God's Economy: Generational Investment

  Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
  (Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Wendell Berry)

It’s planting season here in Pennsylvania, and I’ve been planting in my yard and in Exton Park, a nearby habitat where I sometimes lead bird walks or help with the Weed Warrior group I helped form. 

In the park, I've been working with friends to plant ferns, wildflowers, native shrubs and trees.

In my own yard, I’ve been moving oak seedling and dogwoods, checking on pawpaw seedlings from several years ago, trying to envision our little grove of trees decades from now, when the new seedlings shoot past the aging stand of locusts.

While I work in the park, I listen to the birds around me: Baltimore orioles whistling to their mates, a vociferous brown thrasher singing from the top of a tree.

At home, house wrens follow me, their bubbling song both complaint and celebration. After starting a nest in every bird house in the yard, the pair have settled in a house hanging from a sagging branch, just above a stick pile left for their enjoyment along the rotting fence.

A pair of northern flickers have been working for days excavating a hole in a half-dead locust tree. There are plenty of holes to choose from, but it seems each year they make a new one. This year I saw their little dance of agreement the day they decided on the perfect spot, and I’ve watched as they’ve taken turns drilling deeper and deeper into their new home. For a day or two all I could see were tail feathers shaking and occasional wood chips flying out. Now the hole is done, and the wild mating calls announce their intent: soon there will be eggs to guard, and then baby birds crying plaintively for food.

This time of year it seems as if all creation is intent on forming the next generation. On Wednesday, carrying my buckets for water for new plantings in Exton Park, I paused to see what a dad and his small children were watching so intently in the little creek flowing from pond to wetland. A large brown snake was coiled among the grasses, and while we watched, another came swimming toward it and the two intertwined, then slithered out of view.

On Thursday, our birding group stopped to see what was causing a ripple in a wetland pond, then watched in fascination as two large snapping turtles came into view and began roiling the water in a strange, muddy water ballet.

In my yard, chipping sparrows carry wisps to a hidden spot in a misshapen spruce, while chickadees and house finch hurry to claim the bird houses abandoned by the wrens.

Generational investment, for most creatures, is innate, instinctive, almost automatic. Procreation is triggered by length of day, change of temperature, availability of certain foods. Parenting is determined by sex and species: turtle moms lay their eggs, then swim away. The babies are on their own. Northern water snakes (those brown snakes I saw in the creek) give birth to live young, 8 to 30 at a time. The babies swim off as soon as they’re born and the mother is done for another year.

For birds it varies by species: baby geese and ducks are ready to follow their parents just hours after they’re born. Baby raptors may stay in the nest for weeks, then need some intensive coaching before they’re able to feed themselves. I’ve watched osprey parents diving for fish while their young circle behind them, crying for food, then seen the parents coaxing the next generation to take the plunge themselves.  I first saw the lesson take place near Sanibel Island, Florida, then again on the Northeast River, in coastal Maryland, and again on Marsh Creek Lake, not far from my home. Same begging young, same coaxing parents, same breathless wait as the first brave fledgling plunges downward for the first self-caught fish.

There are occasional exceptions to the deeply embedded parenting process. Brown-headed cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, so occasional wrens, warblers or other small birds may find themselves parenting a baby bird that eats more than usual and doesn’t move on at exactly the right pace. Maternal mammals sometimes adopt and care for young from other species.  

But even those exceptions demonstrate the deeply embedded pattern of care each species is hard-wired to give.

Except humans.

As I garden, listen to birds, watch baby bunnies appearing, I find myself thinking about generational investment from a human point of view.

Children? Yes, no, later?

Parenting? Hands-on, hands-off, free-range, helicopter, tiger?

Our options for choice go far past the obvious.

We’re the only species that can decide to plant trees. Or not.

Pave over fields. Or not.

Drain aquifers, strip mountain tops, spray our food with neurotoxins.

We can choose to live in the moment, pocket the profit, forget the future.

We can choose to invest in our own offspring: their immediate happiness, their immediate safety, their immediate future, with no regard for the children of others.

We can choose to invest in a broader way: in the lives of generations that follow us, known and unknown, near and far. In sustainable practices, just policies, accessible education, enduring beauty.

Or not.

Today is Mother’s Day.

It’s the day we share those expensive Hallmark Cards we remembered to buy and celebrate the mothers still with us.

