The Gift of Adolescence

Most of those boys in Thailand, the ones rescued from the cave, decided to enter a Buddhist monastery for a while. Apparently, they felt they needed a timeout to reflect and gain spiritual depth from their experiences before going on with their lives.

Various ceremonies acknowledge the end of childhood, like the Bat Mitzvah for my Jewish friend’s daughter.

In our modern societies, the preparation for adulthood, the middle time after childhood, is long. Adolescents may attend middle school, then high school. Some then seek to enter the job market. Others go on to higher education or an apprenticeship before final entry into adulthood.

This long adolescence is a troubling time for many. It could be an opportunity.

We could view it as a special time of learning and discipline and even withdrawal. Adolescents might accept celibacy and abstinence from drugs and alcohol while they worked through this period of learning. They could build up their bodies as well as their minds and spirits and social skills.

Emerging from adolescence would require meeting certain conditions. One would be a basic education. Another would be the ability to work and support oneself.

Their place as adults would include a continuance of lifelong development, but now within a framework of their own contributions to society.

Maybe the gift we can give adolescents is support as they prepare for responsible adulthood.

A Sorting of People

In his book, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, former President Jimmy Carter pinpoints the first time he was aware of racial prejudice.

Growing up as the son of a white landowning family in a mostly black community, he played with the black neighborhood children. For him, they were simply playmates.

Then one day he and his friends were going through a farm gate. His black friends fell back, allowing him to enter first. He thought they had set up some kind of childish trick—something in the path, perhaps, that he was meant to stumble on. Then he realized that they were giving precedence to him because he was white.

A thousand thoughts must have clicked in his mind. That was his first understanding of a system that favored one group of people above another because of skin color.

His pilgrimage toward understanding the absurdity of racial prejudice mirrors the journey of many Southern whites. Some of us who struggled on that journey are now amazed at the strength of prejudice in this day and age.

We the People?

We have great cities, huge corporations, a dynamic economy. But we are failing to develop our people.

The wealthy accumulate more wealth, but the tax base shrinks. More of our taxes come from ordinary working people rather than the wealthy. Ordinary people pay taxes; the wealthy hire lawyers to find loopholes.

How much better to invest more of that wealth in building up ordinary families: schools, college, continuous job training, health care. “The country needs to rethink the role of human capital and invest substantially in doing so.” (Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J. Slaughter, “How to Save Globalization,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2018.)

One with minimal schooling and training can no longer walk into a life time job, with benefits. Yet jobs—our daily service—are part of our self-worth.

It is, as the authors point out, not just too many ill-paying jobs but the fact that labor is so unrewarded for too many.

They propose investments, not only in education but in life long training to meet a changing job market. “ . . . it is human capital, more than any other asset, that determines an individual’s changes of thriving in a dynamic economy. The United States should expand its investments in human capital at every stage of American life.”

In other words, invest in “we the people.”

Power Off Here; Children Dying There

A windstorm blew through our island community this week. The power flickered off about ten in the evening. We went to bed under our quilts. By next morning, power was restored, as we expected. Safe in a peaceful community, we had never doubted we would again have heat and food and hot water.

But even as we waited, securely, for normality, recent scenes haunted me from Yemen, in the Middle East, where nothing is ever normal and children die a slow death from starvation.

We have taken the side of Saudi Arabia against Yemen, war ravaged for years, though few Americans have any idea about what is going on there.

The bloodletting is part of an ancient struggle, begun in the seventh century, between different branches of Islam—Sunni and Shia. Saudi Arabia is the Sunni leader. Iran, descendant of ancient Persia, is the Shia leader.

We’re mainly interested in the oil pumped from Saudi Arabia. That and the money we make from selling arms to them. Oh, yes, also, Iran has become public enemy number one, and we want Saudi Arabia’s backing against them.

Neither side is pure, of course.

Iranians stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and imprisoned our diplomats for 444 days. They also sponsor Hezbollah, a political and militant group in Lebanon.

On the other hand, fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who attacked our country on September 11, 2001,were from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia sponsors that war against Yemen.

You can blame either side, if you like.

For me, though, taking sides becomes irrelevant next to children slowly dying from starvation as helpless parents watch. Others have been bombed by weapons we sold to the Saudis.

I don’t care who you choose as your enemy, but what we have abetted and allowed is a sin against God.

The Only Story Already Written

The summer I turned nineteen, between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I landed a temporary job as what used to be called a cub reporter. The job was on my hometown newspaper.

The news people who hired me, I now believe, did so out of the goodness of their cynical hearts. They wanted to help a young person stupid enough to plan a journalism career. They, in their crusty way, wanted to pass along what they knew, give me a chance.

I did manage to advance, in my second summer, from writing obituaries to actually covering a minor religious convention and writing other human interest stories.

