Parenting in Tragic Times

Driving It Home:  When the World Seems Broken
In the blink of an eye, so much can change.  Last week at this time, most of us were looking forward to the holidays with some degree of excitement, as we planned gatherings and family meals and trips to see loved ones.  On Friday, with the news of a school shooting in Newtown CT, our full attention was on a national tragedy so sad and terrible that it was difficult or impossible to believe—and yet, it was true. I heard the news on the radio and reacted with numb horror as my preschooler slept in the carseat behind me, in the parking lot of the grocery store. 

I had time to react before he woke, and thought I had myself put back together by the time my daughter got off the bus.  She walked in the house, took one look at me, and said, “Mom, what’s wrong?”  So much for my poker face.  The reality is that even for those of us able and willing to keep our kids from hearing and seeing media about such events, they often know something is wrong, just from picking up on our energy and subtle cues.  I gave her a little information—she’s 10, after all, and starting to see herself as part of the community and world around her—and let her ask me any questions in the hours that followed.  

Following the advice of experts in the field of children’s emotional health, I kept the news off, gave enough info to answer her questions but did not dwell on details, and assured her she was safe.  I tried to make sure my younger child, just four, didn’t know anything about the event.  I reminded my daughter that no matter what happens, as Fred Rogers said, there are always helpers present—to look for the helpers, and she will find them. 

As the weekend unfolded, we talked a little about some of those helpers—teachers who saved lives.  When she went to school on Monday, she heard a lot more in an in-class presentation.  I was glad her teacher and guidance counselor were there—helpers who were assisting me in taking care of my child’s emotions and spirit during a scary time.  As the days have gone by, I have found myself turning back to the advice when either she or I start to feel overwhelmed.  

·         On an ongoing basis, we can and should limit our exposure to the news.  Seeing repeated images and hearing eyewitness stories about a horrific event can be devastating for both kids and adults.  We can become so focused on immediate consumption of news and world events that it can be completely overwhelming at a time like this, especially for kids.

·         It’s ok to be sad.  Permission to grieve together is important to give our kids.  We model our compassion and care when we show sorrow.  But for kids, this is usually a short time, with lots of snuggles and reassurances—then move on to doing something good, joyful, or healing. 

·         Reclaim joy after grieving—play games with your kids or have an impromptu dance party in the kitchen.  Bake some cookies for a neighbor, volunteer at your local pet shelter, or get out and take a walk or bike ride with the family.  We owe it to our kids in a dark time to continue to share our light, and to enjoy the world with them.

·         Reach out to your friends, family, and your ministers if you need to talk.  We are all in this together, and we can all be helpers in our communities, and our communities of faith, as we bind up each others’ broken hearts during this time of sorrow.

Some suggestions from the American Academy of Pediatrics about talking with your children about the tragic events in the news, including Newtown CT:
http://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/Children-and-Disasters/Pages/Talking-to-Children-About-Disasters.aspx

Mr. Rogers’ great advice:
http://www.fci.org/new-site/par-tragic-events.html

And Now For Something Completely Different

Today my minister and supervisor asked me quite frankly if I was preparing the congregation for the possibility of not having a DRE next year.

(Enter offstage sounds of bombs dropping from airplanes, terrible explosions, where before there had only been birdsong and breeze.)

What makes a community?  The kids answered and created this labyrinth mural.

I was caught, to say the least, quite off guard.  I mean I'm quite sure that isn't going to happen, ha ha, nervous laugh.  Not because I was suddenly afraid to be out of a job that I love, though that part would hit me later, a delayed drone attack that followed me to the car and targeted in while I drove home.  But because I had a moment where I rose up out of the very serious conversation in his study, through the beautiful vaulted roof, and looked down on a church, sitting among flowering trees and the unmistakably vibrant health of Springtime, like it was on a gurney and me above it, running alongside, not wanting to notice (but how could I not) its vital signs dropping. 

Annual stream cleanup behind our Fellowship

In the three years since I became DRE, my beloved community has struggled mightily, and seen our attendance, membership, and pledges drop.  The talk began to be of cutting programs.  All of which provided a very rational backdrop for the minister asking if I was doing enough to prepare the congregation to lay lead RE.

Through my shock and, now, sorrow at the question, I can't help but think about a very real response.

Here's my advice.  Should it come to it, here is what I think you should remember--for what it's worth.  Or what it's not, as the case may be.

