So from our family to yours, we wish you a happy and blessed New Year!

 

There will be time enough to get here.

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of Penn Staters from HP, one of whom has become a friend over the last few years. His son has just entered Kindergarten and he is already reading. This is becoming more and more common, that children should be reading earlier and earlier, and we have all seen the videos where kids are reading from the age of 6 months with a special system that can be yours for only 4 payments of $19.95! Our son is entering the second grade and while he is reading very well now (he just passed/exceeded the standards test for beginning of the second grade) he only started reading last year. Was he behind? Are we bad parents?

Some would say the answer is yes, we are delinquent as parents. We should be getting our children to read as soon as possible to give them every advantage. Certainly we read with our children, often noted as the most important thing a parent can do for their development, from their earliest days on. But I am in agreement with Malcolm Gladwell who in an interview commented that this push for early reading is misplaced. Reading is not like a sport where repetition allows one to build upon skills and develop new ones. Sure, vocabulary will increase but it is not like one is developing better “reading muscles.”

Our daughter was also a bit slower at reading, but by the time she had finished second grade, however, she was reading all of the Harry Potter books then published. This summer she read constantly and wrote over 100 pages of her own fiction. I am not worried.

What my friend and I noticed was that his daughter is only three years older than his son whereas our daughter is six years older. His son saw his big sister learning how to read and joined in, wanting to do everything she did. From our son’s perspective big sis had always been reading and often read to him. There was not then the same challenge or incentive for him. Different context led to different results. Will his son be farther along by second grade than my son?

As far as reading goes, not likely. Just because you are already reading doesn’t mean that you are comprehending more difficult concepts. (Math is a different subject entirely, double entendre intended.)

Sports, as I suggested, are different again. My son is soccer mad and plays all the time. You can definitely tell the difference between those kids who have played soccer for the last two years and those just starting. But even there the learning curve is not so great that an athletic and focused child can’t become very good very quickly. Remember Tim Duncan, NBA two-time MVP? He didn’t play basketball until he got to college.

The moral of my essay? Care for your children, never neglect their education, and let them have a childhood.

 

Anyone else feel this way? Love is worth it, of course, but we are just beginning and I am not sure my nerves can take it. Fortunately, as when I was dating her mother, she is definitely worth it! It also helps that our son is 6 years old, which is so different that it balances things out. We can just go play Star Wars Lego Wii or soccer and all is right with the world. All in all, I am a very bless man and I am so thankful for them both and my bride, their mother.

 

In the post Kids – Between Jacob and the Jelly Bean the Christian Monist questions the path on which most Evangelical parents would want their children to follow as they grow.

I think if you polled most Evangelical parents and asked them to choose one of two paths for their kids, I know the one they would choose . . . path one.

Path one, the Jelly Bean path, is where they go to church faithfully, support the pastor and elders in everything they do, they dress well, never get tattoos, never use a long list of words esteemed by Evangelicals as being bad. They never drink alcohol in case they might offend some “weaker brother” somewhere. They are very, very nice. On this path they substitute dogma for thinking. They believe what they are told to believe and never doubt it. They suppress their raw human frailties deep out of sight and never, ever mention them outside their silent thoughts, alone in their beds in the middle of the dark night of winter.

Now, as it happens, we have been having some of these discussions within our family. To preserve some sense of privacy for those involved, I will simply say that one of our children is at one of the innumerable junctions that we all face at various times in our lives with regards to the company we will keep, the culture we will adopt, and what we will believe. So CM’s comments are very relevant, particularly since I have been engaged in this very conversation with said child this week. My problem with the approach outlined by CM is that there is a false dichotomy. After presenting path one he offers path two.

The second path is messy. On this path, they think and think and think. They don’t grasp the 1,2,3 answers to every problem but feel confused, lonely, angry, horny, frustrated . . . and in distress. They encounter God and a deep visceral, almost animal-istic place. They wrestle with God . . . not disrespectful, but in the honestly of emotions. They are known to cry out, “Oh, God where the hell are you! I’m hurting down here!” Yes, sometimes they use unapproved words.

But in the end of this earthly life, those on path two do come to peace with God, having borne the scars of their struggle.

I do think there is a via media, and not just because I’m an Episcopalian. We help our children down the first path when they are young, in the sense of going to church regularly, teaching them the basics, including morals. As they get older and begin to have questions  I believe we should not shut them down but allow them to think, question, and wrestle. The real problem is assuming there is only one path.

