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I missed blogging yesterday because I was away on a quick trip with my family to surprise my father in North Carolina on his 85th birthday. It was a visit of great tenderness.

Coming back to my blogging, I am aware of myself wondering just who might be out there reading the words I have been pouring out into cyberspace. Apart from John who seems quite tuned into what I write and faithfully leaves interesting responses, I’m not sure who’s out there. The daily discipline of rising early, turning on the computer, and composing some words for the blog has been good for me, regardless of whether I am being read by others. Nonetheless, there is the desire – partly self-absorbed, partly the simple desire to connect – to have more people out there who are considering the words I produce. Last night when I crawled into bed exhausted, my mind went to wondering what I might write about today.   I thought of a novel I read a couple of decades ago by John Updike called, “A Month of Sundays”. It was, I think, a rather trashy novel, but the premise was intriguing, at least to me. The novel is told from the point of view of a middle aged Lutheran pastor who has had some kind of nervous breakdown and is now in a thirty day rehab treatment center specifically for broken down clergy. Apparently as part of his treatment he sits in his room each morning and writes the sordid details of his life and its breakdown; these writings make up the body of the novel. The thing I remembered in the darkness of my bed last night was the fact that throughout the thirty days he becomes consumed with wondering whether anyone on the treatment team — he imagines specifically a very professional and detached nurse — is coming into his room each day while he is out playing golf in the afternoon and reading his entries. Remembering this, I reached in the darkness of my room for a pad and pencil to write the book’s title down, lest I forget about it in the morning.

 

A peculiar convergence of thoughts and events:

 First the thoughts. This past Sunday my sermon included my thoughts about the Christian life and children, inspired partly by the Gospel lesson and partly by the fact that we had two little ones being baptized.  I noted then that there is no instance in the Gospels where Jesus says to a child, “Come, follow me.” Children aren’t intended to be disciples in the full sense of the word, which means laying one’s life down for Jesus and his kingdom. Rather, one of the marks of disciples is that they are to serve children (see Mark 9). Learn how to be a disciple, Jesus seems to be saying, by serving children, who

  a) have no status or power in this world with which to pay you back for your service; and

  b) are so caught up in themselves that real reciprocity in a relationship is not possible (nor advisable: when parents turn children into their confidantes they do them great harm.)

Being a disciple involves giving yourself away. You can’t give yourself away until you first have a firm hold on yourself. Otherwise, there is nothing to give away. The appropriate task of childhood is to create a self — a sense of identity. Who am I?

When Jesus said a disciple must serve children, the disciples had been engaged in an argument over “who is the greatest”; as such they were being childish when it was time now for them to get past that. The “who is the greatest” argument is an unavoidable part of growing up. We create a sense of self by discovering our unique gifts (which inevitably involve comparing ourselves to other people) and the ways we uniquely belong.

We slowly build a sense of self by finding ways in which our gifts set us apart. “I am the best soccer goalie on my team.” Or, “I am the one who feeds the dogs; without me, they’d be lost. The dogs, and the family, count on me to do this.”  Childhood is a time for play, and lots of it, and in that play, our distinctive imagination develops. Children are inherently, unavoidably self-centered, and though we adults get frustrated by this fact, it is simply the way life processes. You can’t develop a self without being self-centered.

If we succeed at creating a sense of self, gradually we become aware that simply having a self is not enough. To live merely for this self is to fail to find the larger meaning of one’s life. This is where discipleship comes in: Losing my life in order to find my life — a much larger life, where I no longer am the center of everything. At that point, Jesus arrives and says, “Come, follow me.”

What, then, should we attempt to do for these children we baptize and raise up in the Church? It seems to me there are three things.

The first is to simply love them, and by this I mean give them as best we can the kind of unconditional love that provides them with a deep sense of belonging. “I love you, Jesus loves you; rest in that certainty. You belong here.”

The second is to lay the ground work for the life that will emerge later. Teach them the Bible stories so Jesus and other Bible characters can live inside their imagination and shape their vision. Plant the seeds that will later bring forth the harvest of a deeper spirituality. Teach them the golden rule, the ten commandments — basic rules of respecting all other human beings. Give them opportunties to experience service — like the boy who offered Jesus his lunch of few fish and and bit of bread with which Jesus fed the 5000 — without forcing them prematurely into the life of a servant. 

