milk & honey mamas

Contributed by Kristen

My baby is almost 5 months old. My journal entries for the past few weeks have consistently started with “this stage is so hard” followed by some crying emojis. Of course it’s also wonderful and adorable and sweet but wow, I am tired. Everyone on the internet knows best. Everyone only wants to help. And I am so tired, so full of wanting to do right by my tiny child who is so still a part of me. I want to be endlessly patient. I want to want to hold him whenever he wants to be held. I want to cherish these moments. But, as I cried to my husband last night, I am human!

Recently, a beloved friend asked me what I thought about a phrase found in the Book of Mormon: “the natural man is an enemy to God.” It’s a pretty potent phrase, similar to sentiments Paul uses in the New Testament. In fact, the idea of a corrupt ‘natural’ state has been deeply influential in Christian history—the Patistics are now famous for what might fairly be called a revulsion for the body (especially the female body). The body, in all its carnality, is traditionally associated with the natural, fallen state of humanity. My lament disparaging my bodily craving for sleep makes sense in this framework. My goal in this frame ought to be overcoming my bodily limitations to tap into the spiritual (which is ostensibly unbound by physical limits). The natural man is an enemy to God, after all, suggesting a deity who distains the muddy murkiness of limits and human nature, our cravings and longings and weaknesses and fleshiness. 

But if I can’t imagine God in my most human moments, my moments of greatest humanity are also likely to be my moments of greatest shame and loneliness. 

One of my favorite authors, Rachel Naomi Remen, writes beautifully about our “life force”: 

“Accidents and natural disasters often cause people to feel that life is fragile. In my experience, life can change abruptly and end without warning, but life is not fragile. There is a difference between impermanence and fragility… There is a tenacity toward life which is present at the intracellular level without which even the most sophisticated of medical interventions would not succeed.” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, page 8). 

Sometimes our life force shows up as rage, exhaustion, or hunger. It is, in short, the tenacious urge to life. My precious baby has it, and so do l. 

I want to suggest that this life force, this will to live, is our deepest, most natural state. It is, perhaps, the natural human. It is not always expressed in healthy or appropriate ways (thus the relevance of a spiritual path). It is strong, powerful, and universal. At the depths of our beings, across our many differences, we want to live. I think this is the story of the Book of Mormon: the story of life forces played out, beautifully and miserably. Their will to live, like ours, became perverted and violent at times. The historical characters, like us, witness and perpetrate abhorrent horrors and cruelties. They imagine and encounter God in gentle, loving, maternal images and in violent, warfaring ones. There is family conflict, murder, violence of many kinds, and genocide. Whether we read this as a historical or fictional text, the Book of Momon stories are deeply relevant because they are human stories. Stories about our life force, both beautiful and miserable.

I do not think the natural man is an enemy to God. I do not think God is at war with us. I think God is with us, in our greatest humanity. I do think God draws us tenderly toward life that is less constrained by the barriers we erect. This is the work of spiritual healing, of wholeness and life. Book of Mormon characters find their own meaning, their own questions and answers, their own resolutions. They encounter mystery and make sense of it. They are human. 

I held my boy’s tiny hands last night and cradled him to sleep. The night was long and hard, and I am tired. That is my life force. It is strong, trying to keep me and my baby alive. But what I find in the Book of Mormon brings comfort to my weary body in a deeper way.  My life force, my natural woman, is my door to God. It is flung wide open, wild and fierce and fecund, and I can nourish it with all the tenderness I possess. I am learning how to nourish my life force, how to listen to anger, and hunger, and exhaustion. My little one will learn too, but for now his life force is his whole being. Someday, perhaps I will learn to become like him again. For now, I will read the Book of Mormon as a mother, hungry for life and love. And I believe in what I know I will find: God, in the wilderness, among us, alive.