The Prodigal Parent

A few weeks ago my son decided that it was time for him to move out and live on his own. I wasn't ready. My wife wasn't ready. My son, Wonderboy, probably wasn't ready, but ready or not he packed his gear and left for greener pastures. Greener pastures in this case was the neighbouring town. There he didn't need to live by the rules of the house. He could party all night and sleep all day. All he needed was a job, and he could move from a friend's couch to his own apartment.

While Wonderboy explored his freedom, my wife and I fretted. We weren't ready to be empty nesters. Vacation plans were changed, work in the upstairs was started, old bones began to complain. All of a sudden we had issues to discuss. We were just the two of us now. That meant we needed to be more present for each other - a tough job in a life where we both work odd hours at high stress jobs. We started looking at ourselves and wondering. "Who am I when I'm not Mom or Dad?" "Who are you, and why are you still here?" These are scary questions. I help a lot of people both ask and answer them. I wasn't prepared to have them staring at me out of the mirror in the morning.

Yesterday Wonderboy came home, for a visit, he says. I can feel the atmosphere relax already. The questions move into the background, for now. They are still there. They still need to be answered. But not today.

Today I listen to Wonderboy play his video games, and think about what I will say when he packs his gear again. Will I be ready? I honestly don't know. What I do know is that I won't have a choice.

Do we need God?

It is a funny thing, but lately we are being told that we don't really need God. Even voices within the faith are saying that this whole Christian thing is outdated and we need to start fresh.

To start fresh means reading the Bible with skeptic's eyes, it means hesitating to swallow the myth of a person named Jesus who came to do and say things that were going to get him killed, it means recognizing that the Resurrection, while a powerful story is only a story.

The problem with starting fresh is that we are left with nothing but ourselves. If we cannot access any revelation of God outside of ourselves, what is to prevent us from worshiping the face in the mirror?

The advantage of the Bible is not that it is the "Inerrant Word of God", but that it challenges us to start somewhere else than ourselves for our spiritual quest. We may search far and wide from that starting point. We may change the way we see God and ourselves. We may change what it is that gives us purpose in life.

We need a God who is outside of ourselves to give us perspective. We need a God who will not let us get away with just being comfortable, but will make us grow stronger, braver, and even, more faithful.

Sackcloth and ashes

The season of Lent is upon us. For much of our society the beginning of Lent is marked by the Mardi Gras, or for us in the more restrained areas, Pancake Tuesday. The tradition behind these celebrations is clearing out the last of the fat and sweet foods that Christians would deny themselves over the next 40 days - the source of "giving up something for Lent".

In our modern consumer society the idea of deliberately no consuming is a foreign idea. We have come to be so defined by what we buy and use (or throw away), that refusing to buy more, use more, consume more is almost treasonous. How will our economy grow if we don't support it by spending our hard earned money? That is after all the purpose behind the tax cuts.

Unfortunately our society is too sick to be revived by a little bit of extra spending. Our entire economy is built on a house of cards. More and more people are falling off the edges. They are not just poor, they have become invisible. They are like Lazarus the beggar at the gate, and too many of us are like the wealthy man who just steps over him without really noticing.

That brings me to the real purpose for Lent. Repentance. Turning away from the things that have led us away from true relationship. Turning away from things. In the Old Testament, when people repented they put on sackcloth and ashes as a visible sign of their change of heart. In medieval times even the highest in the land put on sackcloth and ashes in penitence for their sins.

Perhaps for the next 40 days we should be repenting our divisions, our comfort at the expense of others, our arrogance that somehow we deserve to have all the stuff we have. Maybe we should bring back the sackcloth and ashes.

Think about it.

Merry Christmas

Wish someone a Merry Christmas these days and you risk a lecture on political correctness. It seems that Happy Holidays is the preferred greeting, though holiday is starting to take a beating as well. It seems that Holiday is short for Holy Day. Perhaps it would be better to just keep our good wishes to ourselves. If we don't make someone's day brighter, at least we won't be making it dimmer either.

Personally I think that the political correctness police have got the whole thing backwards. The usual reasoning goes like so: We wish someone Merry Christmas, they might not be Christian. If they aren't Christian they might be offended that someone had the temerity to wish them a Merry Christmas. So it is better to water the whole thing down until no one could possibly be offended. I almost always hear this arguement from Christians, or post Christian Atheists. I have never been told off by Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Baha'i, Buddhist, or pagan.

There are a lot of problems with this approach, but the one that I don't hear talked about is that giving up on Merry Christmas breeds intolerance. That's right, by giving up our Merry Christmases we are spreading intolerance not understanding. If I give up saying Merry Christmas and any allusion to the Christmas Story that wasn't written in the last hundred years, then I am also tacitly telling my friends of other faiths that I don't want to hear their stories. After all it is only fair that if I give up Christmas that they should give up Hanukkah, Diwali, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Solstice or whatever. Our society becomes as interesting as a turkey dinner after it has been put through a blender.

I figure I am going to wish people a Merry Christmas, and I hope that they will feel free to wish me whatever it is they want. We will be surrounded by celebrations of light and joy that will last for months, not just until Boxing Day. It is a good thing to be sensitive to people of other faiths, but that doesn't mean giving up our own. Rather it means listening to their stories as well as ours. We end up richer, not poorer for the exchange.

Think about it.

What do we want?

It seems to me that there is a great abyss between what we think we want and what will actually satisfy us. We drool over everything from big screen tv's to the hottest new cars. Each purchase we think will finally be the one that puts us over the top. We will now at last find happiness. Unfortunately whatever happiness we find only lasts until we see a bigger tv or sexier car. We are caught in a trap of feeling poorer and poorer, even while we are surrounded by piles of stuff that we never use.

So, what do we want? I think what most people truly want is to know that their lives matter. If what we do today will make a difference tomorrow, then we can rest content tonight. What would our lives look like if we decided that we were going to make our decisions based on what is going to change the world? What if we decided that instead of a car that can travel at twice the posted speed limit, we would get that car that would go twice as far with the same amount of fuel. What if we decided that those people next door really were neighbours, and we started treating them as if they might be friends. What would happen if we allowed our lives to be driven, not by the stuff we own, but by the stuff we can give?

Just think about it.