Martin Luther King Jr. March

  
Look for the helpers.  Mr. Fred Rogers once said that as a child he heard about a troubling story on the news and asked his mama about it.  She told him that no matter how bad a situation was, to always look for the helpers--they are there.  When responsible for the religious education of children, it is even more important to remember this maxim.  You can't do it alone--it is too big and too important of a task.  Helpers may be the people around you, elders, leadership, parents, youth.  But don't forget that a web of resources exists to help religious educators and religious education thrive.  Reach out to them.

Look for the helpers--good teachers are worth their weight in gold.

A person's a person, no matter how small.  Remember that our children and youth don't get a vote.  They don't have a voice in congregational meetings or at the board meetings.  Families have varying degrees of involvement in the decisions of the church, but when you are responsible for the RE program, you take on the duty of being very clear and intentional in remembering that the religious education AND the spiritual, emotional, and physical health of children and youth is ESSENTIAL.  There is no political issue; no alliance or allegiance that should ever be perceived as more important than that sacred duty. Easier said than done, but done it must be, no matter what. 

Be shepherds to their growing spirits.

Haul water, chop wood.   Vision and leadership includes wiping up spills, getting the recycling together, and all the other little things that are part and parcel of a life with children and youth.  Hauling water and chopping wood means making the dozens of phone calls and sending the dozens of emails *that will never be responded to*.  It means sweeping up the glitter for the millionth time.  It means crunching the numbers every month and keeping the budget straight and well-documented, even when it's the last thing you want to do--even less than sweeping up the glitter again. It means doing the heavy lifting to build the garden beds when no one else is there to help and it has to be done before it rains.  And not being resentful about it.  It means taking responsibility. It means making the hard calls, and calling the parent about the teen you saw smoking. It means smiling and caring about the new family or the sad kid who can't handle class today, even when you have been up all night, and are needing pastoral care yourself.  Got all that?  Now do it all again, every day, as long as you have the responsibility for RE.  And learn to love it.  Because it has to be done, and you see that, and can and will rise to the occasion, because they deserve it.

Do the heavy lifting.  Smile about it.

Make memories with the children.  No lesson plan will embed itself more deeply in a child's identity and spirit than will watching a chick hatch, a seed sprout, or a snake shed its skin. Every good experience has something to do with our UU values and our principles.  A good teacher knows how to see the lesson embedded there, draw it out of the experience, and make it visible to the children--and s/he knows how to get them to see it and make it their own. Get them singing, dancing, digging in the dirt, watching bees pollinate, cleaning the stream, playing with babies.  Identity is formed around powerfully inspiring and engaging experiences.  Make sure they happen.

In the new RE organic garden, with a beautiful snake.  Making memories.

Protect the children and youth from politics, drama, and worst of all, a poverty of spirit and a spirit of scarcity.  Nourish their spirits, and their sense of who we UUs are, from a veritable wellspring of hope and joy.  Never let them see that providing their birthright, a religious education that inspires and nurtures them, costs the church, or the teachers, or the congregation.  Never put a dollar amount on what that kind of education is worth. Let them believe, a little longer, that this, providing this kind of experience, is what every child deserves, no matter what.  That it's just what we do.

Wise and magical people.

Always remember:  Everything we do is religious education. All we teach is Unitarian Universalism. The congregation is the curriculum. This includes the explicit AND implicit lessons we are teaching all the time, through our words and deeds, but also through what we do NOT speak of, and what we do NOT do.

An interest in the religious education of our young people receive is a vision of he future.  It is the very definition of stewardship--caring for precious natural resources today so that they will still be with us tomorrow.  So that they may still be us.

Guide them, help them grow--show them they are needed in this world.

For The Future

by Wendell Berry

Planting trees early in spring,
we make a place for birds to sing
in time to come. How do we know?
They are singing here now.
There is no other guarantee
that singing will ever be.

On Traveling Mercies

This excerpt of a longer piece was written a few months ago, coming back from a conference, stuck in an airport for several hours, when I took refuge in the airport chapel and found a strange, lonely solace there.  Today I share this little essay in all its unfinished glory because it manages to say something more gracefully than I can manage at the moment, in the middle of congregational challenge.

