My daughter turned eighteen last month, and graduated from high school a few days ago. And just like that, I've entered a new stage of parenting, one that the What to Expect When You're Expecting books don't quite cover. Over the past few weeks, I've sat teary-eyed through a series of "lasts." Her last high school choir concert. Her last Bollywood dance recital. Her last prom night preparations. Her last track meet. While making a scrapbook for her birthday, I've pored over old photographs, remembering her as a crinkly newborn, a precocious preschooler, an intense pre-teen. I've laughed at funny memories — like the time her grandfather offered her his thumb to hold (she was barely two, and they were about to cross a busy street), and she grabbed her right thumb with her left hand, saying, "No thank you, I can hold my own." And I've cried at the sad memories. Illnesses, hospital stays, arguments, mistakes.
It's a time of pondering. What have the last eighteen years meant? Who was I when I started out as a mother, and who have I become since? It's a time of transition. Who will I become now? What will my identity be? And most of all, it's a time to learn the bewildering business of letting go. Time to launch a child — oh, no wait, a young adult! — into a beautiful, broken, and unpredictable world.
Spiritually, this tender time has led me to contemplate more seriously one of the Bible's central metaphors for God — God as Parent. God as both our Father and our Mother. I have to admit, this is not a metaphor I've paid much attention to until now. Sure, I've always accepted and believed it, but for some reason it has felt remote. Too theological and abstract to touch my heart. But now, suddenly, I'm wide open. I'm hungry to know the paternal and maternal faces of God, and I'm newly grateful for the array of scriptural texts that describe God as a profoundly involved and feeling parent:
"How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!" (1 John 3:1)
"Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." (Isaiah 49:15)
"Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions, the Lord alone guided him." (Deuteronomy 32:11)
"How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing." (Matthew 23:37)
"For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself. But now I will bellow like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant." (Isaiah 42:14)
"Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you." (John 14:2)
These are just a sampling of the Bible's rich offerings of God-as-Parent, but even these examples reveal so much. The God these passages describe loves his children wildly and lavishly, without restraint. She has a long and trustworthy memory; she holds the stories of those who cling to her for nourishment. She resists complacency and insists on courage, growth, risk-taking, and journeying. But she does so with wisdom and caution; she hovers, launches, supports, and guides. She longs to give and receive affection, and aches when her children refuse her embrace. She groans in hard labor, giving herself over to shattering pain to bring new life into the world. And he keeps house, honoring the diversity of his children by preparing not one room, but many for his children to return to and call home.
Given my own phase of life right now, what strikes me most about these images of God-as-Parent is God's utter and profound vulnerability. In her beautiful reflection on Isaiah's description of God as a laboring woman, Episcopal priest and theologian Lauren Winner describes it this way: "The image of God as a laboring woman puts together strength and vulnerability in a way that tells us something about God and how God works. The point is not just that God is vulnerable, although that in itelf is startling. The point is that in the struggles of labor, we can learn what strength is. If our picture of strength is a laboring woman, then strength is not about refusing to cry or denying pain. Strength is not about being in charge, or being independent, or being dignified. If our picture of strength is a laboring woman, then strength entails enduring, receiving help and support, being open to pain and risk."
I remember my daughter's birth well enough to know that Winner is spot-on here; I will always remember giving birth as one of the most empowering and vulnerable-making experiences of my life. I was stunned by what my body could do, but I was equally stunned — and humbled — by my utter dependency on the love and knowledge of others — my midwife, my husband, my nurses and friends — during those long, grueling hours in the labor and delivery room. I can't think of a more radical way to describe God's paradoxical strength than through the metaphor of childbirth. Or, well, maybe I can: the cross.
Though Winner's insights about vulnerability perfectly describe labor and delivery, I think they extend further. Looking back now after eighteen years of parenting, I can say for sure that vulnerability has been the name of the game all along, from start to finish. My cocky sense of certainty and knowledge about parenting ended, oh, ten seconds after my daughter was born. I couldn't get her to breastfeed. Or take a nap. Or sleep through the night. I didn't know what to do when she cried. (And cried, and cried, and cried.) As she got older, she asked questions I couldn't answer. She had opinions I found bewildering. She faced challenges I couldn't fix. And all along, every moment of pain, fear, loneliness, or defeat she experienced resounded inside of me, a deafening gong. To give myself over to mothering was to know powerlessness like I'd never known it before. Yes, I had authority. Yes, I had strength. Yes, I had skill and wisdom and insight. But I also had a whole lot of raw and trembling vulnerability.
Could it really be that God's experience is similar? Even though I was raised to believe so many things about God that don't match up with my own experience of parenting? I was taught that God is unchanging, transcendent, all-knowing, all-powerful. Maybe God is all of those things. But the truth is, it is not possible to parent as the above Biblical passages describe, and not experience tremendous emotional risk, weakness, pain, and transformation. It is not possible to love lavishly, or to offer up your own body as nourishment, or to nudge your frightened child out of the safety of your nest, or to carry your reckless young on your outstretched wings, or to watch your children refuse your protection and wander away, or to offer first-rate hospitality in the full knowledge that it might be rejected — and not embrace vulnerability as a way of life. If God is indeed our parent, then God is daily, hourly putting God's paternal and maternal heart at risk for the sake of love.
In a few short weeks, my husband and I will help our daughter pack up her belongings, drive six hours south, and drop her off at college. The fierce little two-year-old who once insisted on holding her own hand when she crosses the street, will soon be the young adult who forges her own path away from our watchful care — for better or for worse. No more hand-holding. No more hovering. Just hope, fear, joy, love, and prayer. Only time, I suspect, will ease the ache of this passage. But for now, I'm grateful to be in good company. The best and most startling company. Whatever else God might be, God is a parent who knows what it costs to hold and what it costs to let go. I'm grateful for the vulnerable God who births, nurses, loves, guides, and launches us, his heart on the line until we learn to fly, choose our course, and make our way home.