It’s the day we grieve the mothers we’ve lost, or never knew, the children we never see, or never had, or lost too soon.

And it’s the day we give thanks for our children, those who came in the usual way, or in other ways: adoption, marriage, extended family, friendship.

Turtles do fine never meeting their mothers.

Birds enjoy two parents for a month or two, then they’re on their own.

But the truth is that for humans, one parent isn’t enough. Or two. Or three.

Some years ago, Search Institute assembled a list of "building blocks of healthy development—known as Developmental Assets—that help young children grow up healthy, caring, and responsible." I often referred to Asset #3 in our youth ministry training sessions: 

"Other Adult Relationships | Young person receives support from three or more nonparent adults." 

What Search Institute's research found was that even a young person with strong support from two loving parents needs input and support from three or more additional adults: caring teachers, youth leaders, relatives, family friends.

Our own kids have talked about how important their extended family has been in shaping their faith, careers, mental health, social skills.

But some kids don’t have strong, caring extended families.

And some kids live in places where the embedded social structures undermine the best efforts of every caring adult.

Scripture talks much about generations: the need to teach our children and their children, but “children” widely interpreted: the next generation. Those who come behind us.   

Read through the letters of the early church and it becomes clear that for Paul and John, those who followed were in many ways their children, sometimes referred to as “beloved children,” even more as “little children.”

Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 2: “we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children.” And in Galations 4: “my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!” Amazing images from a fast-moving man like Paul. 

I’m thankful for the mothers and fathers in my life. My own parents were a dim absence, gone before I was two. My paternal grandmother took the place of both, teaching me to read, to cook and sew, to climb trees and grow tomatoes.

But there were many others: a strings teacher who invested far more than the job required in helping me love and understand music. A camp director who gave me a first glimpse of grace and generosity and steady hard work toward a distant goal. Uncles who taught me to dance, to drive, to survive conversations with scary adults I didn’t know. Teachers who taught me to write, to think, to weigh ideas carefully and follow them out to their logical conclusions. Compassionate, gracious in-laws who continue to teach me about love and family, about how to continue learning, serving, changing.

At a recent retreat, our speaker Paula Rinehart spoke of her own uneasy relationship with her mother, and the way God gave her many mothers, women whose photos she framed and set on a table by her bed to remind her of how well she’s been parented.

I am thankful today for my own many mothers. And many fathers.

For those I will never know or name whose investments of time and love have kept this part of the world lovely, who made my education possible, who imagined a way of life that has made my own life possible.

A Greek proverb says “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Trees grow faster than we think.

So do children.

Our best investments carry no guarantees.

Yet, even as I write this, my youngest daughter appears with a cup of coffee, a small vase full of flowers, a promise of cinnamon buns heading to the oven.

Beyond my window, birdsong fills the air.

This is the fourth in a series on God’s Economy. Ealier posts: 

Fruit that Will Last, April 19, 2015

Gods’ Economy: Subtract or Multiply? April 26, 2015

God’s Economy: Inescapable Network of Mutuality May 3, 2015

Other Mother's Day posts:

#OneMom, October 23, 2011

Resurrection Women: Happy Mother's Day, May 12, 2012

Like a Motherless Child, May 12, 2013

Like a Motherless Child

I confess, I am not overly fond of Mother’s Day, much as I love being a mother. And now grandmother.

As a kid, I hated Mother’s Day. That’s a strong word – but true. Mother’s Day was the day to remember that mine had vanished before my second birthday. A day to note, up close and personal, that not every family looks and feels like a typical Hallmark card.

I pause to think and pray for the friend who this year lost dearly loved mother and mother-in-law in the space of a few short months. The friends who lost their mothers too soon and still carry the weight of “motherless child.” The friends whose mothers weren’t there, or only rarely, carried away by mental illness or addiction. The friends whose mothers linger but no longer know their names, or recognize them when they visit. The friends whose mothers could never quite affirm them, who carry their mothers' critical voices like embedded shards of glass, sharp points of pain that never heal.

There’s no shortage of pain. What of those who would love to be mothers, but aren't? Those mothers who have lost a child to accident or illness, or are losing a child to estrangement or addiction.  I think of the mothers and fathers I know who will spend Mother’s Day grieving the loss of a child to suicide. 

As Job’s comforter Eliphaz said, “Man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.”