If you can give yourself to something, then you should. For me, I try to give myself unselfishly to the duty of finding the scattered bits of grace and meaning in a world where they can be rarities.  I ran across this bit from a poem that Sharon Olds wrote, that I have loved for a very long time, and it made me remember what I do, and why:

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.
--Sharon Olds

Here I am in an airport chapel in Tulsa, 221 miles from home, sitting by a fake tree and and a plug-in air freshener that smells just awful.  Planes are taking off and landing, a carousel in my line of vision rounds endlessly, and people come and go like clockwork.  The carpet is stained and the exit signs glow garishly.  This place is so far from holy, but it’s better than nothing.  

Someone has taken the time to bring in holy books from several of the world’s religions, and there are two beautiful, worn prayer rugs.  And the decal on the door, of a person on his or her knees, praying, is a little surreal, in a good way.  I don’t remember seeing that on a mass-produced decal before. So this place is what it is, an airport chapel in Tulsa, a sacred space carved out of the modern madness for those between point A and point B who need a place to pray or just rest, any hour of the day or night.  It’s the one place I’ve been in an airport where the loudspeaker voices-- warning of heightened risk levels and the extreme importance of minding your bags lest ill-doers do ill to them in an unattended state—don’t reach.  The respite from the repetitive dire edicts is enough to make it sacred to me, but the books and the rugs and the dim lights are a traveling mercy beyond that, me stuck in negative space, waiting for a ride home.  

The chapel seems to exist in its own shadow, dimmer than the spaces around it. It’s an anachronism, a vestigial organ, a ghost, fading into the million things around it that fit better in this airport, this algorithm, this age.   Mostly, I don’t think folks see it, or know what to do with it in their minds when their eyes roll across that strange word, chapel, amidst all the chrome and noise.  Except when, like me, they need a traveling mercy.

Like a good DRE, I took the time to put all these books together on one shelf, so they could talk.

I’ve been at a kind of continuing education seminar for the past three days, in Glen Rose, Texas.  Folks from Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships in the Southwestern district of UUs do a Fall Conference there every year, and it was my fourth time to attend.  If you work in religious education, as I do, it won’t surprise you to learn that it is a grueling kind of job, requiring you to bring your best self to the table every single day, even— especially—when there is conflict between or among members of the congregation, staff, or clergy.  Even when there is political drama in leadership. Even in transition and during times of great change.  Even when you aren’t being paid for the hours you work, which is most of the time, and even— especially—when you wonder why you are there, amidst all that anxiety and struggle and doubt.   

Bringing love and compassion and delight and reverence to children’s lives is easy.  Showing up for all the rest of it can be daunting.  Scarce resources (time, talent, and treasure seem to always be in short supply in a cooperative religious education program), competing interests and priorities, and difficult relationships seem to be in the very DNA of church work, though we might think it shouldn’t be that way.  And when your minister is also your boss, and there’s no objective person to whom you can turn to vent, or ask for help in untangling all the threads, you can add a deep sense of isolation, and sometimes outright despair, to that 

mix.  

That’s what makes these trips I take to little Glen Rose Texas so important.  I go to get healed.  They are like an old-fashioned revival, if you are willing to accept that they save my soul from damnation on a regular basis, which in religious education programming work seems to be required about once a year.   This time, I almost waited too long.  Far enough away from the challenges of the very real community of my church, I can see the patterns emerge, the big picture coalesces, and I remember that human communities do the same things over and over again, in our attempts to make meaning. It is like I am in a plane, high enough to lose detail but gain perspective on the landscape. I see a story, not just a headache.  A story, I can manage.  A little space and time and distance, and serendipity shows up...a traveling mercy.

On Getting Religion

I spent my life looking sideways at religious people.  Feeling superior, condescending, and flat out cooler than them.  I walked out of my childhood church, a Free Will Baptist one (pause for laugh line--yes, I did perceive the irony, even then) when I was 13 years old, and didn't step back in to one for about 30 years.  I started to write "save for the occasional wedding", but then, racking my brain to think when this caveat applied, I'm coming up blank. I don't even know anyone who got married in a church.  That's how disconnected my life was from religion. Huston Smith or Joseph Campbell was the closest thing to a religious teacher I had for many, many years. The closest I got, truthfully, to a community of faith may have been leading La Leche League meetings for a decade in various liberal churches on weekdays.  Or the B'hai kids I spent time with at some Rainbow Gatherings?  I'm reaching here.  I got shed of religion as soon as my mom and dad stopped taking me to church, is the truth of it.  I eventually went on to get a degree in sociology, the field (along with art history) noted by researchers as the one most likely to be tenanted by extremely liberal people, and the least religious.

