Years in the past, when my daughter was born, I knew that I needed to breastfeed her.I had not grown up seeing girls nurse their infants, so I spent my total being pregnant studying books on the topic. On the finish of 9 months, I figured I used to be an skilled. I additionally figured that since breastfeeding is a pure course of, it might come, you understand, naturally.
When the time got here to really do it, although, it solely took me about 30 seconds to appreciate not solely that my new child had not learn the books, however that the books have been ineffective within the face of our mutual bafflement. I had no concept easy methods to maintain the newborn. She had no concept easy methods to latch on. Neither of us knew easy methods to hold her tiny flailing fists out of the best way of her frantic little mouth, and neither of us knew easy methods to hold her from choking when the milk let down. The pure enterprise of a mom feeding a toddler ended up taking weeks of observe, persistence, clumsiness, and tears.
However over time, we discovered. We found out what to do with our our bodies. We developed a rhythm. We nestled into one another, my daughter eagerly drawing the necessities of diet, affection, and safety from me, and I in flip—aching with tenderness, urgency, and wild, unbelievable love—sharing my complete self with the little individual cocooned in my arms.
Between my two kids, I spent about 4 years of my life breastfeeding. 4 years sustaining human lives with my physique. 4 years glowing with delight and satisfaction when my infants’ cheeks crammed out, and their limbs grew sturdy, and their eyes sparkled, and their bellies swelled with my milk. I discovered what it meant to present myself away, to thrill in a fullness aside from my very own, to be nourished by the act of nourishing. To grow to be meals.
I used to be too exhausted as a younger mom to assume a lot concerning the non secular resonances of my expertise. However trying again now, I’m wondering if what I felt, feared, and discovered again then mirrors something of what God routinely experiences when she tries to feed us. Does God really feel the aching want I felt, to nourish kids who persist in baffling self-sabotage? Is God affected person after we fumble and thrilled after we latch on? Does God really feel delight after we lastly start to fill out? What does God’s maternal pleasure appear to be after we consent to soak up what she gives? Once we develop and flourish beneath her care?
What do God’s sorrow and terror appear to be when we don’t?
When my daughter was 12 years previous, she developed anorexia nervosa, and over the course of a number of months she stopped consuming. The descent was gradual: first, no desserts. Then no carbs. And finally, no meals. Simply bits and scraps. A single grape. One carrot stick. A spoonful of yogurt. Hardly sufficient to maintain a life.
Because the sickness progressed, our household eating desk turned a battlefield. Grocery buying turned an train in desperation. For years, each try at intervention failed, and my husband and I confronted the true prospect that we would lose our little lady.
It’s unattainable to specific what I felt throughout that interval of my life. All I needed within the universe—what I’d actually have died for—was to feed my daughter, to nurture her again to wholeness. Each time she refused to eat, I panicked, I seethed, I grieved, I begged. I skilled a powerlessness that I hope by no means to expertise once more. In any case, I used to be her mom. My main job was to maintain my kids fed. How might I fail at job one?
Right here once more, the non secular resonances pile up quick. I want I knew the supply of this excellent phrase, however I’ve heard it mentioned greater than as soon as that Christianity is “the eatingest faith on the planet.” Therefore the abundance of meals metaphors within the Bible. Bread, wine, milk, honey. Fish, figs, manna, quail. Banquets, tables, feasts, receptions. The Bible is full of tales of a God who longs to feed her hungry kids. It is usually full of kids who inexplicably flip away from the meals she affords.
On the heels of my experiences with my daughter, I can simply think about the heartbreaking urgency of a divine mother or father who is aware of precisely what makes for all times and what makes for demise—and longs to spare her beloved kids the latter. I can effectively think about how God grieves and weeps, seethes and pleads, fears and hopes, after we say no to the feasts of affection, mercy, justice, and peace she prepares for us. And I can think about very effectively how she should wrestle together with her personal vulnerability, her personal powerlessness, each time we flip away from her. The horrible value of the liberty God has given us to starve ourselves if we so select.
My daughter finally recovered, and I’ll all the time be pleased about that. However the traumas of our lives additionally depart scars and shadows. I feel I’ll all the time really feel a rawness in my coronary heart with regards to my kids’s nourishment. I’m wondering if so for God, too.
There’s an evocative line in Psalm 131, one other meals metaphor: “However I’ve calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned baby with its mom; my soul inside me is sort of a weaned baby.” I’ll confess that with regards to my non secular life, I’m very hardly ever “a weaned baby.” More often than not I’m the opposite form of baby—fierce, frantic, flailing. My face scrunched up, my mouth pursed tight and away, my physique clumsily proof against divine tenderness.
It helps to know that God understands my ambivalence. It helps to know that God’s persistence gained’t put on skinny, regardless of how lengthy or how arduous I resist. It helps to know that by some means, in opposition to all odds, God’s love will coax me again to the meals I want. Like a weaned baby together with her mom, I will likely be full.
