2022-10-12 A Meditation on Parenting

“I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.” (2 Ti 1:5 ESV)

One of the greatest measures we take is allowing our kids to strike out on their own. There is some prudence and wisdom, some unknowable wisdom, in thus giving them an amount of room that can lead to seeing painful things, wishing to intervene but knowing that Love prescribes that they go through this alone; and the plain fact of each of us being Original Sinners.

One of the most salient facts of a Body called Nation with heartbeat restored, is this: that we dare to love and dare to allow and dare to upbuild, even as these our progeny are prodigal and in child-like ways bound up by base sins. That is, we see the dynamo of the human heart, endearing itself to us and frightening us; we see our own call to indulge that measure called Security, namely the secure allowance of things and objects of study we might not have foreseen.

Except that we go by the book, in some regards: “Son, daughter, you are precious in our sight; explore, do your finest, seek and you shall find; and know you have us as fond observers and a backup, a warm embrace, when you need it”. So we do not live vicariously through our kids, except once in a while to announce our affection for them; our own salvation is something we, properly of that generation called “The Protestant Ethic”, the catholic contribution, does know to base acceptance by God on an ethereal, mystical possibility called Calling and Employment: we are saved, we might assure ourselves, by looking at the ability we have to hold down a job, any job, a job in the Kingdom.

Therefore each generation watches aghast in part but also prayerful, as turns are made, as new dispensations seem all-encompassing: “Oh. My son/daughter is spending all their time thinking about the very thing we were taught to avoid”; “Oh. I represent fussiness and incomprehension, to these my ‘enlightened’ kids”. Such is the Jesus project in many forms, a Pentecostal generation, a generation coached in Healings and Miracles of a variety unknown by our saintly but quiet parental generation. So we beg for those unafraid moments, those unfearful warm feelings, those assurances that on some level we are pleasing to a heavenly father and mother, if we are likewise given that rare but all-encompassing word of encouragement, from a mother or a father.