Sound and Fury

I am a bit of a political junkie. I love following the media coverage of the presidential campaign. The media is obsessively guessing, second-guessing, analyzing and editorializing – and I love it! But, seriously, sometimes I need to check myself. The amount of attention given to Iowa over the last few months only to have a difference of 8 votes between Romney and Santorum – inconclusive and inconsequential. And that’s just the reporting. It’s the guessing and speculation that takes up most of the time.

Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist gave a very funny illustration of the media on Meet the Press;

“The media is like a Jurassic Park dinosaur; 30 foot tall, huge teeth, and all due respect, not the biggest brain, and it follows movement. When it sees movement… Rick Santorum… it stomps over there.”

It’s so true… the media constantly makes a big deal about the latest and biggest. And I fall for it every time.

Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful article on the Bible in the New York Times last week was a great corrective. It is a great article all the way through, but in particular, it reminded me of how differently the Bible sees the world. She describes the Bible as a history of God’s movement through the most insignificant and marginal people. It is not filled with great movers and shakers. It is filled with ordinary, insignificant people, loved by a great God.

“Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence. The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too.”

That influence of that point of view on literature and culture cannot be underestimated as a corrective to the aggrandizement of the political and media landscape. The media is a harsh judge, that raises up and puts down for the most frivolous virtues. The Bible shows us a God who judges and shows mercy – the least of these.

Beyond Deserving

Being a parent is a lot of fun.

However, it is a huge existential crisis. What is my role in influencing someone else? How do I help a little human life develop spiritually, physically, mentally and emotionally? And more prosaically – how do I manage the family life, like getting kids off to school, getting them to get their homework done, and stopping them from fighting like cats and dogs? Robin and I often talk about this – and stumble along together!

I have been reading a great book that has helped me to think through the very role and purpose of parenting – grounded in the theological concept of grace. It’s called ‘Beyond Deserving’ by Dorothy Martyn. It has helped me in my thinking. I highly recommend it.

The basic thesis of the book is that parental love (and any kind of mentoring love) works to the degree that it breaks the cycle of ‘this for that’ justice. True, nurturing love moves beyond rewards and threats to the much more powerful force of unconditional alliance with the child. She is really taking to task the common (and very tempting) mindset of rewards and bribes.

She uses Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) who all received from the generosity of the lord. Fairness and merit disappear in the face of love which transcends “deserving” all together.

That may all sound airy-fairy – but it is a really helpful book! Here’s a quote from the conclusion:

A good parent doesn’t simply wash his or her hands of hurtful behavior and abandon a child to impulse. He or she recognizes that the out-of-control child, attempting to act on a destructive impulse, is at the the mercy of a force within that he may not be able to withstand alone.”

“Understanding what it is like to be under siege, the good parent, as well as the good mentor, intervenes powerfully and unconditionally on the side of what is good for the child, standing with the child instead of standing over against him in judgment. Such a stance is in fact derived from the way that God enters into human suffering with mercy, moving first with grace – not waiting for bad behavior to change – and with patience, that is to say, sustaining and accompanying the human being without coercion.”