Or – to quote Frederick Buechner:  "Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.” Enjoy the dogwoods and azaleas. But remember those in pain.

How do we walk alongside those in pain without doing harm ourselves?

I travel back to the spring I was sixteen. My grandmother complained of chest pain and went off to the doctor, from there to the hospital, leaving my brothers and me on our own.

Sifting back through memories of that difficult time, I find no conversations with caring adults. No one who sat us down and said “your grandmother’s had a heart attack, and this is what that will mean.” It was clear our lives would change, but how? When? Where would we be?

Kind people dropped off dinner: Roast chicken. Unfamiliar casseroles.

Kind people offered rides, wrote down the dates we needed to arrive at the camp jobs we had planned, promised they’d get us there.

But I don’t remember any real conversation about how we were doing. What we were feeling.

Resettled Farm Child, Dorothea Lange, New Mexico, 1935

And stranger: I don’t remember anyone praying with us. I know people prayed. But not with us.

Looking back on that season of my life, I am overwhelmed again by how alone I felt.

And overwhelmed, again, by how God’s presence became real, in a way I have never since doubted.

In the years since then, I've walked with others in pain, and my prayer is always that they know God's presence.

There are plenty of things people say when trying to comfort those in trouble: “It will all work out.”

Really? And what if it doesn’t?

“It’s all for the best.”

No. God can redeem even the ugliest event. But no – I refuse to believe bombs, massacres, kidnap, suicide are “all for the best.” Never.

“God needed her in heaven.” Please. No. Don’t.

Our attempts to sweeten, lessen, minimize pain just make the pain worse, just push the questions deeper.

Why did God allow a loving mother to die when her children were still young?

Why did God allow children to be gunned down by a mentally ill young man?

Why cancer, why psychosis, why heroin, why . . .

Here’s what I know for sure: we live in a broken world. We live in a world that staggers under the weight of folly, that shudders in the grip of sorrow.

And in the midst of our grief, we are not alone.

What I want to offer, to those in pain, is God’s presence. 

But that’s not mine to give.

What’s mine to give are prayer, and my own presence.

So somehow I want to say: you’re not alone. If you want to talk, I want to listen. If you need a hug, I’m here, nearby. If you’re angry – that’s okay. Go shout at God. He doesn't mind. Some days I shout too.

And if you’re sad – go ahead and cry. As long as you want. As loud as you need. I'll cry with you if you let me.

I’m not planning to tell you what to think, how to feel. I just want you to know: you’re not alone on this dark road you’re traveling.

But most, I want to pray. Over coffee, in a car in the driveway before you jump out and go inside, standing by the door as you leave for the hospital, deep in a couch that’s lost its springs.

On a crumbling cement stoop with neighbors walking by.

Under a tree on a summer day. 

Around a late night campfire.

 Over the phone. 

After you’ve said what you need to say, shared your fear, put the questions into words, here's mine: "Do you mind if I pray?"

How many times have I asked that question?

On a battered city porch.

In a glass strewn park.

On the end of a dock, feet dangling in cool water.

In the prayer alcove of our church, or right there at the front, with the worship band playing loud.

Do you mind if I pray?

I want to pray for God’s presence to be known. For his love to be felt. For his goodness to be visible.

Sometimes when I pray, I’m overcome by the sadness the other person carries. I set a hand gently on her shoulder, and the grief travels through me – like a tide of darkness, flowing up my arm, through my heart, weighting me to the floor.

I hold that darkness out toward God, pour it, like dark water, into his waiting hands.

Sometimes when I pray, I’m overwhelmed with the sense of God’s great love pouring through me toward the person beside me. It wells up through me – warm, bright love – wrapping us both, setting our hearts pounding, spilling across us like golden sunlight after a winter rain.

Sometimes when I pray, words come un-thought. Words of blessing, forgiveness, of mercy, of hope. People come back, weeks, months later, and say “When you said that, this happened.”

Those were not my words.

Once, praying for a girl who had just lost another father, I felt all those things: the weight of her pain, the warmth of God’s love, the words of blessing. As I prayed, she sank to the floor, sobbing. Someone moved to comfort her – and I said, softly, “No. She’s crying in the arms of her father.”

We moved away and left her, sobbing on the floor. Later, she asked, “How did you do that?”

Do what?