I also learned, after a public upbraiding by the editor, to check and recheck my reporting for any mistakes in spelling, wrong word usage, or other errors before I turned it in. (We had no computer programs then for checking such things.)

One lesson, however, was especially valuable for a young person, who thinks, like most young people, that they are going to live forever.

In the basement of the newspaper building was the “morgue.” Filed away in endless cabinets were the stories already written. They waited for unearthing when the inevitable happened—the death of a famous person

Thus, when a politician or a business magnate passed on, all the reporter had to do was write a few lead paragraphs dealing with the cause of death and immediate circumstances.

Every time the person did something great or degrading, the happening would be added to their file, but eventually the file ended.

Every person has an ending. Each of us writes chapters, perhaps for a long time, but the story always has an ending.

Try writing your own obituary. Anything you would like to change in your life before somebody else takes on the responsibility?

Leadership: The Battle for Middle-earth

One section of Fleming Rutledge’s book The Battle for Middle-earth is called “The Treason of Isengard.”

The leader of the kingdom of Rohan, Théodan, has allowed a disreputable person to control his kingdom. “This clever but craven personage . . . is a classic example of the person who holds an entire human unit captive to unreality by calling black white, truth lies, and wisdom foolishness.”

Rutledge comments on what leadership is about: It has to do “with defining reality,” she says.

It is interesting to examine how some leaders in today’s world define reality. Rutledge’s book was published in 2004. Yet, eerily, she says, “If the person who is allowed to define reality falsely retains the premier position in the group, the potential for corporate evil is unbounded.”

We now are learning what happens when facts are defined as “fake” merely because they are unfavorable.

A Battle for Our Time

The Battle for Middle-earth, by Fleming Rutledge, was published in 2004. By that time, three years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States had entered two wars. It was evident that the world would never return to the more certain times of pre 9/11.

Rutledge’s book is a commentary on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. She writes: “I believe . . . that this is a tale for our time. Since the seemingly clear-cut triumphs of World War II, the Shadow has been growing, and it is not so easy to tell who is enemy; there are ‘twilights of doubt as to sides.’”

Tolkien lived and wrote with great wars all around him. He had fought in the Battle of the Somme in World War I. He wrote during World War II as his country, Britain, fought for its life. He lived to see its aftermath, the Cold War, and the possibilities for earth’s annihilation by nuclear war. No wonder his writings awe us with a sense of powerful evil, almost certain to win, unless a few lesser folks sacrifice all they have in a desperate attempt to overcome.

His novels spotlight a few small people who seek to do good even when they know the odds are against them.

Today’s Town Crier

In the days before widespread literacy, some governments announced public proclamations by a town crier.

As time passed, literacy became more important for commerce and making a living. Public school systems increased.

However, news, other than local, was not yet an important part of ordinary life. In the novel by Paulette Jiles, News of the World, Civil War veteran Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd makes a living by traveling to small Texas towns and charging money to read newspapers to audiences.

It took radio and the advent of world wide wars to make news a staple of the average American household. Television brought the horror of the Vietnam conflict into the living room.

From earliest colonial times, courts decreed that truth was the deciding factor in what could be printed as news. Even if a news story was derogatory to public officials, it must be allowed if it was true. If it was not true, the source of the falsehood could be sued for libel.

Today, we have fewer “gatekeepers,” that is, editors and investigators, to test stories for the truth before they are “printed.” Today, because of the internet, truth and lies can unsettle whole populations before stories can be unraveled.

Whether this glut of words—news, opinion, knowledge, entertainment, lies, gems of wisdom, personal data, and a hundred other kinds of reportage—is good or bad is an open question. The outcome depends on how responsible we literate beings are in what we choose to read.

What Overcomes Allegiance to Our Political Tribe?

Early Christians were the first to place religious convictions above tribal loyalty, wrote Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.

“For the first time in human history, individuals claimed the liberty to define the limits of their political loyalty, and to test that loyalty by spiritual and ethical standards.” (Rowan Williams, “The Two Ways,” Plough Quarterly, Autumn 2017).

In answering accusations against them, one early group responded. They were not rebels against the state and had no wish to overthrow it, they said. They would pay taxes to it. They would not, however, worship the emperor. “They would not grant the state their absolute allegiance.”

Throughout history, states and empires have come and gone. Some have established centers of civilizing influence. All demanded some form of loyalty to the state apparatus.

The early Jesus followers called for a loyalty higher than the tribe, higher than whatever state was in existence at the time. They proclaimed their allegiance to his teachings and said those teachings took precedence over any other authority.

A question for us today, the religious and the non-religious alike, is whether we worship some political cause or, instead, give allegiance to greater causes like justice, mercy, and serving the widows and orphans.

