Category Archives: parenting

fast

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I was visiting church members today.  They have well launched children and umpteen grandbabies and what we agreed upon is this:

The lives of our children go so fast.  One minute, they are handed to us wrapped in swaddling clothes and we commence to loving passionately and then, after countless breakfasts and shoe ties and recitals and games and wet beds and school conferences, they are grown and gone to the lives we helped ready them to live.

Watching my children unfold into their beauty is probably the greatest miracle I’ve been given to witness.  I like them so much.  I love discovering that they are funny and wise and interested and I love knowing that I will never be able to know them fully, these persons who resided next to my heart for nine months and who walk with my heart for the rest of their lives.

It goes fast.  I watch families now.  Cooper and I are those slightly creepy old people who ooh and ahh over the children of strangers.  They interact with us, these kind parents, with a wary sort of appreciation.  What I want to say to them is savor it savor it savor it savor it.

When your eyes are crossed with fatigue and you are not sure you can stand one more question or interrupted whatever, take a breath and take your babies on your lap and smell their heads and listen to their hearts because before you know it they are launched and gone and you too will be one of those people who tries hard to live in the present whilst mewling for the past.

It goes fast.

elves

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The tree is up.

The nativity sets are unpacked, the stockings are hung by the chimney and the house smells of sap.

The ritual of preparing living space as proclamation of hope is sacred work.  There are musts in my home:  Julie Andrews has to sing, the stupid looking elf must be at the top of the tree, and the Christmas village has to be arranged and wired to shine.

I wonder sometimes about the hassle of it all.  Who has time for such nonsense, anyway?  Why not skip the pine needles under foot and the clutter of it all?  My kids are grown, the grandchildren not yet, and life is busy busy busy.

But what I have come to is that I need it, this ritual of hope.  I need to unwrap ornaments made by my children in kindergarten.  I need to remember Christmases past when dressing the tree for Christmas was a work of great excitement and joy.  I need to mourn the passing of years and savor the richness of the now and I need to deck our halls with the familiar.

It matters greatly.  When my children arrive from places far from home, they will know themselves wrapped in the good of a place where goofy elves straddle tree tops and rituals of hope are commenced and space proclaims through scent and sight:

Een so Lord Jesus, quickly  come.

tender shepherd

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Music grew me.

Always in the house there was music playing.  I learned the melodies of operas and symphonies through osmosis – they soaked into my soul as givens.

One of my favorite records was Peter Pan, the Mary Martin version.  I can still see the green record cover with a Mary-Martin-in-tights and attitude.  The songs were the very best to sing along with, since they were full of bravado and wistfulness, both.

One of my favorites on the album is called “Tender Shepherd”.  It is the lullaby sung to the Darling children as they nestle into beds in the safety of the nursery.  Their mother seems to intuit, as she sings this song with heart and soul, that her children are soon to fly from her into lands and life far from the power of her tending.  It grabbed me then, and does now, as prayer:  Dear God, watch over the sweetness of  hearts precious beyond the telling.  Please.

No one ever told me that having children would require such courage.  To love so fiercely and know so fully that life has bumps that will jar our tender lambkins is impossibly painful.

And it is so, this pain.

So we sing.  We conjure up days gone by when we could sit by bedsides and songpray our children to the warm of sleep.  We remember the smell of their heads and the gentle of the love that wrapped our lullaby times.

And when they are grown, and the challenges they face are grown with them, we sing on, sure that the universe and our God hear the imploring of our hearts: 

 Tender Shepherd, guard our children, we pray.  Please.

the beat goes on

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We bought our house at the peak of housing mania.  We were blending families and making new life and what we wanted was a house that could hold and make space for all.  We found an old beauty with lots of room and presence figuring that we could turn around and sell in in a few years once a new notion of family had been established.

Well, that was then.  Home sales have stalled and with it our blithe sense of being able to downsize.  For us, it is probably just as well because gone is the sense that we would only need the space for a few years.

Our children range in age between 20 and 28.  They come and they go and they come again and they stay and they go and they come back.

Turns out we need this space.  Last week we housed five of the six, provided a temporary idling place for in-between venturers, fed and slept and loved and savored the progeny the Holy one in all Her wisdom saw fit to send into our lives.

We send them out from this hulking blue launch site.  It is exhausting, for sure.  But being on the front lines to help them equip and venture is precious and rare.  The world awaits them.

And home is here to welcome them back.

water washed

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My children tease me about many things. 

What is predictable is a tease following baptisms.  I love being able to be a part of baptisms.  The power of enfolding and naming and proclaiming grace and identity on behalf of the movement through the ages makes me near crazy with wonder.  Without exception, I believe with all I am that the babies know well that they are participating in miracle.  They are “right there” with their eyes:  open, aware, present, holy.  So I come home bubbling with the story of how it is holy communion is shared and my children know the ways that their mother’s heart has to tell the story or burst.  So they listen, God bless them.

This past Sunday has me humming yet.  Baptised in the midst of a community of grace and joy were a mom and her three-year old.  Both of them are wise beyond the ages.

The wee one was held by her mother and baptised first.  As an invitation to feel the sweet of the baptismal water, I asked her if she wanted to feel it, knowing that she would.

Her sweet palm was nestled in the water of grace as she was baptised.

And then, when it came time to baptise her mother, I asked her if she wanted to help, knowing that of course she would.

And so we blessed in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sustainer.  Water; gift of earth, flow of life, wash of grace was gentled onto the head of a woman who is already witness of the Way.

She who was nurtured in the water of her mother’s womb used water to bless and welcome her mother to life.

Water washed, wonder full.

holy vexation

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When I came to Richfield UMC seven years ago for my introductory meeting, I was scared and fragile feeling and grief-full.  Could I really make community with these folk, and how was it possible that I could leave beloveds in Duluth?  Would this crazy and audacious process of pairing pastor and congregation to live Christ together really work?

One of the people at the table that night let me know that the Senior Pastor has always led the men’s Bible study, so of course I would do the same.  I asked him if that would be so, given that for the first time their Senior Pastor would be a woman.  He didn’t miss a beat as he assured me that such details didn’t matter.

And so I have gathered every Wednesday at eight o’clock with a dozen or so men who bless me beyond the telling.  We talk about the seemingly unmentionables in church:  politics and sexuality and change and challenge.  We share insights about scripture and life.  We read books and The Book and we laugh plenty, pray, and hold each other when life gets scary.

Today’s epiphany was delivered by the same man who informed me that of course I would lead the men’s Bible Study.  We were finishing up Karen Armstrong’s drink-of-living-water book “The Bible” in which she says over and over that the lens through which we must read scripture is that of compassion and care.  Bible bullets meant to mangle are antithetical to the gifting of God’s invitation to love sung over and over again throughout scripture.

I was bemoaning the ways that hate speech in the name of the Christian movement has moved my children from the lap of church community.  My fellow scholar paradigm-shifted me away from my well-worn lament.

He asked about Mary, the mother of Jesus.  Didn’t I suppose that she too worried about her son challenging and walking away from the organized religious community of his parents?  Look what happened to the movement of God in the world when he set out, challenged, and proclaimed a new way.

I’m still grinning.  Because of course he is right.  Whew.  I don’t have to flop around trying to convince the next generation that we (that would be those of us who claim kin called church) really ought be trusted and joined and worked through.

Maybe, like Jesus, they are listening to a deeper voice and following a broader vision than they have heard sung through the church.

I’m hoping that we listen to them and respect them and allow ourselves to be shaped by their challenges.

Worlds are changed by those who vex their parents.