And finally, let them be a part of a community of faith where there are readily available living examples of a mature faith being lived out.

When children are pressured early on to “give their life to Jesus”, they run the risk of getting stuck in the “who is the greatest” argument, with the answer they keep coming up with is “look at me, I’m the best little Christian; so much better than the others, praise me for being so good”, which is altogether different from one day laying down one’s life for Jesus and his kingdom.

Now the curious convergence I referred to at the beginning of this post is that in the week following my sermon I have been hearing over and over about a new documentary just released that has been creating quite a storm entitled “Jesus Camp.”  It describes a camp in North Dakota where children children 6 to 10 are pushed hard to be Christians. (If you type “Jesus Camp” into your search engine, you’ll probably be able to see a clip from the film.)

At our Wednesday healing prayer meeting, one of our members was so disturbed by what she had seen on “Good Morning, America” about this film that she was moved to pray for the children she saw in the film clips. I share her reaction. There is this point of view decpicted in  ”Jesus Camp” that portrays Christians as being engaged in a war with Moslems and others, whom they refer to as “enemies”, emphasizing the need to draw recruits early on for this war (pointing out that this is what some radical Moslem groups are doing so well.)

Whatever happened to loving the enemy? Whatever happened to the parable of the Good Samaritan?

Let children be children.

Having been blogging now for over a week, the challenge of finding things to write about begins to emerge. Last week I wrote about some of the rhythms of an ordinary week in my present life. One solution to the problem of finding writing themes is to delve into the past.

People who have listened to me preach long term have surely heard me tell the following story, perhaps more often than you care to. I wasn’t a confident swimmer as a child. Once, when I was maybe 9, I was swimming as a guest of a friend in a “man-made” lake. There were plenty of people around, but at some point I was swimming alone — I’m not sure where my friend or his mother were. There was a sharp drop off from the shallow to the deep water, with a flotation line marking the boundary. I was swimming with my eyes closed, and somehow managed to cross the boundary. I went to stand up and there was no bottom to place my feet upon. I panicked, thrashing my arms about, which of course simply made it worse. Absolutely helpless and terrified, I would have drowned, if not for some man, a stranger to this day, who came and pulled me to the shore. He deposited me there and disappeared, and I sat there sputtering out the water that I had taken in. The whole experience seemed to have gone largely unnoticed. For the most part I kept the experience to myself, embarrassed as well as horrified by what had happen.

Having come so close to death affected me deeply for weeks to come. It seemed to me that it would have been so easy for me to have drowned, that I was extremely lucky that the stranger saw me thrashing about in the dark water, saving me from drowning. I imagined my lifeless body in a coffin, in the ground, the whole morbid bit. I contemplated the devastation my parents would have endured. For the first time in my life, the reality of death hit me hard, filling me with terror.

These reflections overtook me primarily at night time, lying in my bed, keeping me awake. I have always had a bit of the insomniac in me. A point came when, in a literal cold sweat, I called out in desperation to God for help. (I didn’t think of myself as a particularly religious kid, but I was, as I said, desperate.) Suddenly I felt at peace. The obsessive anxiety was gone, never to return in regard to my near drowning.

I don’t think I made too much of this experience at the time. Mainly I was grateful to be done with the anxiety, able to get on with being a kid. Today I am unable to locate the experience precisely in time; I am not altogether certain what summer this all took place.

It was only years later that I began to seriously reflect on the meanings of this childhood experience. One thing seemed to shift decisively in the moment of the answered prayer. Before I had contemplated with horror a universe that operated merely on blind chance. Afterwards it seemed clear to me something more was at work.

What of the stranger who played such a extraordinary role in my life; who was he? Surely he has no clue of the impact he had on my life. Some might imagine him to have been a supernatural angel who appeared momentarily in human form to rescue me. For me it is enough to think of him as some ordinary Joe to whom God gave a nudge in order to save me.

