Drink the Still Water: Jennifer Stavinoha’s Sacred Chaos

Drink the Still Water: Jennifer Stavinoha’s
Sacred Chaos

By Franci Revel Eckensberger, Lead Editor

Jennifer Stavinoha’s Sacred Chaos: Finding Joy and Jesus in the Messiness of Motherhood begins by dismantling a false distinction: that faith is either a matter of feeling or a matter of thinking, that we must choose between the heart and the mind. 

Christ, the author reminds us, is not bound by our categories. 

He does not wait for us to arrive at Him through the correct intellectual framework or the right emotional disposition. A fractured attention span, hands busy baking a birthday cake—these are likely not the conditions under which we imagine ourselves contemplating theology or moved to tears by a psalm. And yet, God meets us there, too, in the places that belong to both or neither of these aspects of our humanity. That meeting place can still be called prayer.

Sacred Chaos is a slim, three-week “retreat” for mothers seeking renewed intimacy with God through prayer, perhaps because the life they are living has made their previous spiritual habits feel impossible. Never preachy nor guilting, Stavinoha is interested in helping women find Him again in sustainable, habit-forming prayer practices.

Scripture opens each chapter, followed by a reflection and questions to carry into prayer. The prayers themselves are brief—sometimes two minutes, sometimes a single line: Jesus, let me desire you today. They do not neglect a mother’s potentially strained nervous system, sometimes focusing on breathwork and always committed to regulating one’s heart and mind back into God’s arms. The framework is built for the life a mother actually lives rather than one she desperately hopes to attain, making it a welcome respite from the onslaught of aestheticized homemaking content we are met with online. Stavinoha’s heartfelt writing is complemented by a practical approach that shows up in her prayer questions, which are straightforward and point us toward genuine relationship with Christ:

How can your encounter with the Lord today serve as a step in your journey to holiness?

What needs do you have that you can turn over to the Lord?

When did you glimpse heaven in your family’s life today?

Stavinoha encourages us to recognize that God, much like the most steadfast people in our lives, often receives only what is left over at the end of a long day. “The Lord wants my ‘first fruits’—the best part of myself,” she writes, “but usually ends up with the tired scraps of time and a reluctant attention span, if He gets any part of me at all” (11). Some of us are familiar with this situation taken to the extreme: we take for granted the relationships that seem unshakeable, until one day we can no longer feel their solidity and begin, wrongly, to accuse the other of having changed. At the foundation of the security we want to give our children is a security we ourselves must first receive, cultivate, and trust—and that security bears the name and face of Jesus, “God with us.”

“The fact that we exist,” she writes, “means that He is constantly aware of us and constantly sustaining us” (35). This is not a theological abstraction. Stavinoha calls us to find Him in details as small as “the fuzz on our socks.” This challenge of this encounter, she notes, is “the aim of every strain of Christian spirituality” (35). The Incarnation itself is the precedent: God humbled Himself to enter not only human nature but human particularity within a specific body, by a specific mother, within a specific historical moment. To care for a child is, in some sense, to participate in the logic of that humility. As always, God invites us in. 

But noticing God in the details is only the beginning. Stavinoha presses us further to find actual restorative rest in Him. Be still. Lie down. There is a green pasture, and she wants us to remember that the still water is indeed for drinking:

 “See this place I’ve led you to? You can lie down here . . . Here, in my gaze, you can rest.” (86)

The places where we find ourselves are not random or devoid of purpose. What these places are are safe, so long as we are listening for Jesus’ promising voice, no matter what distortions are cast by exhaustion, anxiety, or unresolved wounds. To rest where He has led us is a form of obedience that carries no immediate outward signs of piety. We can’t flaunt it and we are unlikely to receive praise for it. Its productive value is amorphous. But for us, and through us, for our children, who are watching not our performances of devotion but our actual orientation toward Christ, this form of obedience can lead us to the kind of lasting spiritual transformation that might echo in the lives of our descendants. 

Our relationship with God radiates outward and is found outside the bounds of the heart’s chambers. The Lord we encounter in prayer is the same Lord we encounter in our husbands’ faces and in our children’s cries. We were made for one another, to meet Him in one another—the renewal of our capacity to see God is inseparable from the renewal of our capacity to truly see the people He has given us to love and care for. A mother who is learning to rest in God is learning, at the same time, to be present to the baby, toddler, or adolescent who bears his image. These projects are intertwined.

Stavinoha knows that the obstacle to these projects is not always finding time and is, instead, sometimes numbness, the flat, gray exhaustion that struggles to feel or expect much. For those days she offers a promise: “When we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives, something objectively changes—even if we don’t feel it. During those days when we feel nothing, God is inviting us to be persistent. Keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. And the door will be opened to us” (27). The Holy Spirit, she reminds us, is not put off by our chaos: “Just as there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents, nothing gives the Holy Spirit more pleasure than to enter chaos” (26). Jesus gives us the great promise of peace no matter the disarray we find ourselves in. “The Holy Spirit is for you,” she writes—”in fact, you are His priority!” (26)  

“The human heart knows well to cry to the Lord. It’s almost as if we were made for it.” (14)

Fittingly, Stavinoha leaves us with the Magnificat, calling Mary “the professional.” “[Mary] better than any human in history, knows what it means to give her life to God’s glory . . . but she also knows what it means to be caught up in that glory herself” (95). The Magnificat is an eruption, a song brought forth from a young woman in the most mysterious of circumstances to a cousin whose own miracle was blossoming in her womb. Stavinoha assures us that the glory of God is not only not limited to sublime landscapes and chasmic oceans, but that it is actually most vividly present in human particularities. Two women, their babies fluttering in utero, finding and proclaiming God in their encounter and their carrying of “a human person who will have the capacity to choose and to love and to reflect God back to the rest of humanity” (95). 

These stakes are looming, often terrifying—and they should be. Within their awesome gravity is the love that generates all. There is nothing in this world that can usurp, cheapen, or deform this love. Both the quietest and craziest of moments of devotion to our families are, above all, in the service of reflecting Christ to the world. Our obedience, however imperfect, is never in vain. Our chances to course-correct are endless, to say yes not only to our practical maternal duties but to our own spiritual nourishment and peace, to a God who has already prepared us a dwelling place and longs for us to rest there. 

May our souls proclaim it!

Keep an eye out for an upcoming episode of A Resounding Yes! featuring Jennifer Stavinoha.

Jennifer Stavinoha is the founder of Everyday Fiat Ministries and is also the Theological Editor for the Every Sacred Sunday Mass Journal, which we wholeheartedly recommend. Learn more about her at her website here.

Purchase your copy of Sacred Chaos from Ave Maria Press here.

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Lead Editor Franci Revel Eckensberger holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Cornell University. With years of experience as a copyeditor for academics, fellow writers, and various small businesses, she takes pride in maintaining clarity, consistency, and beauty in each client’s voice. 

Franci finds grace and insight in the Catholic Church’s rich relationship to language and invites that relationship to influence both her literary and editorial work. Saint Cecilia and Catherine of Siena continue to play a vital role in her journey to the faith as an artist. She lives in coastal Delaware with her husband and daughter.