Friday, June 26, 2009
"Being saved is about your whole life, and all the decisions you make each day. You can't just rest on the fact that you prayed a certain prayer." So said my childhood friend, now a mother of small children, when I asked her whether she is teaching her children to become born-again in the way we were taught it thirty years ago.
"But still," she continued, "my kids have prayed the sinner's prayer. I'm not totally sure what I think about it, but it's good insurance. You know, something to fall back on. At least they're several years away from the age of accountability, so I don't have to worry about it too much yet."
In my household, the age of accountability is, well, whatever age you happen to be. My four-year-olds are held accountable for their decisions, and so is the 2-year-old, and so is the 36-year-old and so is the 42-year-old. I can imagine my preschoolers being questioned by the Great Judge, "Did you enjoy the sunshine I gave you? What about all that love your parents had for you -- did you receive it? And the bruise on your twin's face, Wesley, have you apologized for that yet?" There's no two ways about it -- they're accountable. Each of us, regardless of chronological age, is responsive to and responsible for the grace, love, and joy that flow in and out of our lives.
But that wasn't what stuck in my craw -- it was the insurance. Is it a good idea to have an insurance policy against spiritual failure? I buy insurance to protect the semi-valuable things in my life: possessions and income. The most valuable things, however, have no back-up.
Take marriage, for instance. My husband and I agreed to be partners for life, and sealed the promise with a spoken word. I've got no contingency plan, no husbands on stand-by, and no escape hatch of my own. If it ends, it will end very badly. Marriage is supposed to last on the strength of a promise and an ever-accumulating stockpile of shared experiences. The relationship calls for faith and trust, and girding it instead with plans and policies just doesn't work. Taking out an insurance policy would actually sabotage that which I hope to strengthen.
I imagine my friend's little boy standing before God someday and being judged unworthy of eternal life with God. The boy reminds God, "But I prayed the sinner's prayer way back when," and God is forced to relent -- the insurance policy holds. The boy has no faith -- he only has his transactional prayer. And this God has no love or mercy -- God is bound by the very rules He inflicted on us. It just doesn't make sense, relying on insurance as back-up in a relationship that is, by its nature, uninsurable.
I'll just hit "delete" and erase that part of the conversation with my friend. Because the first thing she said makes such beautiful sense all on its own: "Being saved is about your whole life, and all the decisions you make each day." Living free -- trusting only God's promise and the ever-accumulating stockpile of experiences you share with God -- turns out to be not fire insurance against hell, but blessed assurance for this blessed day.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Wow. I couldn't put it down, except to wipe away the tears that kept welling up. Surviving the Island of Grace is a well-written memoir about life as an Alaska salmon fisherman. I'm going to read more from Leslie Leyland Fields.
The book inspires me to be a better wife, to go outdoors, and to work hard at something practical someday (probably not salmon fishing, tho - seems like super hard dangerous work, which is bad enough, but it's cold, too.)
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Frankie Schaeffer has a convert's zeal for Eastern Orthodoxy, finding there the true home that fundamentalism never was for him. Several friends in Pennsylvania have invited me, with similar enthusiasm, to consider becoming Episcopalian, or Brethren in Christ, or Unitarian Universalist. But I don't get it. I have rich experience and resonance with certain elements of the African-American holiness, Mennonite, and Episcopal churches, but none are home to me, not even the fundamentalism of my youth.
If organized religion is an apple, the shine on mine has worn through. In fundamentalism, I learned timeless universal truths that all people everywhere ought to believe, and that everyone in my church and family had always believed. But rub that shine even lightly, and it dulls. My church was pastored by a pedophile, and my friends' parents (the stalwarts) have moved in various directions from the one true point of truth where we we had vowed to stand firm. A genealogy of my family would show a hodgepodge of fundamentalists, Lutherans, Catholics, non-Christians, and generic nominal Christians. It seems to me that the fundamentalists felt most strongly about their beliefs, and imposed them more strongly forward in time on their children, and back in time through their interpretation of their ancestors. I learned to overperceive the scope and importance of fundamentalism in my family and my church, and to underperceive flexibility, difference, and innovation.
It's not a matter of tossing aside my bruised apple in favor of a new shiny one, which is the risk I run by hanging my hopes on some new tradition. Maybe I'll stick with the Brethren in Christ, the Wesleyan-Anabaptist-Pietist denomination of my college and my family's present church. But I won't tell my children this is the true and only way. Instead, I'll describe it like an entrepreneur looking to maximize a business opportunity. We go to this church because it was there. We're mustering up our initiative and hoping profit accrues by investing the communal part of our spirituality in this place and in these people.
