Then I remembered something a woman had said at a conference for doctoral students and professors that I had attended just a few weeks before. She said that at a Christmas Eve service when her daughter was a baby, she had suddenly been overcome with a desire to nurse baby the Jesus. At the time, I had thought, "Wow, that's really strange." She said herself that she had been perplexed by this desire and had wished there existed resources in our denomination for helping to think about such a desire. She suggested that experiences like this might not be so uncommon, but they are just not talked about.
And so, in light of that woman's comments, as I sat there in my living room on Christmas Eve, I decided to try allowing myself to experience and explore these feelings. As I gave myself to prayer through these feelings, I heard my prayers become, "Jesus, take my whole body. Take all of my nutrients, everything that gives me energy, I want to give it all to you. Just as my body would drain me completely before it would let a baby die, so take everything inside of me that you may be born into this world..."
As I heard my prayer, God resolved a tension I had been experiencing since the time I had committed myself to staying at home with my daughter - The tension revolved around a fear that maybe my love for my daughter was becoming idolatry. I love her with a fierceness that pushes aside anything that might stand in her way. Some of the things that I had pushed aside included really good things I had been doing in response to a call from Christ - ministries at church, time needed to finish my dissertation quickly, the respect (I think) of my professors who had seen such potential in me to become a really great scholar, maybe that potential itself, extended times of prayer, etc. I often wondered, was this really appropriate? Was I going overboard? Was this some kind of "new mom thing" that I needed to get over? But then, when I would think about putting the baby in childcare or hiring a babysitter a few times a week to give me more time to do other things, my love for my daughter would take over. No, I will do whatever I can to give my daughter whatever she needs, no matter the cost.
With this experience on Christmas Eve, God resolved that tension. I discovered as I prayed that, as I embraced the love he had created inside of me for the baby entrusted into my care, God had himself been carving into my being a new capacity for loving him. This new capacity integrated my entire person - my will, my body, my emotions, my reasoning - in a way that I had never even dreamed of.
I've been thinking about the verse in 1 John that says, "If one does not love her neighbor whom she has seen, how can she love God, whom she has not seen?" (general paraphrase) That never really made sense to me until I had this experience. Through loving my baby in the way God created a mother to love, I had become a person capable of putting someone above my own self, above my needs, above my own ambitions, above what other people (particularly my professors) thought of me, even above my acts of religious piety. And in so doing, I became a person who capable of loving God more fully above each of these things, as well.
I am so glad that woman at that conference had the courage to talk about wanting to nurse Jesus. Had she not, I probably would never have embraced those thoughts, and I would have closed the door to God speaking to me in that way. That's one of the reasons I'm writing this particular blog, odd though it may sound. Our theological training still fails, after all this time, to include what God has spoken and done through church mothers, to the detriment of not only the women in our congregations, but also to our collective understanding of what it means to love God.
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