I often encounter students and others who struggle with being a mother and following God's call. Claire Wolfteich's book is one I'll offer to these women, for her book directly reflects on mothering in the context of spiritual life. Wolfteich says: “Mothering is a kind of askesis, training, spiritual exercise” (4). Wolfteich investigates several well-known mothers who are also spiritual writers. Then she develops a practical theology responding to that spiritual writing.
Wolfteich considers the mystics and mothers Margery Kempe and Jarena Lee. Wolfteich notes that these mystics do not often speak of their children, so that any connection between mothering and spiritual life is left ambiguous. Both women describe (in Wolfteich's terms) “othermother[s]” (45), who share mothering practices and enable each mother to live their other vocations. Yet that leads to questions like these: How well does this kind of spiritual life and mothering go together? How much is community required for spiritual mothering?
Wolfteich next considers the widowed mother Jane de Chantal and her mentor Francis de Sales. Jane's writing describes a wide range of vocations, from mothering to founding a religious community. Francis and Jane write of what Wolfteich names as everyday mothering in spiritual life. For example, Francis describes mothering in connection to spiritual love: “maternal love, the most pressing, the most active, the most ardent of all” (63).
Third, Wolfteich narrates twentieth-century women: Dorothy Day (cofounder of the Catholic Worker), Dolores Huerta (cofounder of United Farm Workers), and Lena Frances Edwards (African American OB-GYN who instituted a maternity hospital at a migrant camp). These contemporary mothers write both of their active spirituality and of raising children. These women see activism and raising children in some tension; Wolfteich suggests that for Day, in particular, attempting both activism and mothering presents a spiritual problem. Huerta and Edwards have “more confident maternal-spiritual voices” (98).
In part 2, Wolfteich develops three themes: motherwork (from Patricia Hill Collins), time poverty, and mothering as spiritual practice.
Motherwork places mothering as important work, drawing from John Paul II's Laborem Excercens: “The family is simultaneously a community made possible by work and the first school of work” (114). Wolfteich understands mothering as a very broad vocation with many iterations (e.g., working mothers, stay-at-home mothers, etc.), while also emphasizing the need for “othermothers.”
A danger for mothers and their spiritual lives is time poverty. Many of the spiritual writers Wolfteich discusses struggled with lack of time. Wolfteich examines the practice of Sabbath keeping, especially as expressed by mothers’ voices, as a way of inviting mothers to see Sabbath rest not as one more activity but as a way to provide space in mothering and spiritual life.
Finally, Wolfteich argues that mothers need to recognize their work as “ordinary spiritual theology” (164). Many mothers describe loss of spiritual practice as their lives become busier with children. Wolfteich offers them an alternative, an ordinary spiritual theology that involves “the daily work of caring for children, in care of bodies, in maternal suffering, in political resistance” (167). Wolfteich suggests that while mothers often write about these practices, their voices are “muted or silenced” (167).
This book addresses an important topic, and I shall suggest it to various audiences. That said, I do have concerns. The first is Wolfteich's reading of Dorothy Day; Day wrote often about spiritual retreats that she attended, and which influenced her work. Day's writing on the retreats discusses just the kinds of tensions that Wolfteich sees in Day's writing—only for Day, as well as for Fr. Hugo and others giving the retreats, these tensions manifest a good vision of both spiritual life and the pursuit of motherhood. That's not to say Day wasn't conflicted; I think she was—but I think Wolfteich's reading would benefit from more discussion of the impact those retreats had on Day (and on Tamar).
Second, I am not sure that broadening spirituality to include “ordinary spiritual theology” does the work that the mothers cited in Wolfteich's book describe and desire. I agree that mothering practices can be part of spiritual life; breastfeeding can provide space for contemplation; holding a sleeping child can be prayer. Yet writers like de Chantal or Day suggest to me that, in considering mothering practices, they are broadening the understanding of prayer, or what it means to love—and not broadening the concept or numbering of spiritual practices.
That said, this book does important work on an often-overlooked topic and should be read.