I saw a documentary about an Italian family who has tended the same vineyard since the 16th century. It seemed wonderful to inherit a place and a purpose in the world. It seems like it would be wonderful, religiously speaking, to come from a family who loves the tradition that has shaped them for generations. But that's not what I have. My family abandoned whatever long-standing stability they ever had in Europe (which likely wasn't much, seeing as they left). We're new immigrants to the United States, for six generations shifting and striving to survive economically and culturally -- and religiously as well.
Religiously, we haven't been nurtured together by a common mother church. And despite what we tell ourselves, we're not the remnant, the few true believers huddled in our lifeboat while the world sinks to hell. If I had to choose a metaphor (and I feel as if I do), I'd say we're spiritual entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur is one who manages one's own business, often with great initiative and risk. My genealogy shows many individuals and families taking initiative to live in the Way of Jesus, affiliated in various ways with the organized church as it existed in each generation. My children come from a long line of people who have taken religious and spiritual matters into their own hands. That's a risky way to live -- I might not recommend it as a general rule -- but I think it's working alright for us.
3 Comments:
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This is why I love reading your blog Jenell - from vomit to ecclesiology in one fell swoop :D
My journey has been so similar and I have found that the label and container is now less important to me than the content. The depth of the soul and the commitment of the community is far more attractive to me than the brand name that used to draw me in.
I care less what they say they believe and more about what they live and how they move through the community.By
Heidi Renee, at 11:09 AM
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My philosophy grad student friend and former student Micah Tillman in his current blog post has a valuable commentary on your post.
We mathematicians even have a name for what you're doing: regression to the mean. It's hard to sustain the extreme of anything.
Just watch out for the Achebe principle: "Things Fall Apart." In other words vomit and ecclesiology aren't as far apart as one might thing.By
Gene Chase, at 4:52 PM
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Thanks, Gene. That was a great post you linked to.
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Jenell Williams Paris, at 11:10 AM
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Revised Title: What I Hate About Vomit, Written Now That All Three Children Have Had the Virus (four hours after the original post)
I hate vomit. I hate touching someone else's stomach contents, even if I gestated that person. I hate the way its smell triggers my gag reflex. I hate the way children don't use buckets. I hate the way toddlers call out "mommy, I'm sick!" instead of cleaning it up themselves discretely. I hate the way vomit, if you sleep in it for several hours, permeates into your ears, skin, and hair, and won't come out even after a bath. I hate finding a vomit smell inside an ear or between toes, hours after a bath. I hate vomit's color and texture. I hate vomit's intrigue - the irresistible draw to define which foods are in it.
I hate cleaning up vomit. I hate cleaning sheets and bodies with only one hand because I have to cover my nose with a cloth. I hate cleaning up with two hands, and then vomiting myself. I hate discovering a vomit scent in carpet months after I thought I cleaned it. I hate vomit that soaks into pillows.
I hate vomit's timing. I hate having pukey towels, sheets, pillows, carpets, stuffed animals, and children on my hands at 3 am. I hate being woken up by the sound of vomit. I hate lying in bed afterward, anxious and fearful that someone's tummy isn't entirely empty (because it almost always isn't). I hate waiting for vomit to come out of subsequent children after its come out of one (because it almost always does). I hate losing sleep.
When it comes to spirituality, I'm all about accepting reality. Accept all things, even pain and suffering, for what they are. Wishing things away doesn't ever help; accepting their presence always does. But I just can't accept vomit. It is unacceptable on every level. That's the only thing I don't hate about vomit -- my resistance to it. I accept my non-acceptance.
3 Comments:
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Totally agree. Couldn't agree more.
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This is akin to my hatred of the lingering smell of poop that defies even OxyClean.
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I dont know what it says about you - or about me? - that my favorite of your writing is almost always about bodily functions. But once again, you have spoken agreat truth and spoken it well....
Sunday, June 14, 2009
My twins recently turned four. When I was four, I accepted Jesus into my heart. I've been agonizing over the fact that I haven't even invited my sons to accept Jesus into their hearts, nor encouraged them to abandon the frolicking hell-bound path of worldliness and sin that they're on. I haven't told them they're going to hell someday, and mommy and daddy are going to heaven, and if they pray the right prayer, then they can come to heaven with us.
Obviously I have some unresolved issues with my own journey to salvation! Accepting Jesus into your heart is a good thing. I believe that. But the accompanying theology, fear, and shame isn't helpful at all. And I no longer believe in the exclusivity of that metaphor for salvation -- that the sinner's prayer (which is derived from scripture, not written in it) is the only ticket to heaven.