Climate and Other Changes

Suppose climate isn’t changing because of human activity, but we pass legislation as though it is?

Our air and water would be cleaner, for one thing. Flooding would be better managed, and newer sources of energy would create jobs in new fields.

Why, then, are we having difficulty cleaning up waterways and passing stricter emission standards?

Possibly because coal miners and others will lose jobs, at least the jobs they have now. Some employees of industrial polluters may lose jobs, too. Standards will be stricter and may cost money to enforce. We may have to give up activities we are used to doing. Development on sensitive land may be forbidden.

Yet, data points to unprecedented and rapid warming of the earth. We have a conflict between what is good for the “community” (a cleaner environment and better management of our resources) over against difficult changes for some.

How, then, can we work toward a zero sum game for all players?

We can begin by acknowledging the hardship caused to some of our population by climate change policies. Change, any change, usually requires that someone give up something.

Our jobs are changing and not only from climate policies. We cannot stop change. We can only manage change, if we so choose. We can begin by asking questions.

Why are we wedded to practices of the industrial revolution when that revolution is long past?

Why is our economic system arranged as if most families can survive with only one wage earner?

Why do we live as though the norm is lifetime employment with one company? A company we must depend on to provide essentials like health insurance?

Climate change is only one change we face. Our digital revolution is another. Continual training, available for all who need it for new jobs, is essential. Universal health insurance, not dependent on an employer, is another.

Given the means to change, we also must be willing to change for the benefit of the community.

Smorgasbord Samplers Versus Full Meal Dealers

We tend toward one of two groups: the smorgasbord samplers or the full meal dealers.

The smorgasbord samplers are the internationally minded post moderns. They are turned off by the brutality and slaughter of competing groups. They believe good is found in all cultures.

They have foresworn the close associations of past communities. They prefer to choose from a variety: one may be an atheist and a Buddhist. Or a Catholic married to a Jew whose child follows an Indian holy man. If one appreciates all cultures, one is less likely to condone ethnic/religious bloodletting, they say.

The full meal dealers find meaning in a long term community dedicated to common purposes: shared religious faith, social justice, meeting the needs of vulnerable people, for example. They crave long term commitments.

In truth, the two camps can learn from each other. The smorgasbord samplers need the purpose and commitment of the full meal dealers. The full meal dealers need the empathy and humility of the smorgasbord samplers.

Madeleine L’Engle: Christian Faith and Writing

As I read Sarah Arthur’s A Light So Lovely; The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle, I sympathized with L’Engle’s struggle to write as both a Christian and a winner of secular literary awards.

Some doubt whether A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle’s 1963 Newberry Award winner, could win such an award today, with its Christian nudged themes.

According to Arthur’s book, L’Engle enjoyed speaking at the Christian evangelical college, Wheaton, because in that space, she was “able to be openly a Christian among Christians.”

In fiction writing today, it’s hard to straddle the line between writing by those who consider themselves Christians and the bifurcated world we live in. C.S. Lewis and L’Engle did. A few others, like Frederick Buechner and Marilynne Robinson, have managed it. So did Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.

In writing conferences today for writers who consider themselves “Christian” writers, two designations are often used to denote the kinds of novels many writers at those conferences try to pitch. The two are “inspirational” and “Christian.” Would L’Engle be able to successfully pitch her work at one of these conferences today?

I think much of the blame for this unneeded separation between religious and secular writing may fall to Christians who think every “Christian” novel should be an evangelical tract.

The Possibility of Something Better

Democracy’s track record has fallen in recent years, due to its failure in many developing countries. Why has the United States endured, even though challenged in the past and certainly challenged today?

The country’s founding document, the U.S. Constitution, and the deference given it over the years, has provided stability. The Constitution is imperfect, given that it is a human document. Most of us, if we could travel back to influence its creation in the late 18th century, would have attempted to alter some of its provisions. The evidence that even its creators thought it imperfect is the provision for amending it.

Yet it enshrines for us certain basic values that have defined us. Our laws are judged by it.

Influencing our history, whether many of us think about it or not, is the idea that we were created as a nation of principles and not of privilege.

We certainly fail at times to live up to this high calling. Nevertheless, privilege—of class, money, gender, race, religion, or other—has constantly been challenged.

It necessarily means that we start with reality—our imperfection. We may, and often do, fall short, but the possibility of movement toward something better is always there.

Thoughts on The Great Spiritual Migration by Brian McLaren

The subtitle on Bruce McLaren’s book is: “How the world’s largest religion is seeking a better way to be Christian.”

The reflections here are taken from my review of McLaren’s book on Goodreads.

Brian McLaren joins others with evangelical Christian backgrounds (i.e., Jim Wallis, David Gushee) who remain in the Christian faith but have moved into what some are calling a “progressive” Christian movement.

