Archive for the 'faith' Category
We decided that it was about time to start training Miss Baby to sit in church, at least for the first little bit until the children’s sermon. She was delighted; she sat down to color the little children’s program, which was happily full of sheep. She turned around to admire the very large stained glass window of Jesus the Good Shepherd. “Baby Sheep! mommy, can you count the baby sheep!” (Many, if not all, animals are “baby” to her.) So we talked about how Jesus takes care of the baby sheep; she seems to have assumed that the guy depicted with the sheep was Jesus, and if he was OK with the sheep, he was OK with her, and she repeated, “Yeah, Jesus cares for the baby sheep! Good Night, baby sheep!” She was impressed with the organ, and when the choir sang, she sang along, making up her own words: “Baby sheep, baby sheep…”
I went down front with her for the children’s sermon, and she insisted on sitting with her brother in his class the whole time, which was OK, since she just kept coloring. Normally, she goes to the nursery for a little kid’s lesson, but not today.
So, there you have it: Miss Baby went to church and was as happy as a baby sheep, which is apparently pretty happy.
Filed under: faithPosted: March / 31 / 2010
One of the consequences of growing up in church is that I’ve heard many of the stories many times. Some – like Palm Sunday – many, many times. In these cases, I often find myself thinking about peripheral aspects of the story. Like this Sunday, I noticed the colt and the rocks, and the ways in which this story is about how grace is restored to nature too.
We’re told that Jesus sent them out for a colt who had never been ridden; either Jesus is some kind of amazing horse whisperer, or he was being bucked all over the place on the way into Jerusalem. I rather think the story would have been a bit different if that were the case. Nope, they brought him a horse that hadn’t been broken in, he got on, and rode it a long way along a confusing path, with people yelling and waving stuff at him, not the kind of thing a newly broken-in or unbroken horse generally tolerates well. This little horse has his little part in the redemption story, and he does it well.
When Jesus is scolded by the Pharisees, who ask him to shush the people, he responds that the stones would praise him if the people didn’t. One has to admire the restraint of the stones, yearning to call out their praise; they’ve been silent since creation, and now, at this moment when they long to sing out, they remain silent. I wonder if they know how their song would terrify the people; even though this is their salvation too, they maintain silence for our sakes. (If the rest of creation fell with humankind, surely they are offered redemption together with us).
Crazy weekend.
Saturday was a big Cub Scout day, the annual “Blue and Gold banquet” to observe the anniversary of scouting. The theme was “Medieval times,” so every den had to make costumes and produce skits. We’ve been working on those for a month, and our den wanted to get in one last rehearsal on Saturday. We were to meet in the morning at our house.
Friday night, it snowed, a few inches of beautiful fluffy snow. My experience of snow in Fayetteville is that everything shuts down, so I figured the whole thing would be called off.
I figured wrong; the snow was lovely, all the kids romped and played, and most of it melted by the afternoon. We pushed our rehearsal back to just prior to the banquet, which made it a little easier to fit in all that last-minute housecleaning. The scouts arrived, practiced, and trooped off. In that brief time, both of my kids blew their tops; the Little Guy had a fit of frustrated perfectionism, and Miss Baby was overwhelmed by all the excitement. My DH stayed home with Miss Baby, who consoled herself with Elmo.
The skit itself? Well, about half of our den had basketball, so they were supposed to come late to the banquet; we were at the end of the program, but we still had to press ahead with an abbreviated version of the skit using the boys who were there. And they did great! They didn’t freak out about the fact that it was so different from everything they had practiced. I was proud, especially considering that my Little Guy had been frustrated to tears an hour earlier.
Sunday? More scouts. I took the Little Guy to Scout Sunday at the church that sponsors our Pack, then we went on downtown to our own church in time for his Sunday School class. The Scout church does the whole Praise-songs-projected-on-a-screen thing; I will confess that I am not a big fan. I am reasonably tolerant of Praise and Worship type music — like, I can handle one of those types of songs every so often — if the words aren’t lame and if it is at least a little bit musical. (In college, they often played, “I Love to Praise Him,” which irritated me no end. Who the heck are we singing to here? Why is God {presumably that is the “Him”} in third person? Instead of telling our neighbors how much we like to praise God, why not go ahead and just do it, and do it with a decent hymn out of a book?) Anyway, these songs were horribly ungrammatical; my mental red pen was all over the place. Singular pronouns referring to plural subjects! Radical shifts in person! So annoying.