The children's "altar" at UUFF

I was part of a tight knit friend group of hard core humanists and atheists from college on.  We stayed close, and formed a kind of diaspora, moving individually or by family, from Central Arkansas to Northwest Arkansas in our late 20s.  When one of our smarty-pants tribe returned to his religious faith, long rejected, we were aghast.  Was he crazy?  Scared? Self-destructive?  Depressed?  Any hypothesis re: his broken-ness was easier to swallow than the one in front of our decidedly upward-turned noses:  he wanted religion in his life again.  We were disoriented.  We were clueless.  We could not compute.  What in the world was he thinking?

And then I had my second child.  She actually believed me when I told her she was named after the most potent and powerful tree for Pagans, and asked me why they believed in a tree.  And why they believed the first woman was made from "her tree".   She asked me about the goddess.  She wanted to go to a pagan ceremony. She wanted to pray to the huge blacksnake in our garden.  She wanted to give it offerings in hopes that my upcoming homebirth would be a good one.  She talked her doctor's ear off at her physical exam needed to enter kindergarten, going on and on about how maybe he didn't KNOW it, but the world's religions used to be matriarchal, focused on mother earth, and that men actually took those religions over and convinced people that a male sky god was the true giver of life.  "Imagine that!" she fiercely told him.  "That's unpossible!  A man can't nurse a baby!"  I was relieved when he told he that he too struggled with a belief in god, but overwhelmed with the dawning realization that *my little girl was religious*.  She had heard my anthropologically-based feminist-focused talk with my friends and with her, and in her it had grown, unbidden, from a political message to a spiritual one. 

A Winter Solstice ceremony at our church

Huh.  Didn't see that one coming.  Now what? 

I checked out the website of the local UU church.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that my town had a religious offering that could meet her needs to talk about her burgeoning, "volunteer" faith development, without alienating her (as her peers at our local country public school were).  "Mama", she said, as she got off the bus one day, "they said I'm going to hell for not being a Christian.  What is sin?"  I was able to tell her that people believe lots of different things, and that we were going to seek out some folks who had different views about diversity of belief.  

Then I found out about OWL (Our Whole Lives), offered at the UU Fellowship.  I wanted desperately for my teen to get comprehensive, fact-based, sexuality education that highlighted both the sacred aspects of sex and the trust, responsibility, and respect that are core components of healthy sexuality.

And then I found myself in a pew.  My baby was in a sling, my older kids were in class, and I was just killing time, giving the sermon a chance, but holding my non-seeking nature as close as a lover.  On that day, the reading was from Wendell Berry, my favorite poet.  The hymn was about how UUs were a gentle, angry people--a combination I found surprising, poetic and stirring.  And while I have forgotten the message, I know that I was shocked to find tears welling up during the sermon.  I looked over at my partner and saw he was having the same experience.  A religious experience?  We walked out that September day into a kind of Spring.  Something had come together--the right combination of words and silence and teaching and listening and poetry and virtue and hope--and it felt like I was simmering, germinating, stirred up.

Inside the 2nd-6th grade class on Sunday morning--so much to learn

That was three and a half years ago.  Soon after that first Sunday, I saw a classified listing for a director of religious education in the local newspaper, and noted it was for "my" new church.  That seemed almost fated.  My background was in the direction of an education program at a children's museum, with lots of volunteer work with mothers and babies and teaching college kids how to write (and understand statistics) thrown in for good measure.  I thought, if I can be honest about my hubris here for a moment, that they would be lucky to hire me.

I had no idea how I would be changed.  How lucky I would feel to be engaged deeply in the work of religious community.  How the expansion of my spirit that began that day wouldn't change my belief in the existence of God (still a radical agnostic: I don't believe humans have the capacity to know) or the nature of our human imperative (I still think it is up to us to make the world better), but would change my experience of my own humanity, and the responsibility I have to constantly reach deeper, work harder, tread more carefully, love more.

Teaching Religious Education classes brings out your best

There is something about showing up every Sunday and making nice, even with the folks you disagree bitterly with over some facet of church leadership, that makes the forest visible, when our egos try to drag us back to examining one square inch of moldy bark on one tree.  Something about willingly diving into the "deep end of the pool", as my previous minister/boss called it, and submerging our individual egos and desires in the waters of religious community.  Something about being willing, as a human, to reflect consistently on whether one's actions and behaviors--even one's thoughts--are in line with the clear principles of one's faith.  And allowing others to have expectations of us--that we will live in accordance with our shared values.  That we covenant together to do just that.

