When I was a child, I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world because I got four lullabies sung to me every night, one each from my mother, father, sister and brother. I can still hear their voices – soprano, alto, tenor and bass – singing my favorite songs. To be loved like that, so specifically and tenderly, night after night, year after year, was one of the strongest shaping influences from my childhood. But it wasn’t until I started singing lullabies to my own children that
I realized the power of this bedtime ritual.
Lullabies sing a tender theology, soft words of love and comfort to remind a child they are safe and cherished, all through the night. Lately I’ve been musing on the words I sing to my youngest children in the dark, and I realized that their favorite songs hold deep truths of our faith.
“Tender Shepherd” sings of God as the Good Shepherd watching over us. The Shaker song “Simple Gifts” gives thanks for forgiveness and the gift of turning back to each other in love. Even
“Frère Jacques” sings of waking with the morning bells, the monastery’s call to prayer.
With gentle rocking rhythms, generations of parents have hushed their children to sleep with the same songs, the tunes we know by heart, the words we heard from our elders, the gifts we now pass to our young.
A therapist once told me that the same routines that help to calm children – rocking in the dark to gentle music – can help adults struggling with anxiety, too. Our bodies remember the first rhythms of comfort, starting with the soft swaying within our mother’s womb, her heartbeat our first lullaby.
Lullabies even evoke what is central to our Catholic liturgies: remembering God’s faithfulness through daily prayers and practices. The beauty of making music together. The traditions that anchor us in a turbulent world. The rituals that make us who we are.
The greatest gift of my life has been mothering my children, singing them songs of love through the years. The deepest hope of my heart is that the memory of that tender love will linger with them long after I am gone, just like a lullaby echoing in the hushed dark.
Laura Kelly Fanucci is an author, speaker and founder of Mothering Spirit, an online gathering place on parenting and spirituality.