Time

One of the things I love about the Anglican tradition is the liturgical calendar – the idea of rhythm throughout the year. Lent, the weeks from Ash Wendesday to Easter, is a  season of soul-searching and repentance., a time to slow down, take stock, simplify the schedule. Traditionally, the forty days of Lent are meant as an imitation of Jesus’ withdrawal into the wilderness for forty days (Sundays aren’t included in the count, since they commemorate the resurrection. For some, they’re feast days – but that’s a different discussion).

Some years I’ve given up chocolate, or coffee, or sugar, or all three, a way to pull myself back into balance after the binging on cookies through the holidays and Girl Scout cookie season. This year, I chose not to give up any specific thing, but to focus more intentionally on time – really taking time – to think, pray, read, reflect, prepare.

Our church is also focusing on time: life in the balance. And as if by design, the weather has been assisting, with snowfall after snowfall. Today, again, schools are closed, roads drifted, snow falling, wind stirring little cyclones of white that swirl across the yard.

This morning, with coffee in hand, and binoculars nearby to inventory hungry birds venturing through the snow in search of seeds, I’ve been reading Think Orange, a book by Reggie Joiner about the need to weave church and family more closely together. His thesis is that churches on their own are ineffective in discipling children and youth – as he points out, most churches have less than 40 hours a year of direct, strategic interaction with children. That’s probably a generous estimate, and the truth is, not much can be accomplished in such a small, scattered amount of time.

Ask

Here’s a question that comes up fairly often. It’s a question I’ve asked, and been asked, more times than I like to count:

How do you love someone deeply when you’ve never been loved that way yourself?

Or – rephrase it – how do you mentor someone else when no one’s ever mentored you?

Or – how do you set wise boundaries, when no one did that for you?

Or – how do you invest in others, when you’re not sure of the investment in yourself?

As a young mother, this really worried me. I remember holding a new, very loud baby, and wondering if it would be possible to love her. I did love her, on some simple, elemental level, but I also knew if she cried too long, too loud, too late into the night, there was part of me that would gladly hand her back.

Maybe that was closer to the surface for me than for most: my own parents couldn’t handle the challenge of parenthood, separated, and vanished, before I turned two.  I grew up in the care of my grandmother, who had raised four boys of her own, and then found herself with four more small children just months after her youngest son left for college.

So – how do you love someone deeply, when you’ve never been loved that way yourself? How do you parent, when your own parents let you down?

Love is just a word I heard . . .

So what is love? A pink valentine heart, or a ring from Kay Jewelers?

Does love mean “never having to say you’re sorry?”

Looking back on the songs, slogans and stories that papered my path to adulthood, I’d say there’s plenty of confusion about what love is, and how it’s shown. Free love? Make love not war?

No surprise that we carry the hope that love will be easy, convenient, and always make us feel good. Yet, a quick scan through the gospels tells a different story: Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

We’ve all heard the chapter from 1 Corinthians: “love is patient, love is kind . . .” Ah, and we’ve been instructed to insert our own names in place of love: “Carol is patient, Carol is kind.” Well, maybe. Some days.

Love has a cost. Even when it comes to loving our kids, our spouses, our parents, our friends. Would you lay down your life for me?

But the cost that comes to mind, for me, is more immediate, more pressing, more to the point: Would you give me an hour? Ten minutes? Five?

The Fabric of Faithfulness

In thinking about starting this blog, and considering a name for it, I’ve been grappling with a book about young adults, and the challenges they face in becoming faithful followers of Christ. Several years ago in our church library, I came across Steven Garber’s The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving together Belief and Behavior. I kept it so long the librarians tracked me down looking for it, and I finally bought my own copy.

Garber recounts conversations with many young adults, exploring the questions “What do you care about, and why?” and pushing to discover: “What is it that happens when a person , moving from student years into adulthood, continues to construct a coherent life? How does a worldview become a way of life? How do students learn to connect presuppostions with practice – belief about the world with life in the world?”

Garber has much to say about the process of faith formation during the post-high school, young adult years, the purposes of education, the integration of faith and learning. As he talks with adults who have moved on to mature faith, those who “with substantial integrity have connected belief to behavior, personally as well as publicly,” he identifies three essentials, or what he calls three “strands” that must be woven together:

Love each other deeply

Shoveling in knee-deep snow, I find myself thinking of verses about snow – there are only two I can think of:

Come now, let us reason together, Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. That’s from Isaiah. And from the psalms: Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

I wonder – how much snow did Isaiah, or the psalmist, see? And did they have this kind of snow in mind?

Even more, the snow makes me think of a passage from 1 Peter: Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

The thing about a heavy snow – this kind of crazy, almost two foot deep snow – is that it covers everything. A dusting doesn’t hide much, although it might make things look bright, or clean, for an hour or two. But deep snow changes things. My bird bath looks like a dome; our two Adirondack chairs are strange geometric shapes. Any dirt has vanished under the thick coat of white.

Theologically, it’s God’s love, the forgiveness offered through Christ’s death and resurrection, that washes us, and make us clean as snow. But Peter wasn’t writing to Jesus – he was writing to us: “Love each other deeply, because love covers a multitude of sins.”

What does it mean to be loved with a love so deep it blankets our failings, hides our imperfections? We live in a culture that is quick to point out flaws, impatient with weakness. Our kids live under the constant scrutiny of teachers, coaches, peers, parents.

We are all quick to see the places where our youth fall short, where we ourselves fall short. Is it any wonder that anxiety is the new epidemic?

Weave us together

There’s a song we sang in girl scouting – a prayer, really, sung while standing in a circle, with arms weaving forward and back:

– Weave, weave, weave us together, weave us together in unity and love,
– Weave, weave, weave us together, together in love.

That prayer is needed more than ever, yet we have few places where we can ask, or even imagine, that kind of weaving taking place.

The Kaiser Family Foundation just documented the use of technology in our teens’ lives, and other reports demonstrate the growing isolation of both adults and teens. (One frequently cited study was done by Duke University in 2006 ).

From my own vantage point, as a youth pastor, parent, friend to many families in distress, our current culture does much to pull both youth and parents into ever more self-determined paths. Points of intersection, for families, friends, church communities, neighbors, are less frequent, less potent, less of a priority, as other demands become increasingly insistent. I'm sometimes reminded of the sobering poem by William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Kids can't hear parents, parents can't hear kids. Families seem to lack a center, a place of focus, and spin into dissolution.