For a girl raised a Catholic, even in the 1970s and '80s, there was always the possibility that one would 'get the call'. Although my dear aunty was a nun, being tapped on the shoulder by God to take up holy orders elicited fear rather than longing in me. A life of service (not to mention a life without boys) was not the future I wanted.
But in my 20s, as my religious affiliation shifted towards Zen Buddhism, the monastery began to hold new appeal. Life there would be calm and ordered, I thought. And, surely, more authentically religious. This assumption, like so many others, has been undone by becoming a parent.
What has been the most important moment of your life? When were you happiest? Those of us who have children often answer that it was when first holding our newborns.
There is a great rush of love and relief in those moments, but that's not all. Bringing forth a baby is a dizzying exposure to the deep core of our being, and in that most mysterious of mathematical equations — when amid sweat and cries one suddenly becomes two — the meaning of our lives is flung open with an intensity I doubt is often achieved by hours of silent meditation or theological study.
In the last few weeks I have been blessed to experience this with my newborn son. Gazing into his eyes I wonder when life entered those dreamy globes. We are born fully human but who can say exactly when we became so? And what kind of consciousness are we at first? One without language or memory, but also fully present and complete. My son stares back at me, alert to the sound of water, the touch of his father's hand, the need for milk.
Ah, milk and more milk. The whole messy anarchy of newborns is inextricably linked to their miraculousness. These tiny missives from eternity come swaddled in equal parts love and shit and grace and sick. Caring for a newborn I am astonished we ever let ourselves be tricked into a false reverence for transcendence: here at the foundation of all our lives is a deeply immanent experience of the sacred. Where then is the boundary between the holy and profane?
The parameters of this experience are not confined to the nursery. In loving her child a parent forms a new kind of relationship with the world itself. These early weeks bring an emotional rawness, a kind of quivering sensitivity which extends to all beings. Violence seems even more unacceptable, war an abomination. It is not only the sanctity of life which impresses, but the sheer dogged effort required to sustain it.
After my first child was born I was overwhelmed by an entirely new appreciation for the years of work required to grow a single human being. Going to buy groceries or walking to the bus I would be awe-struck by imagining all the hours of care, the relentless round of feeding, washing, and soothing which were responsible for every person I saw. It is an enormity of labour which of course begins on day one. History's catalogue of achievements now mean little to me. Man Walks on Moon? Big deal. Each day the headlines should shout, Woman Gives Birth!
In the early weeks of parenthood it is clear that the lay life is, in fact, profoundly religious. Properly perceived, what happens every day in our suburban homes and neighbourhood parks is as sacramental and as grace-filled as the ceremonies held in the loftiest cathedrals or remotest mountain monasteries.
That parenthood, this most earthy and ordinary of tasks, is also the most direct experience many of us have of the spiritual and sublime. It demands we rethink what those categories actually mean. The great religious traditions have paid scant attention to the experience of parenting; a tragic loss for their understanding of divinity. Christianity, of course, celebrates The Holy Family, but what can it learn from the experience of an ordinary, everyday, secular one?
Caring for babies is over in such a brief instant (even if it feels like an eternity at 3am). Hours spent marvelling at our newborns' perfection are rapidly replaced by ferrying children to soccer practice, earning a living, growing old. So parents need religion to help us embody the revelations which the love for our children brings.
Equally, religion needs the knowledge of mothers and fathers to appreciate the miraculous ground from which we all emerge, and to share in the questions raised when staring into a newborns' eyes.
Sarah Kanowski is a writer, and a producer and broadcaster with ABC Radio National. She held a Commonwealth Scholarship at Oxford University between 2000 and 2002, and won the inaugural $2000 Margaret Dooley Young Writers' Award in 2005. Pictured: Sarah Kanowski with her children.