Summer and Sabbath
My thirteen-year-old daughter and I have different ideas about what it is that she will be doing with her summer vacation, which will be upon us in a few days. I think that the summer before she enters high school would be a good time to get a jump start on subjects she finds challenging. Also a good time to learn to type properly, or play the piano. Not to mention that there are a good number of household projects that could use some manual labor. I know that she will be bored with the vacant hours, and I have warned her repeatedly that her days will not be spent in front of the computer or TV screen.
And I keep asking her just what it is that she expects to do this summer. What is it that her days will look like when she is not off at camp or visiting an out of town friend? All I get for an answer is that she doesn’t know – and doesn’t want to be asked.
She doesn’t have a way to say it, but I think what she is looking towards is sabbatical time – a Sabbath of the school year where she can, to paraphrase Whitman, loaf and invite her soul. She wants to be free from pressure, free from schedule, free from things that have to be done and other people’s expectations that she do what other people think is good for her. That’s what the Sabbath is for. It is a time of forced openness, when you give up work and see what remains. Outside of the structure of daily life your soul gets a chance to stretch out.
OK, I confess I’m a little scared to see what remains for my young teen outside of her structured life. It’s hard to trust that her soul will be well served by weeks of openness. But there’s something to be said for being bored, for sitting with the emptiness long enough that something from deep inside might come to fill it. There’s not that much to be said for being the mom who has to listen to the whining that accompanies that boredom until that mysterious something comes along, but I guess that comes with the territory.
There isn’t any magic formula that decrees how much of our lives needs to be given to work, or to improving our selves and the world around us. But the tradition of the sabbath and the sabbatical teaches that a seventh of our time is not too much to give our souls the space to expand. I’ll let you know how it goes.
What Kind of a Parent is God?
Women’s studies classes in college introduced me to the idea of feminine images of God/goddess. Frankly, I hadn’t really much thought about it up to that point. God was simply not an idea that I much related to, since God seemed to be distant, vague, and to alternate unpredictably between benevolent and judgmental. But a mother God, a God with a (metaphorical) lap to sit in, a God who was one with the earth and fertility and creativity, that kind of God started to sound like something I could relate to.
It wasn’t until much later, when I became a parent myself, that I realized that the whole Mother God/Father God split was patently unfair to men. The Father God I heard about from conservative Christians was a punitive, “wait ‘til your father gets home” kind of God, whose kindness was at a distance and whose judgment was close. It’s one version of being a father, and perhaps the version that is still popular amongst those who hold to this theology. But I know a whole lot of dads who are loving, nurturing, reliable and supportive. It turns out that the image of a Father God is less the problem for me than the kind of dictatorial father that that God is supposed to be. For what it’s worth, given that Jesus addressed God as “Abba,” the Aramaic equivalent of “Daddy,” it’s a pretty good bet that Jesus didn’t have a distant 1950’s God in mind either.
The Women’s Movement didn’t just give us the notion of a feminine image of the divine. It also gave us a revised understanding of what it means to be a parent. After years of recoiling from the notion of a Father God, maybe I’m ready to embrace the idea of a Father/Mother God who is the kind of parent that I aspire to be: a parent with ample love and reasonable limits, who tries to instill my values but knows that ultimately, my child will need to choose for herself, according to her own experience and view of the world. That kind of a God would value exploration and creativity above blindly following a narrow set of rules, and would ask “did you have fun?” rather than “did you win?” about my activities and endeavors. That kind of God would treasure my individual quirks, but encourage me to work through my failings to become more responsible, more compassionate, more aware of others and what I could do to improve life for those around me and the world as a whole.
That’s not the kind of God I see preached by people who disapprove of contraception and Gay people and a woman’s right to control her own body. But I look around at so many women and men I know who are terrific parents, and I think that maybe God is alive in the world after all.
Rev. Dr. Lynn Ungar is minister for lifespan learning of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. (www.QuestForMeaning.org)
Still Mulling Over Mitt Scissorhands
Apparently the story of Mitt Romney’s highschool “hijinks” has now moved on from the news cycle, and that’s a relief. But I’m still mulling it over. I find it on my mind and heart as I pray, garden, or wash the dishes.
I suspect that this didn’t change any votes: Those who were for Mitt now add this to their list of misgivings, or they don’t care. Those who were for Obama now feel some added justification. I’m not mulling it over as a voter. I’m still processing it as a mother, as a minister, and as a human being.
I don’t know about other ministers, but I have received a couple of calls from congregants who have found that this stirred up memories for them that they would just as soon forget. Issues of the lack of fairness—if this were a movie, the bully character would be shunned and left behind, not running for president. The hero would have been the guy with the hair, going on to vindicate himself. He is now dead with no story to tell.
The unhappy memories stirred for congregants are not just times when they were bullied, when they felt unsafe because of someone else. I have also heard from people who either participated in bullying or didn’t stop others who turned on a vulnerable person. “Like Lord of the Flies,” one of Mitt’s classmates apparently said. These folks are sometimes suffering more than the bullies. Suddenly, years later, they are ashamed of who they were and what they did, and don’t know what to do about it.
Those of us who minister to, or parent, or care about teenagers know that in our communities we are speaking to potential or real bullies side by side with their intended or actual victims. We know bullying is going on now, every day, in blatant or subtle ways. We know that as much as all the kids nod and tell us the party line we want to hear, they are often protecting each other and us from the whole story. Mitt’s victim apparently never brought this up at home. We hear over and over after bully-induced suicides, “He/ she never mentioned it,” or “It didn’t sound so serious.”
Those of us who love at risk kids know how quickly “hijinks” can turn serious, taking lives as quickly as car accidents or heart attacks.
I guess all of that is why I am still mulling over Mitt’s “pranks.” I wish to see a huge, united, adult community saying with one voice that some things are bigger than political ideology or party affiliation: that respect for others is the center to a good shared life. It would start with Mitt himself, dropping the act of “If I hurt someone…” and acknowledging that he did, badly—both the victim and the ‘friends’ who joined his behavior. It would move out to the rest of the adult community, talking honestly about people we have hurt, making amends to them when we could and making commitments to ourselves not to let it happen on our watch again.
Then maybe our kids could be safe to talk to us honestly about their own situations.