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Marzo 10, 2008
cfm like peterpan
last year at the easter vigil i led the procession of children away from the altar and out the main sanctuary doors.
afterward someone said i may be the new children and family minister but i am a little more like an imp, or the pied piper or peterpan.
but i don't do it for the parents to be rid of their children. i am careful to engineer each event so that children will have access to their parents. and slowly, and much to their dismay, the parents are beginning to realize this.
now i don't claim to know what the parents are going through as they struggle with flash floods of parenthood ambivalence. i don't have "my own kids". but i meet their frustration and pain with genuine concern and THANKGOD genuine curiosity--that is the prerogative of the childless children and family minister.
Dan allender says that really being with a family is like being on the autobahn and if you don't know where you're going to, you'll miss the turn off.
sometimes all i can do is believe in the healing power of a casserole. othertimes, well, miracles happen.
but the parents often respond to even the most genuine curiosity the way groan-ups often do:
we're fine.
we're well.
we're just tired.
they think i can't see behind the sad crinkles around their eyes or the way their lips tremble, just a little when they look to the left and try to evade the questions about what they did with the dead cat, or said about the dead grandpa. they don't think i notice the gray hairs they have grown this year or the tired way they slump to the altar railing for the host.
you can't depend on parents to understand children--it is so difficult. they spent so much energy trying to separate themselves from childhood and now, they somehow can't get back to neverland because they have run out of pleasant thoughts. sometimes they are, in the best innocence of the word and also in the worst way: children themselves.
they should call me the children and grown up children's minister.
you know, in the gospel reading from last week Jesus wept.
and i told the children sitting on the wine-soaked carpet stairs up to the altar:
weeping means big, giant tears come pouring out.
and they were looking right in my face. so i told them, i said it right into the lapel mic: it is OK to not be OK.
but i can't force you.
so today when i sat in my car and thought of the way i send mixed messages, and the way i confuse people because i hope beyond hope that they will read between the lines,
i felt real not ok and real bad, and so
i was weeping.
and i had this one tiny wonderful thought: even if you don't understand, i do.
i know exactly what is going on in my head and if you just stay with me a little, and get creative, and add in your two cents, and then ask a genuine question or two, you could understand too. but that is all debunked now.
i think today will be the first day i can stop expecting the adults in my life to understand. i think i can finally see how badly they want me to explain things to them in words they understand. not that i will be able to do this, but at least i have a new view of the problem.
and i called my husband and he said, "you have a prophets heart and you have to call these parents to more." and then i said that i feel like i chose to be in two worlds at the same time and he said, "because that is what you did."
because he just knows this stuff.
and i think its real difficult when i wake up on a gray morning in March and realize that my very presence is pressuring parents to put one foot in their child's world, and keep one foot in theirs and it really sucks to have to be both places. the word is "ambivalence" but it might as well be ambivolatile or ambifuckedover.
i know, because i am dumb enough to hope, they can do it; there is plenty of casserole around here and still a few miracles yet to get born.
and you have to realize that every week when i give the children's word as part of the liturgy the room falls silent because the children are interested (which is to say, not fidgeting behind a pewback too tall to see over) and
the parents are taking notes on how to talk to their children and
the grandparents are grateful that somebody can keep this shit simple, for once... and
the pastor is praying thankyouGodthatwasonethingicrossedoffmytodolist and
the childless couple is heartaching in the back row, holding onto somebody else's baby girl, as she sleeps in the barren arms hopefully realizing that Jesus probably fielded the questions and accusations about why he didn't get married or have kids or settle down or whatever. and
even my husband sits with the young adults and they listen in out of jealousy or hope for an entry point or something funny to happen because they want so very much to enjoy church.
i do not want you to think that i am in anyway tooting my own horn because you can see now the pressure i think i am under, i think we all just want out so bad that when i tell them that Jesus' sadness is, in fact, good news... well, it doesn't take a genius to hate me or at least smile knowingly that this is pretty insane, and think silently, to oneself, "oh, no she didn't".
and yet, they haven't fired me yet.
i may look like peterpan, leading your children off to some safe place where their childhood will stay the same forever... but really it is more like i'm hoping you're jealous and looking back and forth at your own life the way you watch a tennis match.
neverneverland is named such because i haven't been there and i can't suggest it: you have to take yourself with you when you grow up.
and that is why i am here to help, in my mixed message sort of way.
go on, give in to the morbid curiosity--lean over the casket and get a good wiff of or at least a good long look at the dead body of your dream that adulthood would be better. i'll be here when you look up again, just hanging around like some sort of good idea, bad idea whore on the corner, tempting you to dream a new, violently hopeful dream.
hinthint: adulthood is just another childhood but now you know the names for all the colors, all the flowers and all the people you just don't like, and some of them are the smallish folks you yourself named.
and that is ok with me, sad, realfuckingsad, but OK.
helpful | By crymytinyflood | 10:45 AM
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