Do You Have Kids? by Kate Kaufmann

Author:Kate Kaufmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

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SPIRIT MOVES

I’m trying to feed my soul somehow. Children would feed your soul, and I don’t have them.

There are so many rules in my church, but I don’t really pay attention to them. I look for the spirituality and the goodness in people.

I think that spirituality and religion inform one another. I’m not sure you can have one without the other.

Look at the stars on a moonless night. Survive a serious accident. Lose someone dear. These experiences offer direct access to our lives of spirit and help define our humanity. They can also shake belief systems founded in established religions and personal spiritual practices.

Growing a religion, any religion, depends on its progeny keeping the faith. None of the world’s major religions gives much ink to a non-mom’s purpose in life, except as relates to her barrenness and potential for reaping the gift of children, regardless of age or circumstance. So finding a place in church when you don’t have any can be challenging. It falls to us, then, to explore structure and define meaning within the realm of spirit and organized religion.

But what’s the difference between religion and spirituality? Gerontologist Jon C. Stuckey clarifies the contrast.

Religion: A particular doctrinal framework that guides sacred beliefs and practices about a higher power, or God, and structures how people worship.

Spirituality : Beliefs and practices that connect people with sacred and meaningful entities beyond themselves that give meaning and purpose to life.

Belief systems and practices originate with our families of origin and through cultural values we absorb. They evolve as we try to make sense of things along life’s continuum. Not having kids impacts that evolution.

-—-—-—

Growing up as part of the only Jewish family in small-town North Carolina, Beth Rosenberg didn’t use her last name much. Especially after three boys in her sixth grade class said they wanted to start another Holocaust and kill her family first.

Independent since age eighteen, Beth supported herself bartending and waiting tables, partying most every night after work. When she was twenty-six, her folks bought her a plane ticket to Israel. “That’s when I had this revelation about getting my crap together and going to college,” she says. “For the first time, I wanted to be out as a Jew, live life as a Jew, which is very different than just going to services and seeing Jews once a week.”

She enrolled in the Jewish studies program at University of Florida and received her undergraduate degree the year she turned thirty. Her original intent was to continue on to graduate school in Jewish studies, but she found she was ill-suited to all the writing that would involve.

She did like teaching, though, and was hired to teach Hebrew and Judaism to elementary schoolers at a synagogue in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Our core curriculum was about the prophets,” she says, “and our core lesson was tikkun olam—heal the world. I felt like I was giving kids tools to be better people. My Jewish faith tells us what to do and how to be, leaving the world a better place when we’re gone.

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