Keeping My Word
By my own reckoning, this is my 100th post in Little Conversations. It isn’t quite 100 Sundays of posts because I’ve thrown in extra posts along the way, but it does mean that I’ve have written at least one post every week since I started in August 2022.
I’ve always been a writer. I blame my father, who wrote as a journalist before I was even born. When I was little and sitting in my own rocking chair with a pencil and a pad of paper, I wanted to be just like him.
Around 2008, when blogging seemed cool, I had a brand-new Catholic faith, a toddler, and a husband about to go on deployment. So, I wrote stories about motherhood on blogspot, kept a blog list in the sidebar, and participated in weekly linking parties. I still read and listen to the work of mothers I met online during that time. It made my day when anyone commented on my posts who wasn’t a family member or my best friend (still does).
I had a couple pieces picked up by bigger blogging houses and, in 2012, I decided I needed a brand. I built my own website. I created and changed the handles of all my social media to match. And then I stopped. For a bunch of different reasons, all pointing towards a lack of authenticity, I couldn’t write about my family life in the style and platform I had built for myself. I closed it all up.
For about ten years, I only wrote online in Instagram captions. But I still wrote, in journals and on scratch paper. I took myself back to school and wrote reams to earn a master’s degree. I wrote before the internet and if the internet died tomorrow, I’d still write. I dreamed last night that I wrote some of this very post in my sleep.
Writing has changed for me and yet it is more a part of me than ever. The things we love can change external form and yet remain internally the same. Stability of love doesn’t necessarily mean unchanging but rather continued growth in the right direction.
The Ten Commandments necessitate for each of us that we enact them as a unique creation. I must obey and live the commandments in my motherhood in ways that my husband or a friend or another mother should not. The essentials, like not committing murder, hold true for everyone. The particulars, how to bring myself, my spouse, my family, and my community into the life of the gospel (which is the fullness of the positive side of “thou shalt not kill”), demand our God-created differences.
Writing, for me, forms such a deep, central part of bringing full life into the world, of understanding and participating in God’s knitting together of the Kingdom, that I am not living into who He made me without it. But I haven’t always understood what creating that gift would entail.
John writes, “Those who say, ‘I know him,’ but do not keep his commandments are liars, and the truth is not in them. But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him” (1 Jn 2:4-5). Integrity and salvation depend upon our ability to particularly enact the commandments in our own lives.
In the process of keeping my word, God perfects me. Ultimately, after so many days of solemnity in a row, we settle down to the season of Easter and the mandate that, if the Resurrection matters, it must spread through us. We must craft resurrection lives.
Being a mother who has kept my word perfects me, and I see it perfecting the women around me.
In order to write these reflections, I must have something to reflect on. I must live a life worth pondering.
Ponder-ability cycles back and forth with co-creation. We form a gift, then we give it. We bake a cake, then we celebrate. We make a book list, then we teach it. We coordinate a meal train, then we deliver. We raise children, then they launch.
This is what I got wrong in my earlier attempts at public-facing writing, especially with my second blog. I didn’t really understand and I wasn’t really living a life of co-creation. I wasn’t fully living the life God called me to live.
I thought of writing as achievement rather than gift. I had very little gift to give away because I had formed little. I had content goals and structured my life to fit those objectives. I was still learning how a writer lives the Commandments (still am).
Learning to keep my word leads me into a life of co-creation which also converts me and re-forms me. To make the cake or craft the book list or create a sharable meal or parent our children, we agree to methods and disciplines which, in turn, form us. The desire to give a good gift spurs us on in the work of creating something or someone worth giving away. If I want to write, then I have to have lived something worth saying.
I listen to women, women creating good things and forming good people, talk about their gifts. They often devalue themselves in the process. I’m just a mom. Sometimes women compare their gifts with this publication. I could never write the way you do.
But they’ve got it backwards. Good writing, like I hope to do, only comes from a story worth sharing. After Cleopas and the other disciple walk the road to Emmaus, after they talk with Jesus and eat with Him and know Him, then they have a story to share (Lk 24:35). It takes a lot of keeping, forming, learning, and loving to have words. The words are secondary to the primary vocation.
Women live lives worth sharing – they live gospel lives of infinite and eternal value. They celebrate milestone birthdays, educate their children, support struggling families, and raise a generation. These are commandment lives. These are the ways we keep our word.
None of my words matter unless they come from a life worth living. I type these words on a laptop at the dining room table, carving out stories between loads of laundry and spelling practice. The laundry and the homeschooling matter far more than the words on the page. They give me a word worth keeping.
Readings for the Third Sunday of Easter (Year B) on the USCCB Website