On Cultivating "Holy Indifference"

for the love of a baby bird

A few weeks ago, a man was working to clear some ranch land in Odessa, Texas, when he discovered to his dismay that he’d run over a roadrunner nest, crushing all of the eggs—except one. He drove back to his home in East Texas, cradling the egg to keep it warm for the 500-mile trip. When the egg hatched soon after, he and his wife searched online for a bird rescue that might take the tiny roadrunner. They drove another 160 miles to a Dallas suburb and delivered little “Miles” into the care of Paula Hagan of the Rogers Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

The image I kept thinking of.

A loved one recently shared this heartwarming story with the comment “there are good people in this world.” Yes there are, thanks be to God. 

I wish the story had a happier ending. The chick lived just a few days. After lots of promising growth, it stopped eating and gaining weight, and died the next day. 

* * *

In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola talks about holy indifference, which my friend Jeff Lehn explored recently on his podcast. “For Ignatius,” Jeff says, “‘holy indifference’ does not mean not caring. It’s about not being attached—to money, to status, to health—to maintain a stance of being engaged without being enmeshed, connected without being consumed. It’s about knowing where we end and another person begins. About discerning what is ours to do and then surrendering the rest.”

Engaged but not enmeshed, connected without being consumed. 

That’s the spirit behind the serenity prayer: to accept what we can’t change and have the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know this prayer—it was displayed in my childhood home, was a key feature of my parents’ twelve-step spirituality—but the longer I’m on this planet, the more I realize what a lifetime of work it entails. In fact, it seems like the more competent I become, the more experience or influence or abilities I accumulate, the more I must reckon with how little I actually control.  

It makes me so mad.

I’ve been working on cultivating holy indifference lately. It’s the hardest spiritual work I’ve ever done, especially in the realm of parenting. On one level it seems offensive, or at least counterintuitive, to apply the concept of holy indifference to child-rearing. Only a bad parent would have any level of indifference toward their child, regardless of the word “holy” in front of it, right? 

Good parents care deeply about their kids’ flourishing; of course we do. We want happiness for them. Positive values. Success, however we define it. Kids are the work of a lifetime, and we are called to great sacrifices on their behalf. It’s just that our current cultural norms around parenting make it so easy to veer from engagement to enmeshment, from connection to being consumed. Their triumphs reflect well on us, so we sink everything into making those triumphs happen. At best, that approach is an illusion; there’s no plug-and-play formula for a successful kid. At worst, it robs children of independence and agency. Two valuable gifts we can give our children, especially as they grow toward adulthood, are 1) the sure knowledge that our happiness doesn’t depend on theirs, and 2) a sense of boundaries around what’s ours to do and what’s theirs. (If you don’t have kids, or your child-rearing days are over, I think this is true for relationships in general.)

Years ago I read a book about child nutrition that argued for a clear division of responsibility around mealtimes. It was the parent’s job to provide the what, the when, and the where of feeding, but it was the child’s decision whether to eat, and how much. That means no cajoling, no bargaining (“eat three bites and you can have dessert”), and certainly no battles. Otherwise you’re setting yourselves up for years of conflict, and a kid who doesn’t know how to listen to their own body. 

So many aspects of parenting (and again: life in general) would benefit from a division of responsibility. But it requires some Ignatian indifference: do your part, and let go of outcome. Yeah, we can drag a child across the finish line, whether it’s a Little League season or an IB diploma, and in some exceptional instances, that may be needed. But almost every parental quagmire I’ve ever been in has boiled down to my trying to do my kids’ work for them. (And again I say, this is basic life stuff. I’ve coached many an overfunctioning pastor who’s trying desperately to get a cozily complacent congregation to show some signs of creativity and life. Occasionally I blurt out, “What is it costing you to care so much more about the health of the community than the community seems to?”)

By the way, this is all really easy to write, and incredibly hard to live. Let’s talk about what I’m really talking about… where our family has been living these many months. Those three things Jeff mentioned in his description of holy indifference: money, status, health—one of these is not like the others. Health. How do we cultivate holy indifference when it’s the health of a loved one? What if that loved one is your child?

If you don’t know what it’s like for your child to have a life-threatening illness—and I’ve had to reckon with depression being treatable, yes, but sometimes life-threatening—this stuff may not make as much sense to you. But some of you know what I’m talking about, because I hear from you regularly. You know what it’s like. But heck, anyone who loves a child who goes to school in an age of mass shootings can access that feeling. Or parents of trans kids. Or people of color, having The Talk with their children and then sending them out into the world. 

A longtime friend has a young adult child who’s struggled with depression for much of his life, at times refusing treatment. She supports and cares and suggests, but she’s so very limited in what she can do. If you disagree, if you’ve cracked the code somehow and think you could do better, I pray you never have to find out how wrong you are.

He might die from this, she told me recently. And I will not. The scar on my heart will never go away, but my heart will continue to beat and will work around the scar.

Our one, basic, inviolable, biological compulsion: to keep them safe. To keep them alive. 

It’s animal, Ellen Bass writes in her poem:

                       The egg
not eaten by a weasel. Turtles
crossing the beach, exposed
in the moonlight. And we
have so few to start with.
And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.
All those years of feeding
and watching. The vulnerable hollow
at the back of the neck. Never knowing
what could pick them off—a seagull
swooping down for a clam.
Our most basic imperative:
for them to survive.
And there's never been a moment
we could count on it.

Right now, I’m at the “holy indifference is f***ing terrifying” stage. As Anne Lamott says, everything I ever let go of has claw marks on it. 

What are you holding onto for dear life? 
What/whose work have you taken on as your own?

If I squint my eyes, I can see some grace in holy indifference. “The detachment we gain from proper indifference gives us two major gifts,” writes Dan Masterton. “Knowing our [inherent] worth apart from anything of the world… and knowing our capacity to give and receive love in any and all contexts in our lives.” In other words: I am inherently worthy and lovable, even if all my best efforts crash and burn. And I’m called to pour out my heart for this world, even if that heart is utterly broken.

I’d add a third: I see a certain freedom peeking through, a freedom in knowing that in a big wide sometimes scary world of unintended consequences and near misses and random tragedy and harrowing stakes, I can focus… there, right there, on the things that are squarely in my power. That when I focus on those things and bring my best and my all, I can be of better service to the world and to my loved ones than when I’ve got my eye on what all my little schemes are achieving.

Which brings us back to that little baby roadrunner who lived just a few days. “It wasn’t the happy ending everyone had hoped for,” wrote Jonathan Edwards in the Washington Post. 

Although the bird’s death saddened [wildlife volunteer] Hagan, the campaign to save the bird remains undiminished in her heart. The couple went to extraordinary lengths to save a helpless creature from certain death. Their efforts failed, but that wasn’t something they or anyone else ultimately had power over.

“Working there, volunteering there, renews my faith in humanity,” Hagan said, adding: “It’s just very moving to me to see how kindhearted they are.”

It was love that led that man to cradle an egg all the way from the Permian Basin to his home in the Piney Woods. And it was Ignatian indifference (whether they called it that or not) that led him and his wife to go still further for that tiny creature, even if the odds were very slim. To try. To risk to the ends of the earth, and let the result be what it will be. You don’t have to be a parent to know, that’s all any of us can do. What a glorious, wrenching thing that is.

No one has told the couple that Miles died, [Paula Hagan] said. Hagan said that if she were to make that phone call, she’d thank the husband and wife for their kindness, that it’s people like them who make a difference in the world.

“I really believe that,” she said.

So do I.

Image is from Are You My Mother?