Editor's Introduction: The Spirituality of Parenting. Or, Stomping, Screaming, and Slamming Doors

Abstract

Editor's Introduction:The Spirituality of Parenting. Or, Stomping, Screaming, and Slamming Doors S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate My favorite winter holiday movie is It's a Wonderful Life. Cynics decry the sappy ending, and others have critiqued its pollyannaish view of the world. But they too quickly skip to the snappy-happy ending and miss the half of the movie that descends deep into desperation. As George Bailey (James Stewart) begins his downward spiral, he angrily discusses his life with his patient wife, Mary (Donna Reed). He runs through the list of how bad the finances are, how their old house is crumbling, and ultimately turns his rancor on the family. He exclaims, "You call this a happy family?! Why did we have to have all these kids anyway?!" George Bailey exclaims what so many of us have thought at so many times: Wouldn't life be easier without children? Parenting is difficult, occasionally overwhelming and exasperating. It is a day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute bustle of assessment, gauging hunger levels, managing sleep schedules, placating sibling rivalries, and soothing emotional upheaval. We often, parents and children alike, spend our time not in some "spiritual" mode, but stomping, screaming, and slamming doors.1 And yet, as we Homo sapiens survive we seem to be drawn again and again to bringing up new members of our species, to shaping and educating our young, and developing some micro-community we call a family. Somewhere in our bio-cultural evolution humans have found that parenting is one of the most rewarding experiences in life. As many of us attest we feel ourselves to be better writers, teachers, workers, activists, artists, friends, lovers, and sons and daughters because we have learned something by being parents. Parenting does this in part because it is a wholistic enterprise, engaging: body, mind, and spirit; economics, politics, and history; gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity; eating, sleeping, and being bored. Very few functions of adult lives are as all-encompassing as parenting.2 [End Page 241] religion, spirituality, and parenting Among this push and pull of parenting, religious traditions play a preeminent role. All major religious traditions exert a tremendous of energy regulating and maintaining the socio-political unit that is the family. For family is, among other things, about the regulation of bodies and minds, as children are taught social skills and adaptations that, as we parents believe, will help them in life. Religious traditions have long understood that stable family structures lead to stable societies. The familial microcosm is a building block of a socio-political macrocosm. Even when we attempt to teach our children to be contrarian to reigning values, we inevitably provide them with a path that we hope they will walk down, filled with values that transcend our immediate surroundings and connect them with a larger milieu. Which brings us to the spirituality of parenting. When I set out to assemble this special issue, I thought to use the term "spirituality" (instead of "religion") because it flows in and out of religious traditions, even as it is infused with personalized impulses and activities. Families create their own rituals around the dinner table, tell stories of their ancestors, establish interpersonal bonds on the commute to school, and create symbolically special spaces and times at home and away. These activities run parallel and often in tandem with what we tend to call religious traditions, but they are also unique and made meaningful by a family of people and are not generally shared beyond that group. Spirituality, as I'm considering it here, allows us to think about a non-institutionalized, small-scale flow of activity and meaning making, even as it follows similar formal paths that religious traditions have long tread. Most of the contributors, I must quickly note, barely use the term spirituality and instead link their parenting life with religious traditions: Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Islam, and Taoism. spiritual parenting now Why revisit parenting now? Why run a special issue on this topic at this point in time? Maybe it was the global pandemic of Covid-19 that stirred this interest, but parenting seems to be on the minds of many...