Anyway, after church, family valentines were distributed. Miss Baby received a lovely Easter dress from Grand-dad and Grandma Beth; she pulled it out of the bag and tried to make her plush froggie wear it. Clearly, that wasn’t going to work; she insisted I put it on her right away, so she could run into the bedroom and pirouette in front of her mirror, admiring herself from all angles.
I got to take a nice nap with the kitty today, which we both enjoyed; now the little people are in bed, and I am supposed to be grading.
I’ve been a little homesick lately — the recent terrible storms in Southern CA are reminiscent of some winters when I was in high school, and facebook has heightened my sense of connection to distant friends, while simultaneously emphasizing the distance between us. I’m between sad anniversaries regarding my brother, which heightens my melancholy. Plus, I’ve lately realized that I don’t really have friends here. I have good, friendly colleagues, and I think I will grow closer to them over time, but my life-pacing (what else would you call it?) is a little off of theirs; I’m nearly middle-aged, but I have small children at home, so I’m caught between two demographics. This was less of a problem in CA, where waiting to have children seemed more common. There’s no one here I can call and say, “Let’s go shopping,” or meet for coffee. Now, I didn’t do that much back home; I did it with my mother, some, before she moved, but there were people with whom I was always saying, “We should do something sometime.” We rarely managed to get together, but we could at least talk about it. I realize that this is a silly non-issue; I have a good job, a wonderful DH, sweet children, and a comfortable house. I know this all sounds terribly ungrateful, but there it is. Soon, I will have a mountain of grading, and it won’t matter any more.
Well, tonight, I got an e-mail from a former student who is interested in the Jesus Movement; I was a child at Calvary Chapel in the 1970’s, so she wanted to ask me about it. I was baptized at Little Corona, and I figure Calvary Chapel is somewhat responsible for my rather hippie-ish conception of Jesus, but what I mostly remember is the music, so I found The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert on my MP3 player, which made for a nostalgic, if incongruous, companion to the Hongloumeng. Hey, I’m nostalgic, but I still need to prepare for class.
Filed under: faithPosted: December / 21 / 2009
The Little Guy has discovered the existence of different religions, and he’s intrigued. He thinks that all the people in our neighborhood who haven’t put up Christmas lights must be Jewish, and he has a hard time dealing with the possibility that not all Christians are nice people. He opined today that all the characters in the movie, “Cars,” must be Christians, because they are nice.
Today, in church, they sang a setting of the Magnificat (more or less– it was part of their Christmas cantata, which was a haphazard conglomeration of various musical styles. If you’re going to write a random mishmash of a musical, don’t include Mendellsohn and Handel in your medleys — it only makes the congregation think, “awww, we could have had the Messiah instead of random dreck”). I told the Little Guy that this was a song Mary sang when she found out she was going to have Jesus. He was impressed — “We still know it?” — so I pulled out the Bible and showed it to him, explaining, in whispers, that Luke talked to Mary about Jesus’ life. “And she sang him the song?”
Hank Hill, that is.
Ever see the episode where the Hills visited the megachurch? They were upset because someone was sitting in their regular seats at their regular church.
Well, we visited a different church on Sunday. We like many things about the church we’ve been attending — the preacher in particular — but we’re frustrated with many other things. Several months ago, they stopped offering children’s programming during the Sunday service. Miss Baby can go to the nursery, but the Little Guy has to remain in the sanctuary. He’s generally pretty well-behaved, particularly when we remember to take a book or some mazes. When I’ve asked the folks in charge of children’s programming, they say, well, he’s old enough to sit still for an hour. That is so totally not the point. The Little Guy isn’t just learning to sit still, he’s learning that church is boring. I’ve even offered — on several occasions to several people — to teach children’s church twice a month, but was rejected. I’d rather attend a church that doesn’t put my children’s spiritual development and theological education on hold until they’re in youth group.
We liked the new church; the service is more high church than the other one was, which I rather like. They have a very involved children’s program, which the kids both quite enjoyed. The preacher isn’t as good as the other one, but he’s OK.
We’ll try again next week, and see how things go.
My DH referred me to a nice piece on a pop culture blog. I always loved Jimmy Carter — it’s a nice, succinct structural analysis of gender and religion, especially coming from an old Southern Baptist as it is.