She thought we’d been sitting there, rubbing her back, in a way that made her feel very warm, very loved, very held.

She was comforted. Joyful. Radiant.

That was God, pouring love and strength right through her. I pray she remembers that presence when she feels like a motherless, fatherless child, a very long way from home.

The prayer I pray often is this:

For this cause I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3) 

The family I’m part of might not look like a Hallmark card, but it’s a family of great love, love that flows through our places of pain and draws us deeper to an eternal, unfailing embrace.

And for you, part of that family or not, motherless child or not, walking today in pain or beauty or both, I pray that you feel God’s presence, that you see his mercy, that you grasp, in some small way, his love far beyond our understanding. 

I pray that you travel through the dark times, and the light, knowing you’re not alone. 

Road to Emmaus, William Strang, Scotland,  ca 1900

Resurrection Women – Happy Mother’s Day

For me, a strong signpost of the resurrection is the record of the first encounters at the empty tomb. According to all four gospels, the women were the first to see evidence that Jesus was risen; three of the gospels record that women were the first to speak with Jesus; all say they were the first to spread the good news of the resurrection.

Women at the Tomb, Jesus Mafa

You can pass this over as just a small detail in a fast-paced story. Or you can count is as one more hallucinatory scene in a mythical retelling that has little to do with actual fact.

Or you can wonder, as so many have: why would anyone trying to gain credibility for a strange new faith trust the story to the mouths of women?

As N.T. Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham and leading New Testament scholar, has noted in sermons, lectures, and books, the role of women in the resurrection story is itself part of the great reversal of Easter morning:

"And who is it that carries this stupendous message, this primal announcement of new creation, this heraldic proclamation of the king of kings and his imminent enthronement? It is Mary from Magdala. . . she is someone who has been cured of terrible multiple demon-possession. But the real shock is not Mary’s character. It is her gender. This is perhaps the most astonishing thing about the resurrection narratives, granted the universal beliefs of the time in the unreliability of women in a lawcourt or almost anywhere else. It is one of the things which absolutely guarantees that the early Christians did not invent these stories. They would never, ever, ever have invented the idea that it was a woman – a woman with a known background of emotional instability, but the main point is that it was a woman – to whom had been entrusted the earth-shattering message that Jesus was alive again, that he was on the way to being enthroned as Lord of the World, and that – this is the significance of the emphatic ‘my Father and your Father, my God and your God’ – he was opening to his followers, as a result of his victory over death itself, that same intimacy with the Father of all that he had enjoyed throughout his earthly life. It is Mary: not Peter, not John, not James the brother of the Lord, but Mary, who becomes the apostle to the apostles, the primary Christian witness, the first Christian evangelist. This is so striking, so unexpected, so embarrassing to some early Christians – Origen had to refute pagan sneers on this very point – that it cannot be accidental. It cannot be accidental for John and the other writers. And I dare to say it cannot be accidental in the purposes of God.

Mary Announces the Resurrection, Mary Charles McGough

"Something has happened in the renewal of creation through the death and resurrection of Jesus which has the result, as one of its multiple spin-offs, that whereas before Jesus only ever sent out men, now – now of all moments! – he sends out a woman. And though the church has often struggled – to put it mildly – with the idea of women being called to genuine apostolic ministry, the record is clear and unambiguous. "


In the great resurrection reversal, we are all set free from the second-place status ascribed to us by tradition, culture, or patriarchal law. Jesus said “the truth will set you free,” and across the centuries resurrection people have experienced that reality in the face of prejudice and unjust laws and every voice that continues to insist freedom is for those born in the right place, with the right skin, the right body.

I first saw this resurrection life in my grandmother, Elda Meech Capra. Born in Oklahoma in 1912 to a poor family with too many daughters, she attended two days of ninth grade then quit, ashamed of her one hand-me-down dress. She left home at thirteen, was married weeks after she turned seventeen to a man ten years older, a man who preferred she stay quiet and do what she was told.

