Several nights ago, I was putting my son Luke to sleep.  Every evening, we read some stories, say our prayers and sing songs.  On this particular evening, we read a Native American story called The Legend of the Bluebonnet.  The story is about a little girl whose parents die in a famine.  We had read this story many times before, but Luke finally understood its implications on this particular evening.

“Her parents died?” he asked me. 

“Yes, they did,” I said.  I had recently read in a psychology book that parents are to answer their children’s questions frankly, but not to offer any more explanation than is necessary.  Just answer their questions, don’t over answer, was the advice that I read.  So I simply affirmed to my son that, yes, the girl no longer had any parents.

Luke looked at me with a very serious expression on his face. There was a moment of silence, as my four-year-old came to grapple with the possibility of tragedy in the life of a child.  “Well,” he replied after a long moment of consideration, “well, then she would be taken care of by the other grown-ups in her church that love her.”

Hillary Clinton has written a book whose title co-ops a phrase that we all know so well:  It Takes a Village.  It takes a village to raise a child.  I agree with this wisdom.  When children are raised in community, they come to experience a depth of security and wellness.  They know instinctively that they will be cared for, not only by their own parents but by the community itself.  There is no better community in this world than a parish church.

When I was a teenager, I once played a trust game.  We were instructed to stand on a picnic table, close our eyes, and fall backwards into the arms of our youth group.  It was incredibly hard to do.  It went against every instinct that I had.  I had to force myself to trust that I would be caught.  I had to force myself to believe that my weight could be supported by the community.  And it was.

 As a priest and Rector of a parish, my children are raised in true community. Numerous people care for them.  When my second son was born, volunteers staffed the office each day for months just to hold the baby so that I could work between nursing.  Retired women and men just loved to come in and serve the church in this capacity.  Jacob stayed with me for the entire first year of his life.  If I had to go to the hospital, a volunteer would meet me there and hold Jake in the waiting room while I went in to see the patient.  Volunteers held Jake during all of the services in which I officiated.  I took Jake with me to see parishioners who were home-bound.  I often wondered which they liked more, Communion or the baby.

Raising a family in the church forces the congregation to see their priest as a human being.  Parishioners understand when I claim that I need to go home and see my boys.  After all, how could they deny my role as a mother?  And the more that I include my children in the life of the parish, the more young families come to the church. 

One of the greatest challenges facing clergy of our day is business.  Like the secular world, clergy find themselves unable to accomplish all that the feel they ought to do each day.  Technology has sped up our universe to such a degree that one is unable to keep up.  Priorities must be set, decisions made.  Many clergy find themselves rarely going home.  Marriages have suffered; clergy have suffered. 

Raising a family counteracts my instinct to overwork.  My children are my inspiration.  They need their mother and that need forces me to return home, even when business is not yet done.  Instinct would tell us that having a family makes you busier, and it does.  No one can deny those sleepless nights with babies or those afternoons spent chasing toddlers around the house.  But having a family does force you to balance your working life and your personal life.  Raising children promotes health among clergy, and in the parish as well.

It is possible to balance the life of a parish priest and the life of a parent. In fact, sometimes I wonder if God intended for the two to go together, for there is no other relationship that has taught me more about the love of God.