THE SELF-EMPTYING OF MOTHERHOOD: BREASTFEEDING AS SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
It took a desert monk to help me see that breastfeeding is the closest I’ve ever come to prayer without ceasing.
The young, wealthy, and well-educated John Cassian left his family’s home in present-day Romania sometime in the mid 380’s to join a monastery in Bethlehem with his friend Germanus. From Bethlehem the pair traveled to the Egyptian desert region of Wadi El Natrun, an arid wasteland rich only in sand dunes and salt. Here, in a land of sand and silence, Cassian lived with and learned from some of Christianity’s most famous ascetics. One of these was Abbot Issac whose instructions on prayer, conveyed in writing years later in Cassian's Conferences, would influence the writers of such works as The Rule of St. Benedict and The Cloud of Unknowing, thereby influencing Western conceptions of contemplation forever.
Abbot Issac is clear on a monk’s priorities. He says, “The end of every monk and the perfection of his heart direct him to constant and uninterrupted perseverance in prayer; and, as much as human frailty allows, it strives after an unchanging and continual tranquility of mind and perpetual purity.”[1] In other words, prayer is that upon which every other spiritual virtue is built, the only ground from which we might ascend to heaven, and it can only be achieved through a purity of heart which must be continually cultivated.
So how did this chapped-lipped holy man instruct Cassian in prayer? First, Abbot Issac says that we must set aside all “anxiety about fleshly matters” starting with the goofy stuff: “idle speech, talkativeness, and buffoonery.”[2] Then, we have to let go of the nastier, more deeply-seated stuff: anger and sadness as well as lust and avarice. The point here is to cleanse the soul “of all the dregs of the passions” so that it might return “back to its natural lightness.”[3] Fasting is an aid here, as is manual labor. Both force us to face our own weaknesses.
For all the austerity and heaviness in the Abbot’s way of life, there is an underlying belief that the soul itself is a thing with feathers, that in its natural state–unmoored and un-mucked by self-interest and anxiety–the soul can be naturally buoyed up to God “by the subtlest breath.”[4]
Perhaps even that of a baby’s.
I was lying on an operating table with my arms stretched out crucifixion style the first time I saw my daughter. After forty hours of labor and a surprising cascade of complications, a beefy surgery technician had hoisted my limp body onto the metal table, making a loud doing. He told me that if I could keep my arms perfectly still he wouldn’t have to tie me down. “Whatever happens,” he said gravely, “don’t reach behind the drape.”
The drape, that blue plastic curtain, separated my sensing, glitching brain and racing heart from the holy of holies–my womb, whose capacity for safekeeping our daughter had swiftly and dramatically expired. As the anesthesia failed and the procedure that gave my daughter life began, I imagined the nails that kept Christ’s hands posted to the crossbeam immobilized my own. I tried to imagine that the pain of his nails in my hands was stronger than the pain behind the drape, and soon the doctor lifted her–mercifully pink and howling–above the veil.
I’m happy to call this, and many other moments of motherhood, a prayer, as I believe Cassian and Abba Isaac would be, too. When Germanus asks Abbot Isaac what it means to pray without ceasing and what kind of prayer it is that he ought to pray unceasingly, Abbot Isaac responds that there are as many different kinds of prayer as there are people, and that within each person there are as many prayers as there are conditions of soul.
In Cassian’s view, when our souls are freed of their regular humdrum, when our passions and self-important brain static are subdued, we find the simplicity we need to see things as they really are. The scrim that regularly clouds our vision peels away, and we can see things in all their glorious, actual reality. In a very real way, our mind is “refashioned from earthly dullness to the likeness of the spiritual and angelic” and in this mode, “whatever [we] take in, whatever [we] reflect upon, and whatever [we] do will be the most pure and sincere prayer.”[5]
When my husband held my daughter’s face to my own, and I felt her tiny breath on my cheek, my agony evaporated entirely. Call it oxytocin, a mother’s bliss, my soul rising in its natural lightness up to God, it was the closest thing to a concrete miracle I’ve ever encountered, the purest possible prayer. In that moment, I glimpsed the fullness of the gratuitous gift that is her life, and inasmuch as this was a glimpse of full reality, it was the closest I’ve come to glimpsing God.
