On Parentage

I John 3:2 says that we are the children of God “now.” We are now what eternity will reveal us to be. The phrase raises the question of our parentage. I like to think of this as an analogy between the parents who raised us and our spiritual parentage. The picture is of my youngest son, his wife, his son, and his daughter. This was a good day. Some people see a resemblance, and some do not. What do you think? In any case, the point is that physically, we are like our parents.

We may also be like our parents in other, deeper ways.

In what ways are we like our spiritual parent? I have come across a few authors who have offered some interesting reflections. I simply offer them to you for your meditation and prayer. 

God carries your picture in his wallet.[1] 

When I was growing up, my surname was Rothschild. My grandfather used to say that we were the “Brooklyn branch” of the fabulously wealthy European bankers. If there is a family connection, we never found it, but people nonetheless made a lot of assumptions because of the name. I learned that it was useful for making restaurant reservations.[2] 

The church is very good at doing things for people, but we are not very good at proximity and partnership. There is a big difference between dragging folks into your soup kitchen and simply hanging out with them on the street corner. There is a difference between bringing others into the church so that they can be like you and becoming immersed in someone else’s struggle.

Things change for you when you hang out with people and become partners with them. Suppose you are tutoring children in a low-income neighborhood. When you begin to see that your pupils are gifted, bright, talented children, yet realize that many of them are flunking out of school, it pushes you to challenge and change the public school system. When you begin to know people’s hopes and fears, dreams and struggles, you move into the fight for justice.

            If you redefine everything in light of this new priority — being present with people and in partnership with them, being concerned with justice rather than just charity — everything changes. Children’s ministry becomes redefined as ministry with all God’s children — the children hanging out on the streets, not just those that an adult brings to church.[3]  

            Whatever the literary genre, [Madeleine] L'Engle upholds that a writer's responsibility is to radiate hope, to bring healing, to say yes to life. Her works wrestle with the unanswerable questions of life and death, God and darkness. In Walking on Water, a superb book about how faith and art influence one another, L'Engle argues that there is a "chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist - the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the Kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home."

              Her stories accomplish this primarily through her characters, real or fictional. Readers develop relationships with them, discussing them with other L'Engle fans as if they were chatting about friends. As L'Engle proposes in Walking on Water, "We all want to be able to identify with the major characters in a book - to live, suffer, dream and grow through vicarious experience." Readers can heal their own painful childhood moments just as the female teenage protagonists who are believable, ordinary girls struggle with their growing up years.[4]

 

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[1] —Sociology professor Tony Campolo, quoted by Jeanette Clift George, “Dad meets the messy baby,” Men of Integrity, January 18, 2000, ChristianityToday.com.

 

[2] —Nina Utne, “What’s in a name?” Utne, November-December 2002, 12.Used by permission.

[3] —Janet Wolf, “Ministry with all God’s children,” New World Outlook, gbgm-umc.org. Retrieved December 5, 2002.

 

[4] -Suzanne St. Yves, "Into the Depths of the Human Heart: Madeleine L'Engle's Search for God," November 9, 1999, www2.ari.net/bsabath/950331.html.