In her late twenties she encountered the resurrection on a street corner in Enid, Oklahoma, where an itinerate preacher led her to Christ and gave her a Bible. He told her “start with the gospel of John,” and she did. When she got to John 8, it was as though Jesus himself was speaking to her: “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

I have her old Bible, pages falling out, tiny notes scribbled in the margins. John 8:31 is underlined, with little check marks in the margin. And just down the column, the verse she repeated often: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

That freedom blossomed in many ways, but without the encouragement or blessing of any church. A network of strong women, missionaries and teachers, helped Elda learn her way through scripture, pointed her to useful resources, discussed and prayed and invited her to test her gifts leading small group Bible studies. I grew up in my grandmother’s home, watching her study her Bible early every morning, listening to those treasured conversations with missionary friends home on furlough.

Noli Me Tangere, Maurice Denis, 1896, France

Those missionary women planted churches in countries I could only imagine, cast out demons, witnessed miraculous healings, and held us spellbound in Sunday school with their stories of God’s work. But they couldn’t speak from the pulpit.

Over the years, my grandmother shared the resurrection with many people, but was never permitted, in her church, to teach men, or teen boys, or speak in any public way. When a group of women she’d led to Christ asked her to explain the Christian faith to their husbands, she agreed to do so in someone’s home. When the husbands asked if she’d lead a weekly Bible study, she again agreed, in someone’s home. When that study grew and divided, she found herself teaching two nights a week, invited often to other homes to meet other seekers, to lead yet others to Christ. Marriages were healed, parents and adult children were reconciled, new life sprang up in visible ways that drew even more to the good news of resurrection.

Elda encouraged all of those new believers to find churches, to worship regularly, to find their way into households of faith. But she never invited them to her own church, and that new resurrection life never became part of her own local congregation.

Why?

Despite all the declarations of freedom, unity, new life in Christ, many church leaders, then as now, allowed two puzzling passages to determine the roles of women: 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which says “women should remain silent in the churches,” and 1 Timothy 2:11-15: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.”

I’m not sure what my grandmother made of those two passages. In her Bible, there’s no note or mark on the Corinthian passage, while many parts before and after are underlined. In Timothy, while the rest of the letter is riddled with small notes and references, that one passage is bracketed, with a short indecipherable note in the margin.

What I do know is that my grandmother believed firmly in the priesthood of all believers: “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.  Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.”

Matin de Pâques, Maurice Denis, 1893, France

In her Bible, the whole passage is underlined, with “priesthood of believers” heavily, repeatedly underscored.

New Testament scholars have spent much time, and ink, exploring the passages about silent women, and trying to understand how those passages fit with Jesus' interactions with women, New and Old Testament descriptions of women in ministry and leadership, and instructions to us all to be more and more like Christ. I list some links below.

But here’s the question that has troubled me since childhood:

What happens to the message of freedom when the church says “That’s for men. The rest of you, stay quiet”?

What happens to the message of unity when the church says “We’re all one, but some of us more than others”?

What happens to the call to witness, to use our gifts, to be like Christ in every way, when as soon as we start, someone says “um, well, no, that gift isn’t for you,” or “you can witness over here, but you can’t speak over there,” or “Jesus wasn’t really talking to you when he said that. But we need someone to serve coffee.”

What stirs our hope in the resurrection, and makes our faith strong?

What stands in the way of faith, and feeds our cynicism and doubt?

I began this series on resurrection with this reflection:

"Those who have seen, experienced, become part of a living community convinced of resurrection power begin to live that power in their own lives, to share it with others, in ways that build hope, and faith, and deepen love. As walls fall down between rich and poor, educated and illiterate, racially and ethnically divided, as God’s people demonstrate the freedom that comes from full forgiveness and the compassion that springs up from the knowledge that all that’s needed is provided, as gifts are affirmed in women, children, the marginalized, the previously ignored, resurrection becomes visible, inescapable.

"If the truth of the resurrection is held in doubt, it’s not our apologetics that needs attention, but our lives together as visible community of love."

What does the resurrection say to women? And to those who love and want the best for women?

Maybe it’s time to go visit the empty tomb, and hear what Jesus has to say.

Jesus Appearing to Mary, Jesus Mafa

For more on the role of women in the church:

Christians for Biblical Equality


N. T. Wright: Women's Service in the Church
Scot McKnight: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible and Junia is Not Alone

This is the sixth in a series about the resurrection:

Risen Indeed: The Hermaneutic Community 
The Great Reversal: A Resurrection People 
Earth Day Shalom: Ripples of Resurrection  
Resurrection Challenge: Feed My Sheep
Resurrection Laughter

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Click on the ___comments link below to see comments and to post your own.