Every labor–even if the anesthesia holds or if the delivery is swift and uncomplicated–leaves a mother utterly harrowed. By the end of it the mother’s body is freshly reaped and her will is a tearstained whisper. It is in this state that she begins the long road of motherhood and her unceasing prayers really begin, because a baby’s needs don’t wait on the mother’s recovery.
Our girl arrived on the scene hungry. By the time I made it back from my surgery she was already trying to latch on to her father’s chest. The first night in the hospital found us eking out dots of colostrum onto our fingers and into her mouth. On the second night she cried for six consecutive hours. Finally, the, no-nonsense, “breast is best” lactation stalwart looked at me squarely and said, “That’s a nine pound baby. You gotta feed that baby.” She left the room and returned with formula. Soon our girl was fast asleep. My “breastfeeding journey,” as the influencers call it, was a herky jerky ride full of missteps, ice packs, pure silver nipple badges (I still don’t know what those were for), manual and mechanical breastpumps, tearful conversations, vividly descriptive text exchanges with friends, and grace in the form of lactation consultants, supportive friends and family, and when we needed it–formula.
The reality of breastfeeding as a discipline–the physical subjugation and relentless rhythm of it–meets every mother who is able to lactate. The practice of it requires a letting go of our typical concerns (sleep, food, hygiene) to refocus on a starker reality (the needs and preciousness of another) which can result in a newfound humility, and sometimes awe, that is not dissimilar to the pattern of prayer that Cassian and his crowd were practicing out in the desert 1,600 years ago. Breastfeeding often involves discomfort, pain even, learning, tears, and an ocean of time. And no matter how your baby eats, caring for him or her results in a complete “refashioning” of the mind. Studies have shown that mothers undergo significant structural and functional brain changes in early postpartum that result in a measurable decrease of self-focus and a heightened response to their babies cues.[6]
I found this refashioning of the brain, this reconfiguring of my will, disorienting and even frightening. It feels like a freefall. When the baby is hungry everything else stops. The way I calculated time changed (“If I feed her now, she’ll be hungry again in two hours, but if she doesn’t nurse well then I’ll have to pump, which will take another 30 mins, which leaves me just enough time to…”). And my relationship to my body changed entirely. I was now a one woman dairy farm, storing my precious, fatty vintages in ziplock baggies in case of future contingencies. But then there were the delirious joys outside of time–her milk drunk smile, her warm breath on my shoulder, moments when we were the only two awake on our street.
Breastfeeding is a fulltime job (some estimate that it takes ~1800 hours a year, or 35 hours per week[7]), and women are doing it everywhere all of the time. In the past week while writing this piece, I’ve been in two different cars with friends who needed to pump while driving. I’ve been at a dinner and on a hike where mothers had to step away to nurse. I’ve been at the starting line of a trail race where a mother told me her milk was coming in just then (she finished second), and just now I had to leave my desk and scramble up into my attic in order to lend my breast pump to a neighbor.
And like any discipline, it can cross a line into self-flagellation. Abbot Issac has some strange and even comical stories about monks who were harassed by demons telling them that they must continue their fast beyond beneficial limits, or that they must keep hammering that large rock with a hammer over and over again even though they are totally failing at breaking it into bits. In each case, the demons were tempting the monks with ambition and self-reliance. How lovely and how tempting it is, the taste of self-righteousness. This temptation is present in breastfeeding, too–to cling to a vision of perfect motherhood that involves exclusive breastfeeding when doing so isn’t serving mother and/or baby best.
Perfection in any spiritual discipline is an ever receding mirage, which is fine, because as Cassian knew, the end of every spiritual discipline is to face our frailty in order that we might draw closer to God. The goal is a moment of ineffable peace when our strivings cease, when we rest with full bellies and hearts. Feeding my baby taught me like nothing else has that an untethering of the will and an acceptance of grace is required to make room for the full reality of love.
[1] John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 330.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 332.
[4] Ibid, 331.
[5] Ibid, 334.
[6] Erika Barba-Müller, Sinéad Craddock, Susanna Carmona, and Elseline Hoekzema, "Brain Plasticity in Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period: Links to Maternal Caregiving and Mental Health," Archives of Women's Mental Health 22, no. 2 (2019): 289–299, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-018-0889-z.
[7] Nelson, Amy. "The Politics of Breastfeeding (And Why It Must Change)." Forbes, October 24, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/amynelson1/2018/10/24/the-politics-of-breastfeeding-and-why-it-must-change/.