Underneath everything, the experience clearly seemed to imply a purposeful universe, and a purposeful life. There have been times over the years when grabbing hold of this thought has provided me with support when I have felt myself sinking into life’s dark waters.

And it has also implies a claim on my life. If I was saved, then I better live the life that was saved in a manner that makes it worth having been saved. Better not waste it.

The experience of near drowning also provided me with a fundamental metaphor for faith. Later on in my life I would get past my fear in regard to swimming. I would eventually realize that when it comes to floating, the most important thing is to simply trust — trust that your body will float in the water if you give it a chance. Floating is actually the natural thing; it was my anxious thrashing about that threatened my demise.

When it comes to life, trusting the mystery we call God is the first thing.

May we know that God is worthy of our trust; may we know our lives as truly purposeful. Amen.

I think the best measurement available to us of the dimensions of the human soul is found in our capacity to hold other persons inside our heart. By holding other persons I mean being able to truly care about them; to feel for them in their struggles and rejoice with them in their joys.  Sharing a laugh with them counts too.

Jesus said, “What does it profit a person to gain the whole world but lose his or her soul?” By gaining the whole world I take him to mean having our heart filled up with something other than compassion: with a preoccuppation with our own personal success or failure.  A person can be riding a wave of earthly success, so that things seem to be falling nicely into place and one’s personal domain of money, pleasure, fame, worldly power, etc. is increasing steadily, but if in the process it is only oneself that fills all the inner space, in a certain sense the soul has been lost. This is why sometimes it is actually better to lose than to win, because the impetus to stop and examine the state of one’s soul is usually greater when things are going poorly in our external circumstances.

In my experience the size of my own soul varies in this regard from day to day, even moment by moment. When I feel stressed — when I rush about consumed with getting accomplished some set of tasks that I have defined as all important — I close up inside. Other people cease to exist for me in any real sense. This state of existence is hardly living; “killing time” is a good description of this kind of life.

In a very real sense we need other people in order to help us escape the prison cell of self-preoccupation. All manner of other people: those most intimately connected to our lives, as well as those we call strangers, and everybody in between.

That’s about it. It’s Tuesday, so now I close down my computer and head off to my breakfast with the guys to keep from losing my soul.

At the end of a Sunday, there is always a sense of my mind being fried. So much taken in, so much put out. Sunday mornings are adrenalin rushes. A lot gets packed into a couple hours. It is good this morning to take time and remember what took place yesterday, lest it all get lost in sensory overload.

Some images that come to mind from yesterday: my hands upon the heads of kneeling persons for blessing as they are received into the church. A baby in my arm as I baptize her. The bagel that Tom always kindly has set aside for me at coffee hour because I am always late getting to the window. Sitting with Don in coffee hour as he tells me of how sixty years later the memories of being in World War II are still painful.

And then there was visiting Marge in the hospital, hours after the surgeon removed her foot, her faithful husband Bob at her side. She does her best to put on a brave front — to see the positive. Now she can get on with physical therapy and a prosthesis and stop worrying whether the foot will heal or not. But still, this is her foot we’re talking about.

Don joined the church yesterday. Marge has been a member for half a century.

Dear God, give us your Spirit, that we may be a community where people find the courage to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Let there be much laughter in the midst of the tears. Amen.

Animation

Flash! The coalescence of the gas
When time was born so things could come to pass,
A blinding light as all that was would grow
Until the forms it took could even know.

From this came life, each moment giving birth
The seeds of which once rained upon the earth
Absorbing sunlight changing what’s within
To energy that made it all begin.

The spin of motion, dizzy if we knew
The forces we are always living through,
Yet man can push this process to the brink
Embracing his ability to think.

What’s more there is potential to rejoice
Discovering the secret power of choice-
To grasp the ring and leave things not to fate
And choose to live before it is too late.

The Spirit shared by those who walk in love
Receives much more than sunlight from above.
Angelic mysteries still do arrive
To teach their students how to be alive.  John H. Bidwell   

The old computer I usually work on is screeching like a cat. The fan that keeps it from overheating has given up the ghost. My sermon notes are on it and I’m not sure it will give them up. (I am typing this on the other computer in the house.) Fortunately, my sermon is mostly in my head. My son tells me it’s going to be a good day. I think he is referring to the soccer game he has this afternoon. I, too, will claim it as a good day, despite screeching computers that withhold sermon notes on Sundays when you’ve got to preach in three hours.