What I like is how Carter demonstrates that it is possible to love something — an organization, a religion, a tradition — and yet think it is screwed up. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
Filed under: media, faithPosted: April / 23 / 2009
I have a colleague who, like many of us, is distressed by the effects of religious and political extremisim and polarization. The other day, she was saying that there should be a way to connect the moderates to one another, since they likely constitute the majority of the world population. (I’m saying “they,” because I’m not sure how much I qualify. I’m pretty lefty, but I’m moderate about it; being as left as I am is moderate in Europe, but scares the bejeezus out of folks in Orange County, CA.) I found this funny, because moderates aren’t usually extremely expressive about being moderate — moderates, moderation, and modesty often go hand in hand. It’s hard to organize a march and hand out signs saying, “It’s OK, relax.” The people who should be at that march are at home mowing the lawn.
Today in the NYT there is a nice piece about a conference on Islam (at Notre Dame; it’s a problem if you are pro-choice, but not if you are Muslim. Go figure). It suggests that there is a moderate school of Koranic interpretation that actually looks at the original documents, reconsiders contexual meanings of words, and generally treats the Koran like the book that it is. Scholars of the Christian Bible have been doing this kind of thing for some time, which has lead many Christians to noticesome interesting things, for example Jesus was unusually nice to women. Naturally, this is not uncontroversial, but it is certainly heartening. They link to the LibforAll foundation, a primarily Muslim group that is interested in all kinds of things, including ecumenicism, and you know what a sucker I am for ecumenicism.
So, yesterday afternoon, my DH came down with a cold/flu/random ailment. It was worse this morning — he had a fever — so I took the little people to church myself. They were pleased with Easter morning — Miss Baby is just catching onto these things, and she was pleased to find a basket with a stuffed whale and fish sitting on the table at breakfast. That clever bunny left the Little Guy a book, a sort of field guide to historic trains, which was also much appreciated. I — I mean, the Easter bunny — was up to 1:00 dealing with eggs, which the little people enjoyed searching for. The Little Guy actually wanted to look for hidden ones. Miss Baby found one: “egg!” that had M&Ms in it, and she was into it from then on out. The Little Guy picks up an egg, finds out what’s inside, then puts it in his basket and looks for another. Miss Baby finds one and consumes the contents. So the Little Guy and I scooped up all the sugary ones as fast as we could. Everyone put on their cute Easter clothes– Miss Baby wanted to wear her Lighting McQueen rubber boots with her pretty dress– and we went to church. We had to go early, since handbells were playing (we joined the choir, organ, and brass on the great Weslyan hymn. Miss Baby was happy to join the appropriate Sunday School class, and the Little Guy enjoyed decorating the large cross with flowers (to decorate the sanctuary) and then going to Sunday School. He’s friends with a grandfatherly fellow in our church, so he sat with him while I played bells, then went down for children’s sermon and off to children’s church, just like that.
They were so well-behaved, I decided to take them to brunch. I’d intended to make an Easter dinner, but there’s no point in that if I’m the only one who’s going to eat it, so we went to IHOP. With these kids, that’s going fancy — no buffet. On the way, to make sure they didn’t explode while waiting, I drove through the doughut shop, and split a donut between them. Miss Baby inhaled hers, then turned to the Little Guy, who was still savoring his, and said, “Oh, Brother, can I have a bite?” He said, “That’s cute, but I’m not giving it to her.”
They ate well and behaved well. We’d been given a high chair with a malfunctioning buckle, so I asked the Little Guy to see if there was one that buckled. He pulled one off the stack (which was nearby), tested it, and, when it didn’t work, pulled down another, tested it, and brought it over. He was such a big, helpful kid; when I commented on how responsible and helpful he’d been, he asked, “Am I earning trust?”
Miss Baby was sweet and silly, cuddling both of us in the waiting area, playing with her fishy, and singing.
We came home, and she had another classic non-nap, and the Little Guy played in the backyard with the neighbor boy all afternoon, until dinner. He insisted on doing so in his jacket and tie. His friend did comment that he “looked handsome,” and he was clearly pleased with the outfit.
My DH came out of the bedroom from time to time, but mostly he remained in bed. Poor guy — he’s got to take care of the little guy all this week — it’s spring break.
OK, so we’ve been reading The Railway Children to the Little Guy at night. It’s a turn of the century British novel, complete with a noble mother and children who struggle with undeserved poverty.
The mother writes and sells stories to make ends meet, and at one point, the son says it would be nice if they were in a story she was writing, so she could make everything turn out OK. The mother says that she likes to think that we are all in a book written by God.
The Little Guy was stunned by this idea. “We’re real, right? We’re not made up?” We tried to persuade him that God is so powerful that when God imagines stuff, it becomes real. He had a hard time moving on.