I see the expressions on my non-religious friends' faces when I go off like this.   They are either wondering if I am crazy or sick, and if the latter, whether they can catch it by standing too close.  And though it pains me somewhat to say it, I do have the zealotry of the recently converted.  But we live in a culture that doesn't ask much of us.  Live and let live, you say tomato, I say to-mahto, to each his own.  I believe, however, that humans have a deep nascent need to be loved, to be called upon to serve, and to be needed.  I think the more we put ourselves in situations where that occurs, the better we will become.  The more fulfilled we will feel.  The more good we will do.

God speaks, in the Passover Play.  I can believe in God if it's a child.

I read that lung capacity increases the more you work at it.  That holding your breath, deep breathing, and sustained "breath work" can build one's ability to harness the power of oxygen in a way that can fuel an athletic or aerobic pursuit, like playing an instrument, or swimming.  I think faith works the same way.  We are all born with a religious perspective on the world--asking big questions, seekers of belief, trusting something larger than ourselves.  That diminishes as we grow, unless we work at it.  If we seek communities of faith, if we make acting in line with our shared, unifying values a sacred, daily practice, if we allow ourselves to be called into the service of a greater good, we are getting religion.  And, surprise,we are giving it, too.

On the Blessing of Being Wrong

Sometimes life with children is so simple.  We make things much harder than they have to be, so often, and the distilling action of teaching our values to a wide-eyed, learning child can bless us immensely, letting the static and knots of adult thinking fall away.  A real blessing.  

The world is changing around us—and that means all communities that are alive are changing too.  The discomfort of change and difference can do a real number on our minds and hearts.  We resist changes in what we love.  We fear what we do not know and we make monsters out of what we do not understand.  Yes, even us—Unitarian Universalists.  After all, we are humans first.  

      "Standing on the side of love affirms the full humanity of all people.  It honors the inherent worth and dignity, the spark of the divine in each and every person.

Yet children are often better at this than we adults are.  Perhaps this is because children swim in a sea of uncertainty and change. Lacking perspective, they soldier on, and if they have been loved sufficiently to believe that this world is a pretty good and trustworthy place, they roll with the punches.  They don’t see the big picture—they see today, they feel what works, they listen and learn regardless, and they get through.  They are surprised constantly by a reality that is still unfolding for them, and they accept change with a measure of grace I sometimes covet. The process is the product, for children.  Life is their curriculum.

A few Sundays ago, my partner and I came home, unexpectedly childless for once, since the kids had gone home with church friends.  We dove in to a grown-up conversation like hungry people at a buffet, unhampered by interruptions, arguments, or the needs of little people—a rarity.  We talked about an uncomfortable topic—about something related to an experience we had in church that day.  We leaned in deep to that discomfort.  We refused to stop at “I didn’t like it”.  We journeyed on, in our discussion, facing our own inhospitality, our own fears, and our biases.  No fun, I tell you.  We like to think of ourselves as progressive, enlightened folks, and facing our own unexamined prejudices was about as fun as digging up the septic tank in a pretty yard.  And just about as necessary.

Our conversation was decidedly adult and decidedly cerebral.  We delved into philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and politics, trying out rationalizations and narratives.   But we kept coming back to our religious and spiritual values trumping our own feelings and all those other stories about how things ought to be.  Each time we circled back to what our UU principles demand of us, and how we want the world to change, our sureness and our pride took a hit.  Finally, humbled before the deepest desire we share—to be welcoming, to honor the inherent dignity and worth of all people, to engage in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning—we talked less, then not at all.  

Then Latt, who co-teaches the 2^nd-6^th grade RE class, gave a surprised sound and a chuckle.  He said, “You know, our lesson in Sunday School today had to do with differences between people and the trouble we have with difference.  We talked with the kids about a world where everyone was the same and they thought it would be terribly boring.  Finally, we decided that people are different so that we have a chance to grow.”  

In the silence that followed, I could almost feel my roots and branches—my humanity-- expanding a little.  We could all use a little more religious education, and I want to be first in line. I’m pretty sure I need it, maybe more than these children so willing and able to grow in love and spirit.