Fire insurance

"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.

Surviving the Island of Grace

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.)

Entrepreneurship

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.

What I Hate About Vomit, Written After Two Children Have Had the Virus, and One is Most Likely Still Going to Succumb Within the Next Day or Two

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.

How to leave fundamentalism (without even trying)

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.

Faith of my fathers

“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.

Life in the big suburb

I’m overwhelmed by life in the big city, or should I say the big suburb. For the month of June we’re visiting my parents in a Minnesota suburb nearly twice as big as Harrisburg, the state capital and the biggest city within range of our Pennsylvania home. My parents moved here in the late 1970s when they were an upwardly mobile young family looking for a good school district and a house with central air. They stayed when virtually all their neighbors made the move to McMansions in newly developed potato fields, and today they are the elderly white couple living in an urbanized suburb with midnight basketball on their street, African and Asian languages called out from split-level kitchen windows, and exposed underwear easily viewed on teen boys with low-riding belts barely holding up baggy pants.

I can barely watch the news while I’m here. Minnesota news is notoriously alarmist when it comes to weather (STORM WATCH! TORNADO POSSIBLY COMING LATER! RAIN! MODERATE SUNSHINE CARRIES CANCER RISK!), but there are also so many individual stories of tragedy, property damage, crime, and death. I haven’t seen any news since day before yesterday – I’m still in recovery from that day’s report. A five-year-old boy was killed a few miles north of here when he chased his ball into the street and was struck by a garbage truck that was backing up. Garbage trucks are slow and loud (“bee-beep, bee-beep” when they’re in reverse), but he didn’t see the truck and the truck didn’t see him. His family had immigrated here from Liberia just a few years ago – his parents risked much more than mine did to improve their children’s futures by moving to this suburb.

The next day, a columnist in the local paper wrote about the importance of watching children. Their peripheral vision isn’t developed, so they don’t even see what adults see when we look at the street. While they may understand directions (look both ways, don’t run in the street), they don’t have good impulse control. And most importantly, curiosity trumps rules. Children must explore. They must dash. And they must do it right now, this instant. It’s just how they are.

It’s a dangerous way to live, but perhaps the only way. We must learn the rules, and as we grow up we have opportunity to master them. But deep inside, always, is the child ruled by curiosity. We’ve got to look out for each other, so that when one simply must dash after a ball or chase an opportunity, the rest can help him stay safe.