This was brought home to me this past spring when the parents of one of our students were sharing with me their child’s high school activities within the youth group of their Unitarian Universalist Church. The mother commented that, “As an adult I firmly believe in the very open view of UU, but in raising children they frankly need more direction and focus.” I am not going to make any judgments about UU, I do agree, however, that a six-year-old for example is not yet at the stage where they are going to mull any deep intellectual way about the moral ramifications of God’s declaring that Israel should destroy all the Canaanites. Some structure, some direction is needed. And if we as parents believe the Bible in some fundamental way and believe the essence of our faith in a similar manner then it is our obligation to share that faith and knowledge with our children in an age-appropriate manner.

As our children grow and develop in it is similarly incumbent upon us to grow and develop our sharing of our faith with them. When my child tells me that “I don’t want Jesus to take control of my life, I think that is wrong, I want to make my own decisions and choices have my own life” the worst thing that I could do would be to shut down the conversation and say, “No! You must accept Jesus as your Savior!”  Instead I believe we need to have a discussion and be honest about our own doubts and struggles (and to admit that “letting Jesus take control of my life” doesn’t mean we won’t make our own stupid decisions!”).

My thinking on this has been informed by the words of my mentor who was counseling me through a tough time in my first year in college. The time when I had my own doubts and wrestled with God and my parents. (It just so happens is also a psychiatrist, so he has a bit of a leg up on these sorts of issues.) He said in general terms there are two kinds of parents. Those who are excellent at raising young children, and hold them close, they nurture, and they’re always there for their children. Then there are those who are good at letting their children go on their own, they give their children’s space and room to experiment and find the boundaries and even cross over them from time to time. At their best, they are also their children’s closest friends. But you can see this latter sort of parent would not be a blessing for young child at all, rather young children need structure support and nurturing. The former sort of parent, however, have difficulty letting go as their children grow and mature and need to make their own mistakes. Of course, he said, what we should strive for is to be the first sort of parent as her children are young and then make the transition with them into the latter sort. As you can see, I feel the same holds true to our spiritual rearing as well.¹

 

1. For those who might wonder at my word choice, I will never forget my mother saying that we “raise cattle, but rear children.”

Now I am dictating a blog post to you via MacSpeech Dictate, which is working like a champ, but has a relatively limited vocabulary when it comes to Biblical and rabbinic literature. The surgery actually well earlier this week and I’m hopeful that I will be out of the cast by the beginning of next week.  In the meantime, I thought I would share a couple of thoughts I’ve had recently while in church.

Cynicism is easy

From John Steven Fernandez on flickr, used under creative commons

Two weeks ago we decided to visit a different church for an evening service that was  “contemporary and contemplative.” I was looking forward to a contemporary service and I knew the pastor was a good preacher. What we had, however, was 50 minutes of a total of three songs and one verse which lasted 25 minutes. Now I recognize that we all worship in different ways and each of us at different times worship in different ways so I sought to take this time to be in prayer and meditation, as intended by the worship leaders. Our 12-year-old daughter and six-year-old son, however, could be forgiven for becoming a bit impatient with the service. As it was, they were not and were very well behaved and our daughter paid quite a bit of attention to the worship and the sermon. The problem is, she has a bit too much of her father’s sarcasm in her.

At one point the worship leader began to improvise on the words singing over and over again “God of breakthroughs.” I had my head bowed and my shoulders began to shake lightly. My wife tapped me on the shoulder and asked if everything was all right. I looked up smiling and said, “God of our grapefruits? Isn’t he God of all citrus?” Needless to say, I was not setting the best example for our children.

I’m sure others of you have the same problem, as scholars of the Bible is not as easy to sit and listen to a sermon or worship service as it is for some. In the time of meditation I reflected on the fact that cynicism is easy.  Or perhaps it is that it is easy for me as a scholar to justify my cynicism as criticism.

It is indeed very easy to find holes in a belief system, to break down the logic of another, to find reasons why one person’s mode of worship is clearly less sincere than our own. There is nothing simpler than to look at another person’s church or denomination and explain how they are, in fact, not really following Scripture as well as we are. And of course, there is nothing simpler to do than to poke holes in religion, market for the fairy tale that it clearly is, and dismiss it in our modern age of enlightenment and reason. It all really is very easy.

What is far more difficult is to set aside our hubris and recognize that there are truths outside of ourselves. Faith is not the belief in things that are irrational or unreasonable.  Faith does, however, require us to be truly open-minded and generous of heart. Yes there are lots of pastors out there who preach horrific sermons and I understand they’re even blogs that catalogue such sins. But that doesn’t mean that truth isn’t contained within their words or even within incredibly sappy song. Sometimes listening is the hardest skill of all.

 

I share parts of a fun Christmas story for kids. Mooseltoe by Margie Palatini, Henry Cole (Illustrator). Oops! I just realized I said, “Welcome to a special podcast from Targuman.COM.” This is Targuman.org, of course. Merry Christmas!