(Un)Natural Momনমুনা

Variety

Any personality can love God with her whole being. Any personality can love her neighbor as herself. Such diversity adds color to our churches, marriages, and world. I believe it even adds color to heaven. You can probably say quite easily which of your godly role models loves God with heart more than with head, and who loves Him with strength rather than with emotions. We should not tamper with the beauty of these differences.

It is possible to stick pretty much any plastic fruit onto a tree. I’ve read that one can now even purchase fruit salad trees in Australia. Some bear as many as six different fruits! The grafting of multiple species into one tree does not change the species of the fruit any more than strapping a saddle onto a moose could turn it into a racehorse. It is never an apple tree that bears lemons.

I meet many moms who have been bullied by models of motherhood that are simply as foreign to them as a saddle to a moose. They are no longer able to find their way to fulfilling motherhood. This often happens to a woman who marries into a different culture or marries a man with a strong opposite temperament.

It also happens when leaders try to make clones of their followers. Trying to fit the mold becomes so exhausting to these moms that even their natural strengths wilt. They are the apple trees forced to bear pears and now bearing neither. Some of them are so cut up by legalism or rigid systems that they look more like bonsai than their natural selves. Once these mothers are given permission to obey the magnetic pull God created them with, however, they start blooming again.

The fundamental problem, I believe, is that we think there is the perfect tree. My “perfect” trees are oak trees. I like the shape, the bark, the leaves, the solid shade in summer, the hues of brown in the fall, and the smell of the soil in which they flourish. Are all other trees wrong or inferior? The spiritual teacher Ram Dass captured it well:

When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You’re too this, or I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees.

Mothers are made to feel like the wrong tree. Can we counteract this by simply reciting the mantras “Live and let live” and “Be yourself”? No, that is not nearly enough. The idea is to know and be known, to understand and be understood, to appreciate and be appreciated, and to mature into what we are meant to be, all for the sake of whole relationships and a happy faith community that bears a large variety of fruit.