Sometimes it seems the stakes are huge and they're planted here: aggressive evangelism of preschoolers. But the truth is, I'm teaching my children about spirituality every day, simply by living with them (it's everywhere, in my cooking, my yelling, my praying, my comforting, etc.). I don't need a system or an ideology to pass on to my children, because the Way of Jesus is a way. We live it together, even if (especially if!) we can't articulate it perfectly, systematize it thoroughly, or prove it scientifically.
And I'm heartened to see much of my fundamentalism left behind as if in a cake pan; I'll serve the best of my religion to my kids in large slices and leave behind the crumbs. Most of it isn't intentional, but when I engage the fundamentalism of my youth (on a summer visit back home), I see what I was taught as a child, but I'm not teaching to my children:
- that they're going to hell
- that God kind of loves them and kind of hates them
- that sex should be discussed with words like "filthy" "slutty" and "dirty"
- that rightful authority should be ascribed to James Dobson, Jim Bakker, Ken Ham, Bill Gothard, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell
- that conservative talk radio and cable news corresponds with conservative Christianity
- that whatever they're doing isn't good enough
- that their culture deserves their fear, judgment, and avoidance
- that the the world is 6000 years old and that God planted dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith
- that Jesus is going to return any minute and won't they feel ashamed because their beds aren't made
- that, as boys, authority over women is their birthright
- that if they question outrageous, violent, ethnocentric, historically questionable, or contradictory things in the Bible, their faith is weak
- that a single moral point may be derived from absolutely anything in the Bible
If you have advice about 4-year-olds accepting Jesus into their hearts, I'll take it. That's a live issue for me, but wow, how much more of my theology has died as I become more and more alive. That's wonderful to have in my heart.
11 Comments:
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I remember questioning my salvation at a very young age, probably about 5 or so, because I had not prayed the sinner's prayer. I also remember the whole issue being very upsetting to me- had I been unsaved all along? How often did I need to pray this prayer?
For many years now as I've looked back on that, I see a lot of unnecessary fear that was presented to a little girl who had a very simple faith in Jesus. And when people ask me when I "became a Christian" or "accepted the Lord", I simply say that I've known Jesus for as long as I can remember.By
Hannah Forney, at 2:30 PM
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Great, Great Post! I love it!
My kids are 7 and 11 and I figure that I do not want them choosing their religious path right now anymore than I want them choosing a spouse. In my, not quite so humble, opinion - such decisions are best left until they are older.
Not that they don't get regular doses of Mom and Dad's take on life, but I want them to know that there are other views out there as well and that they need to make decisions... not my drilling into them what their opinions should be. :) -
Don't worry Jenell, your kids aren't near the "age of accountability" yet (:
But,I am praying there is a Child Evangelism Fellowship group nearby.
(:
Smarty pants, Randy
p.s. I loved your garden post.By
, at 6:13 PM
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Thank you for this! I, too, have been agonizing over whether to encourage Audrey (5) to "accept Jesus in her heart." I mean, she already knows him. I don't remember ever praying the sinner's prayer for the first time -- but I do remember countless "recommitments." I'm inspired by your resistance to fear and shame in your kids' spiritual vocabulary. I'm going to try to do the same.
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Seen this one? Jenny Schroedel, just published by Paraclete Press, Naming the Child: Hope-Filled Reflections on Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Death.
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, at 12:19 PM
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Great to know not all committed parents are fundamentalists. Great post!
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Howie Luvzus, at 3:02 PM
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THanks, anonymous. Someone told me about that book some time ago, and I didn't know it had been published. I'm glad to know.
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Jenell Williams Paris, at 11:42 AM
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love this bit:
"how much more of my theology has died as I become more and more alive"
I share that sentiment. AA has this wonderful expression: Let Go and Let God. If God is who we say God is, then what we think about God is limited at best, an evil idol at its worst.
We just had a VBS at church with a couple of clowns. The first song they lead was "Don't monkey around with Satan, Don't money around with sin." My 4 year old did not care, and I was glad he did not care. What he cares about and what we know has the greatest impact on religion in kids, are nurturing parents and a good group of adults and friends he can trust.By
Drew Tatusko, at 12:53 PM
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But really, it probably isn't wise to monkey around with Satan :)
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Jenell Williams Paris, at 10:32 AM
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Loved this post. Found it through the "weeds" of the internet blogosphre-a flower among the thorns indeed. I know that God knows my kids and frankly it doesn't matter if we know God because God knows us.
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, at 10:55 AM
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I don't believe in "evangelizing" children anymore. And I don't believe the "sinner's prayer" actually does anything more than fairy dust would.
I think rites of passage are valuable and when a child expresses a certain "crossing over" into a new level of understanding or belief or whatever, we can certainly celebrate those moments in our families, individually and in our communities.
