  As a Christian mother trying to raise children with a sense of reverence and spirituality, I strive to find ways to make religion relevant to my 3 year-old's life, and maybe even to my 1 year-old's. But as an anthropologist, and a liberal woman, I feel increasingly discouraged at the traditional image the Christian church presents for spirituality.
The structure itself especially fails my children in giving them a sense that, even though God made everything beautifully in the universe, he somehow didn't make girls as special as boys. That's just shit. This morning my mom and I got into a long discussion about thinking reflectively. I started it by talking about my new book, The Beginner's Guide to Zen Buddhism , which I bought after my gateway book, Buddhist Reflections on Everyday Life , gave me so much fulfillment.
I began my delving into Buddhism last year while seeking out ways of calming my crazy new mother of two brain. Since then, I have found Zen meditation to be a remarkable source of self reflection, which hence breeds calm by teaching you to isolate thoughts as they fly through your brain and deal with them, whereas they might otherwise turn directly into worry or stress. I keep thinking about the benefits of knowing oneself, of controlling the chaos of thoughts in your brain to better direct them. I love the focus on self awareness, and I can't believe the whole world doesn't embrace this! I think many religions of the world initially did. I think that must have been either the focus or the inevitable outcome of the Native American vision quest. I'm left to wonder--and this is the question I brought to my mother--if Judaism also focused once on knowing oneself, somehow ceremoniously. Christianity now focusses so much on prayer, where your meditative time is directed at knowing God or, more typically, complaining to God. I regret that this focus is not more directed on self discovery. She brought up the group that John the Baptist belonged to, men who denied themselves almost all foods and certainly sex, and Jesus' foray into the desert for 40 days.
Those certainly were examples of ritualizing self discovery. If it was once in Christianity's roots, I feel like it's absent now. And I feel sad that the dominant religion of the western world doesn't value self reflection. Our culture has certainly suffered in its absence. I find myself then in this strange place where on the grounds of theology alone I am a Christian, and in practice, I'm somewhat eclectic.
We did go to that one church once, urlLink Ecclesia , that spent a good part of the message time free associating a la call and response about a psalm. But then I later discovered that Ecclesia doesn't let women be Deacons (whatever archaic form of religious governing that even is! ) or head pastors. And that, too, is just shit. Maybe we should try the Friends, since they don't believe in having any one leader, whether or not women can be leaders is a non-issue! I've found a fellow ecclectic practicer in an unlikely place. urlLink Brother David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine Monk who spent enlightening years studying with Zen monks. He's found remarkable similarities between the disciplines of worship between the two religions. Most importantly, he's built on a dialogue between the two that help both discover themselves along with their spirituality. I first heard him on this New Dimensions re-broadcast from 1990, and I couldn't believe his words, which sounded so appropriate to the present, were actually 14 years old.
You can listen to that program urlLink by clicking here . Similarly, urlLink Mothering Magazine ran urlLink an article earlier this year written by a mother who had learned to adapt her Zen mediation for breastfeeding. When I first read the article, I didn't understand her angle. Since then, I've read enough on Zen mediation to understand the vital imporance of breathing, and the article is a recurrent joy to me! 