I hope that visitors to this sight will take the time to read Terry Germann’s essay on her mother that was posted yesterday.  Terry’s mother spent time as a prisoner in Auschwitz.  Terry describes a remarkable dream she once had of her mother visiting her.  This is not to be missed.

Saturdays feel different to me than other people.  For most people it is the day after the work week, to do with what you will, whether that be household chores you haven’t gotten to all week or liesure activities.  For me, Saturday is the day I must make major progress in the process of preparing myself to preach on Sunday.  Over the years I’ve gotten a lot better at keeping myself from feeling paralyzed by the fact of the sermon that is not yet fully in focus.  Nonetheless, for me, Sunday continues to hover over Saturday. 

I have found that the best time for focused, reflective thought — the kind required for making progress on the sermon – is in the morning.  Later in the day it is always harder to enter into that same space.   The afternoon is good time for things like cleaning the house. 

If Saturday morning goes well — if I feel confident I have something to say on Sunday morning — I feel less distracted the rest of the day. 

I hope that’s how it is today.  

My Mother

Everybody has a mother and I am no different. My mother and I were very close throughout my life. Whenever I had a problem, she was always there to listen and give me advice. Whenever I had a joy to share with her, she was always there to celebrate it with me.

When I was a teenager, of course, I rebelled and didn’t really want to spend much time with her, choosing to be with my friends because you know, it just wasn’t “cool” to hang out with your mother. Also, she had a Hungarian accent and my friends would always question me about her strange and unusual accent.

However, when I became an adult, I found that my mother had a fantastic sense of humor and was the most caring, sensitive and kindest person that I knew! We would literally stay up for hours talking. I can honestly say that my mother was my best friend in the whole world. After my children were born, she would come over to my house and spend weekends with us. Never one to sit down and rest, she would constantly be cooking, doing laundry, cleaning, and was the kindest grandmother, always giving in to their every whim, always doting on them. My three children were ecstatic whenever they heard that “Softa”, which means grandmother in Hebrew, would be coming over for the weekend. I would beg her to sit down and watch TV and take it easy but she would tell me that she enjoyed helping out and wanted to be useful.

My mother had been in Auschwitz, a horrible concentration camp in Poland. Knowing how sensitive I was, she never wanted to discuss the details of the horror that she had experienced there. Her father, brother and fiancee were all killed by the Nazis and whenever she would talk about any of them, she would start to cry and I would cry along with her, not knowing how to comfort her. My teenage babysitter had asked her if she wouldn’t mind coming to her classroom to talk about her experiences in the concentration camp because she was learning all about it in her High School and thought the class would benefit greatly from having a “survivor” witness to them. It was very rare that my mother would say no to people, always wanting to please and she consented to speak in front of the class. I wanted to be there for her, to listen to her tribulations but she refused, saying it would be too upsetting for me. Could you imagine someone who had suffered so badly and yet worrying about me, that I would be upset?

Sadly, my mother died very suddenly in the year 1990 from an apparent heart attack in her home, sitting in her favorite chair, at the age of 70. We were all in a constant state of shock because we weren’t aware that she had been sick or that she even had a heart condition.

About six months after my mother passed away, I had this wonderful vivid dream about her. I dreamt I was entering the family room of my home and there she was, sitting on my sofa, a younger and healthier looking mother, her face was shining and she was smiling. I ran over to her and said “mom, you’re alive” and she smiled and gave me this hug, the warmest, most comforting hug I could ever have imagined and I just sat on the couch and hugged her for the longest time. When I woke up, the warmth in my heart was still there and each time I thought of my mother, I was comforted because I convinced myself that she came into my world to say hello and to let me know that she was all right. I very often think of that dream and that same warm sensation engulfs me and I’m once again comforted by it each time.

Years and years ago, I once heard a man on television say that his wife was his heart. I didn’t really understand that statement but I can fully understand him now because my mother was and will always be – my heart.