Last year, the book Embodied: Clergy Women and the Solidarity of a Mothering God got me wondering. Pastor Lee Ann Pomrenke invites readers to notice the unique lens through which women who are clergy understand their work. (For simplicity’s sake, I’ll use the word “pastors” to include both deacons and pastors.)
Pastoring and mothering kids share more in common than I’d realized in the early years of my vocation. Both involve caring for people in a way that surrenders the course of our lives to other people’s lives. Pastors and mothers may plan their days, weeks, or years, but the trail is blazed by the people whom we love. For mothers, careers are temporarily set aside to care for family. (Less often but sometimes, fathers do this work.) For pastors, family vacations are shifted when a funeral comes up. For both mothers and pastors, holidays are self-sacrificing and labor-intensive in order to create memories for others. You carry around your own examples, pastors and moms, of the way your life has been shaped by your generous love for others.
Reflecting on the past couple of years, I am noticing something else pastors and mothers share in common. A less obvious commonality between pastoring and mothering can be found in the way we either empower or disempower the people whom we love. This is some of the hard, hard work of pastoring and mothering! If we peel back the layer of “It’s easier to do it myself”, we notice we are keeping other people from doing it themselves.
Time for an example! Preparing for a Sunday off this week made me realize I’m the one who turns on the sound system and sets up the Facebook Livestream even though there are ushers and techs who are perfectly capable and willing to do this quick and easy work. During the course of the pandemic, pastors did the majority of the volunteer work for a spell and I became accustomed to “it’s easier to do it myself.” But now, there are plenty of fingers to press the green button to turn on the sound and type in a welcome on the livestream.
At home, the more work I can teach my kids to do (laundry, cooking, cleaning), the easier my life is. But this is daily hard work! It’s finding a balance between encouraging and nagging, teaching and letting go, caring and not caring. Empowering others is messy, grinding work at the same time it is the most faithful work demanded of pastors and mothers.
I know the balance is off when I get crabby. When my kids don’t do their laundry or chores or the sound system doesn’t get turned on or something else gets missed. Crabby is like a warning light reminding us to step back and notice whom might we empower and rely upon. The truth is, it isn’t easier to do it myself again and again. It is easier if others know what to do and how to help.
I was sure by the time I’d been a pastor for 17 years and a mother for 15 that I would have a better grip on these things! But life is never like that. Humans aren’t wired to learn most things once and for all. We learn again and again and then once again. And in the learning, we learn (not once but again and again) to be gentle on ourselves, to loosen our grip on life, and to give thanks for the people whom we love who shape the course of our lives.
Lisa Lewton 