Tending my tiny garden

Art and interruptions as opportunities for identity formation

I had grand visions of writing this week about how humans have created a sense of identity in relationship to institutions over the last six hundred years or so. I was going to talk about how, for a long time, institutions were monolithically all-encompassing — you belonged based on your geographic and socioeconomic location. Then, a huge cultural shift happened with the establishment of the United States, and choose-your-own-identity by opting into preferred associations became the style du jour.

I planned to talk about how we’ve been entering a new era of meaning-making since the 1960s and that’s a big part of why it feels like the earth is shifting under our feet. I was so excited to share this incredible research out of Candler School of Theology that I’ve been geeking out about, because it has been giving me language for the trends I am seeing in church spaces and in the wider culture, as some of us try to make sense of who we are collectively in an Age of Authentic Individuality.

I was going to do all that, and probably still will. But then life happened. I got a call from my kids’ daycare that they weren’t well and needed to be picked up, and there went my whole workday.

When these interruptions happen, as they so often do with small children, I’m learning how much of my identity has been tied up in what I do. Since I was a teenager, my mom has often reminded me,

“You are a human being, not a human doing.”

Intellectually, I nodded along. But it has taken becoming a mother myself to honestly assess my relationship with work. How adeptly I can shift from accomplishing a task to being present with my children hinges on how tightly I’m clinging to the way that particular task makes me feel. If I trust its completion to provide me with a sense of accomplishment, if I believe doing this thing will make me feel confident, successful, good, then it is easy for me to slip into annoyance and even resentment toward my children.

I recognize this is a perennial pattern which working parents, and mothers in particular, contend with. Parenting is absolutely work too, no question! Attending to the needs, joys, or pain of children is a labor of love. But there’s no clear outcome, at least in the moment. No product is created. There’s much to do, of course, but so much of parenting is about simply being with one’s children. There is satisfaction in practicing presence, yet our society does not generally see value in this caring work, whether it is being done by parents, daycare workers, or teachers. So I am considering what it means to me to be a mother who works — how to best ensure the flourishing of my children, and the integrity of own soul, while my caring work remains unpaid and largely invisible.

Similarly, I’m reexamining my understanding of vocation, while reading Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness. Peterson asserts that careerism has so infected American religion, that most pastors (including this priest) lose sight of why they said yes to the Divine call to ministry in the first place:

“Pastors commonly give lip service to the vocabulary of a holy vocation, but in our working lives we more commonly pursue careers. Our actual work takes shape under the pressure of the marketplace, not the truth of theology or the wisdom of spirituality. I would like to see as much attention given to the holiness of our vocations as to the piety of our lives.”

Recognizing the allure of priesthood as a career path, with benefits and job security, is one of the reasons I find myself currently outside of a parish setting. There’s been a great deal of conversation lately about pastors leaving the ministry, especially with this viral exit interview-style blog from a pastor detailing all the ways church systems were dysfunctional and hurtful to him and his family. I haven’t resigned myself to abandoning this vocation. Rather, I needed a chance to reset and reevaluate. To reroot in a deeper sense of vocation, outside of the ambitions fueled by neoliberal capitalism. To rediscover vocational holiness.

So. I’m pondering how my identity as a mother connects to my vocation of priesthood, and how both of these things exist in tension with the traditional tendency to derive meaning from association with institutions, a pattern which is actively shifting toward a compulsory individualism that leaves us lonely and disconnected from community.

Which brings me back to this theme I am looking forward to diving into in the coming weeks: Identity, and how it is formed in us.

I’m curious to explore ways of forming identity that are encouraging of the flourishing of our whole, embodied, spiritual selves. I want to interrogate the ways in which identity formation, as it stands right now, hinges on productivity and monetary valuation of our time, energy, and gifts. I wonder, in this Age of Authentic Individuality, whether the pursuit of an authentic identity — the true self — can still be done in the context of community.

I recently heard Jamila Woods’ song “Tiny Garden” for the first time. These lines struck a chord with me:

It's not gonna be a big production
It's not butterflies or fireworks
Said it's gonna be a tiny garden
But I'll feed it everyday
I'll feed it

In all the questions I am holding, art’s interludes and life’s interruptions are opportunities to pause and practice grace for myself in the process. We are in the thick of a monumental cultural shift of identity formation, and I doubt any of us are going to be alive to fully see what’s on the other side of it. It is indeed daunting to stay connected to our true selves in these tempestuous times. Yet I can lovingly tend the tiny garden of my own soul. I can care for the little corner of the world I call home (and this tiny pocket of the internet).

So let me ask you: How are you feeding your garden? How are you tending your soul? What revolutionary ways of forming your identity can you lean into today?