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Though babies require me to practice self-denial, I also insist on self-care. Asking for help every day—and at this point, I can't make it through even eight hours solo—is at least as difficult as self-denial. I'm beginning to see it as a spiritual practice. Like many evangelical girls, I was raised for domestic labor, raised to be a cheerful giver and never a taker. In the colicky evening hours, however, when two babies are crying at the same time and I'm beginning to cry myself, I just can't do it all. Asking for help, both when I'm at my wit's end and when I just want a break, preserves my health and strengthens my community. It draws my husband into the inner circle of baby care, a sanctum from which dads too often are excluded. It brings friends and family members into my babies' lives in meaningful ways. And it allows me to snatch some sleep—and occasionally even a walk or a shower. Self-care is the inverse of asceticism, but it may be a feminine counterpoint to pride-crushing self-denial. When done for the right reasons, both self-denial and self-care are sanctifying.

The spiritual value of women's work has been given little credence in Western Christianity. As in ancient Greece, men are still often seen as more capable of sustained philosophical and theological reflection, while women are tied to earth in the messy physical work of childbearing and raising. In Breathing Space, Lutheran pastor Heidi Neumark describes her friend's first interview with a church committee. Members of the committee were concerned that the woman's mothering would get in the way of her pastoring. The candidate's reproductive giftedness was cast in competitive terms against her spiritual giftedness, and the church wanted only the spiritual goods.

If this spirit-body dualism were true, then mothers of babies and young children would have to put their spiritual growth on hold until they were able to seek God in quiet study, silent prayer, and uninterrupted conversation. For their part, male theologians and pastors would also have to maintain a false separation of family life from spiritual life. Augustine, for instance, left us to speculate about how his experience of fatherhood fit with his theology of women. Though the tradition of elevating the esoteric over the experiential continues, parenting offers both women and men an opportunity to integrate living their faith with thinking and speaking of it.

I've been influenced by the dualist tradition enough to fear it's true. But when I look down at my suckling sons, there's no doubt in my mind that this is holy work. In contrast to her friend's experience, Neumark was interviewed by an inner-city Puerto Rican church committee. They also asked questions about mothering and pastoring, but with a tone of anticipation instead of anxiety: "'Pastor, when are you and Gregorio going to start a family?' Instead of seeing pregnancy and childbirth as inconveniences and obstacles to job performance, they considered motherhood a natural and joyful part of life that they hoped I would share." Church folk got what they asked for: concurrent opportunities to receive Neumark's leadership and to support her through pregnancies and early motherhood.

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May 2007, Vol. 51, No. 5