were actually onto something

When I started looking for inspirations of how I wanted my family to look and function like in a few years, nearly all of the big, thriving families that I found were either Mormon or Christian. Most of the spiritual but not religious moms that I knew would part ways with their children’s fathers before those kids reached adolescence. There’s something about organized religion that seems to produce happy families and communities more reliably than bespoke spirituality or secular mainstream culture. Maybe prioritizing yourself has some limits too after all.

Some people (or maybe just my mom) ask me sometimes why I won’t go back to the Catholic Church. I’m more open to this idea than ever, but something about it still doesn’t feel right. A large part of it is that I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to have a monopoly on truth, that I could only trust a spiritual teacher who’s open to learning from people at least as much as he’s teaching them. But this isn’t the whole story, and I struggled to put it all together until now.

The conversation I had with my mom about anger reminded me what my other problem could be. I really struggle with the concept of sin when applied to little kids. Growing up like this taught me nothing but wallowing in guilt, gave me no tools to actually deal with my anger or despair in a way that didn’t hurt anyone. How much of my distrust in the church is due to the way how things worked in my particular family? The Catholic book they gifted to my daughter frames things in a similar way, but the author was born during World War 1. Perhaps children’s pastors these days are more emotionally literate?

I went to the church a few times to figure this out, and they never mentioned emotions while I was there. What struck me instead was a deep distrust of this world. Maybe churches were always like this, I just didn’t notice it until I started listening to my body and to nature in general. This is a fallen world whose concerns distract you from matters of true faith, your body is a wild beast that must be tamed, passions lead you to temptation and must be overcome. Your true reward is elsewhere, and you can only claim it if you sacrifice everything now, die to yourself, put yourself last.

No matter how hard I try, I just can’t find myself in this frame of mind. This world and all the beautiful things in it are simply too precious to me.

To marry it all together

Old religion is a stern father: “You must strive to do better”. New spirituality is a tender mother: “You are perfect just the way you are”. Can these two not just coexist, but love and support each other, lift each other up in a passionate union? I try to imagine a church that would honor and celebrate a marriage of holy masculine and feminine, but it feels like reinventing the whole Cosmos from scratch.