Today’s Prayer to Passage will be from the book ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce

Today I pray, “Dear God, It is an exciting time! In the world of first chapters, where do we, humanity, best start as an open book with one another? Amen.”

Following my prayer, I held the closed book in my hands and opened it to this passage:

“Certainly in every public work which in it anything of gravity contains preparation should be with importance commensurate and therefore a plan was by them adopted (whether by having preconsidered or as the maturation of experience it is difficult in being said which the discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not up to the present congrued to render manifest) whereby maternity was so far from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient in that allhardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely for the copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently moneyed scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and for an inconsiderable emolument was provided.”
—JAMES JOYCE

This is why we live in a powerful time for women. Because women are no longer defined soley by motherhood. For today’s girls, they live in a time when a “biological clock” is a past-tense artifact we may gaze upon as a symbol of our history as women, yet live wide-eyed and wondrously in the present, knowing they are free to choose motherhood as an important portion of their highest potentials. Or provide for the earth in other ways by forgoing motherhood. Girls, young women, and adult women in this age do not necessitate a ticking clock that negates their blessed choices in other glorious directions. This is a time of added possibility for femininity.