In my life, LGBTQ+ people have taught me about the sacredness of being true to oneself despite the cost. This matters because when we accept the parts of ourselves that others have tried to change or silence, we are really accepting a particular revelation of God. For this reason, in my work as an editor at the National Catholic Reporter, I have found great value in amplifying queer voices. And I can’t help but think of these and other friends when reading today’s Scriptures.

Here, Jesus utters some of his hardest words: whoever loves family more than Christ is not worthy of Christ at all. For many queer people, to be worthy of Christ—to embrace the parts of God they uniquely embody—has asked painful things of some familial relationships. While plenty of families warmly celebrate LGBTQ+ identities, many of my gay and transgender friends have had to cling to the Gospel in the face of harm or rejection. For what is the Gospel if not the good news that the most intimate, vulnerable parts of us are perfectly loved by God?

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I am not the kind of writer who calls her book her “baby” or likens its publication process to that of giving birth. I understand the metaphor, I really do, though the length of gestation is more akin to an elephant pregnancy than a human one. It’s just that I’ve carried and delivered four actual babies and, reader: it is not the same thing. Not even close. I’m sorry to denegrate a beloved writer cliche, but there it is.

Here’s the kind of writer I am: I am the kind who mentally and emotionally moves from one project to the next after completion like some kind of attachment-disordered college playboy. By the time a book sees the light of day I have, quite frankly, already lost interest in it. Is this because I have ADHD? It’s possible. I prefer to think of it as being blessed with the posession of an abundance of creative energy but tomato, tomahto. I would make a terrible book mother, is the point, so good thing I don’t claim to be one.

I suppose this is my long, sorry excuse for why I’m just now writing a blog post about Feminist Prayers for My Daughter when she’s already been out in the world for two months. (See? Deadbeat mom right here.)

Feminist Prayers for My Daughter (2023) and Rewilding Motherhood (2021)

All snark aside, I really am proud of this book. Not because I think I got every prayer just right; not because I don’t critique past-me’s lazy language choices here and there; not because this book is the apex of my career. No, I am proud of this book because there is genuinely nothing quite like it out there — and there should have been, long ago.

I think the mark of a good piece of writing, whatever the form, is not whether it is technically perfect but whether it takes shape and comes to life in the hands of a reader; whether it transcends speaking to them and somehow speaks for them. That’s how I felt watching Rewilding Motherhood launch into the world, and I have the honor of getting to bear witness to that magic a second time around. Because the stories of how this not-a-book-baby has come to life at the fingertips of her readers? That’s what makes me proud to have authored it. What a lucky life I get to lead. What a lucky girl I am.

Thanks for letting me do what I do.

SKE

My daughter was not exactly “planned.” Quite the opposite, really. The surprise positive pregnancy test came just a few weeks before my fourth son turned one. We weren’t sure there would be any more babies after him, and certainly not for a few years, but I couldn’t find a trace of anxiety inside myself. I just knew, right from the beginning, that this was my daughter.

Perhaps the sense of deep knowing came because at that time, I was in a reckoning with my faith tradition over the ways God is masculinized at the expense of the feminine. I was angry that God can be called He and not She. I was exhausted by the all-male hierarchy within Catholicism, the church tradition I belong to. I was adamant that Christians needed to be disentangling ourselves from racism, homophobia, colonization, and xenophobia, and I believed that female leadership would move that work forward. I was longing to relate to God as Mother, not just Father, but was unsure whether that would ever feel comfortable.

But I accepted the invitation to reimagine a God I once thought I had understood: the God who is neither male nor female yet both masculine and feminine; the God who shapeshifts into the symbol or metaphor we need at any given moment; the God who transcends language but still invites its use; the God whom some mystics called Mother, and others Lover.

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