But I don't think "asking Jesus into one's heart" is really the most intellectually honest and spiritually significant way to usher a child into a life of spiritual discipline and right living.
I have 2 girls - 7 and 4 - they don't know the Bible stories and don't know there is such a place as hell...much less that people go there. But through living in our family, they know the triune God, they know love, they know service and compassion and justice...and that's more than most adults I knew growing up in the church.
Friday, June 12, 2009
“Uh, could you try to straighten that out a little?,” asked my dad after I hoed my first row in his garden. On subsequent rows, he didn’t even bother asking. Come July, curvilinear crops of beets, beans, and carrots will fill up his perfectly square garden plot.
Dad gardens every summer, and every summer he compares himself unfavorably to his father. Grandpa was a fundamentalist Baptist minister who gardened as a hobby, a serious enough hobby to feed his family of six for several months of the year. Garden bounty was supplemented with small-town pastoral swaps: a chicken for a funeral, beef for a wedding.
If grandpa saw my rows, dad said, he’d say, “Why’d you send that girl to college? Go to college, and you come back and can’t even hoe a straight row.” True, but my life would offend grandpa in more ways than that. Grandpa read only the Bible – he didn’t believe in worldly learning, including the daily newspaper. His granddaughter learns from Marxism, feminism, anthropology, and puts no limits on her reading. Grandpa believed women were to be submissive wives and mothers, and here his granddaughter is a working mother with a husband who parents full-time. Grandpa didn’t believe in college – Bible school for pastors, and hard work for the rest. His granddaughter went to college and beyond, and now holds authority over men in the classroom. Grandpa died when I was two, so I can only imagine what our relationship would be like, based on stories from his children and his sermon notes. I do know my father, though, and while we see eye-to-eye on many issues, "women in the workplace" is not one of them.
Despite our deep differences, grandpa, dad and I can find common ground in the garden. We each parted ways with our parents, making lives for ourselves that might provide escape from our family’s status quo, and that might even reverse the Curse. Grandpa’s parents were North Dakota farmers, and grandpa set out to Bible school (William Bell Riley’s Northwestern Bible School). He didn’t want to do painful toil on the earth, producing nothing but thistles and thorns (Gen. 3), and found an open path in Bible study and pastoral work. But he always kept a massive garden (poorly, by his father’s standards). Dad escaped his family’s small-town Midwestern fundamentalism by attending a secular university and becoming a white-collar corporate worker, putting even more distance between himself and toiling in the earth. But he kept gardening too (poorly, by his father’s standards), and scooched over just a bit from fundamentalism to right-wing evangelicalism.
Just as grandpa and dad rejected Adam’s curse, I reject Eve’s, who was damned to a life of domestic labor and unfulfilled relational longing. As they did, I took drastic measures: moving to the East, becoming a professor, marrying an equality-minded man, and revising the right-wing evangelicalism of my upbringing to make space for my femininity. But I keep gardening, too (poorly, by anyone’s standards).
At twilight, dad and I stood at the edge of his garden, offering well wishes to the cucumber seeds and encouraging a toad hopping across pepper mounds. There’s no returning to the garden of our ancestors, but thank goodness we can make our own – such as they are – and enjoy their yield.
2 Comments:
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I “inherited” a 156 square foot garden on the Porch property (for all the porch gardeners to see). I have never gardened in my life, I usually kill green things. So, I planned (using my drafting tools), I made many trips to Bachmann’s, I measured (using both a tape measure and a yardstick), I planted, I watered. It grew. Now it is time to “thin” (what does that mean!?) and I can’t tell the difference between the plants and the weeds. Could your Dad come over and help me?
KaylaBy
, at 6:42 PM
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Jenell, I really enjoyed this post. I think its beautiful to look back on and see how lives have changed and how each one of us has taken our own "detours". I don't usually comment on other blogger's posts, but I couldn't resist on this one. :) Definitely food for thought.
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k. elisabeth, at 7:08 PM
3 Comments:
This is why I am a Christian Universalist... It removes all of that insurance thinking and focuses on the first part you mentioned. Romans 5 says that we were reconciled when we were enemies and how much more having been reconciled shall we be saved through his life.
This is the point everyone misses. Heaven is not the issue. We ARE reconciled.
Now Jesus wants to save our souls.
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Andrew, at 3:37 PM
Blessed assurance indeed. And I love your parallel with marriage; indeed, it can only embody it's full promise in the absence of contingency plans.
Miss you here in Central PA!
By
Cynthia, at 7:41 PM
Wow, this expresses how I feel about salvation and whether I am "sure" I'm going to heaven in a way that I haven't figured out to explain yet. Thanks so much for these words.
By
Beth, at 3:21 PM
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