In McLaren’s case, he calls for Christians to focus on living out Jesus’ love rather than emphasis on correct beliefs. He states: “What I care about is whether they are teaching people to live a life of love, from the heart, for God, for all people (no exceptions), and for all creation.”

However, it is not, he says about “pledging mushy allegiance to an undefined spirituality without religion.”

He sees Christians continuing on a trajectory they have always followed: Many Christians used to defend slavery; now they do not. Some used to believe the conquest of “pagan” lands and forced conversion of natives was God’s will. Few champion that path now.

McLaren strikes a middle path. Conservative Christians have rightly championed family relationships but also supported patriarchal domination. Liberal Christians have disowned patriarchy but failed to teach family skills.

He calls for Christians to migrate to a higher level once again.

I found particularly helpful McLaren’s illustrations of what it means to go beyond conservative and liberal. He calls for movements within our institutions rather than new institutions.

McLaren’s emphasis on migration and growth rather than division is welcome, not only for the new ideas sparked by his book but also for the book’s practicality.

Why Must Wealthy Donors Rescue Us?

Jeff Bezos has announced a donation of two billion dollars to help homeless families and to create preschools in low income communities. Bezos is due our praise for his gift and his stated intention of giving more in the future from his accumulated wealth.

We have other wealthy people in this country who give generously to worthy causes. They are to be congratulated for their generosity. The tradition of “paying it forward,” of sharing blessings is a noble one.

But why are the basic needs of so many in need of rescue? Why don’t our taxes cover basic education, medical care, and affordable housing?

If basic needs were met, wealthy giving could fund “extras”—scientific experiments, worldwide agricultural breakthroughs, and other endeavors not easily financed through regular taxation.

Of course, meeting basic needs would no doubt require more taxes from the wealthy.

From Tribe to Nuclear Family to the Solitaires

The dominance of the nuclear family in the United States began about the time World War II ended. Many returning soldiers and sailors married and moved with their families into university housing to take advantage of the GI education bill.

Others moved to find jobs, leaving parents behind in small towns and inner city neighborhoods. Suburbs gained dominance, a haven of the nuclear family. Senior citizens were often absent from those first suburbs.

As baby boomers aged, older suburbs grayed as well. The children grew up and moved, some to different suburbs with townhouses and smaller lots. Who has time to mow a lawn these days? Others rediscovered the city.

We whittle down the nuclear family to the single going it alone or with a partner. Children? Perhaps, but children are expensive to raise, not to mention the time and energy they take.

Singles and those in loose partnerships have changed the landscape. The nuclear family, conqueror of the extended family, is now conquered by the solitaires.

Somewhere, we lost community, too. The solitaires may have their own groups, their friendships. They can change when they feel it necessary, not bind themselves, they say, to dead marriages or associations that have lost purpose.

Community had its drawbacks. Those who didn’t fit were too often ostracized. Some groups were dysfunctional, wounding their members.

Yet we lack adequate replacement for covenanted community, for dedicated care to meet physical and spiritual needs. A task for our age is the healing and rebuilding of community.

You Can’t Return to the Past, Except Maybe in a Book

As a newbie U.S. Foreign Service officer in the early 1990’s, I remember my first assignment in Saudi Arabia as a marvelous adventure. It was as exciting as the stories I used to read in my childhood.

I visited exotic market places with new friends, walked through ancient ruins, and fell in love with Middle Eastern food. Once in a while I took leave to visit Europe, exploring countries I had only read about.

My career began before terrorism led to intrusive pre flight searches in airports. I traveled before airplanes became boxcars of pressed humanity.

In the course of my job, I learned to respect those who saw the world through a different cultural lens. I visited prison wardens, assistants to emirs, and foreigners with custody of American children.

I can’t go back to those days again. By the end of my second tour in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000’s, I had to live by new restrictions on travel. We learned to be alert to the possibilities of terrorism, and not only in the Middle East. From the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, we watched on television as the twin towers fell on September 11, 2001.

Fortunately, I can conjure in novels the lessons I gained during the earlier days. The novels dredge up insights, before so much fire and fury, that I am only beginning to understand.

Creativity’s A Funny Thing

If you have a story to tell, tell it. If you have an image to draw, draw it. If you have a song to sing, sing it. A poem, a sculpture, a wall hanging, a garden . . . Whatever.

Maybe you’ll be able to share it with the world. Maybe not. But strike while the muse is hot. Use it, or it will disappear, and you’ll be the poorer, if not the world.

Creativity is a subjective process, not like a journey from Point A to Point B that you plot on a map. The fulfilment of the creative process requires discipline, to be sure, but it is never tamed or owned, only borrowed from the Creator.

“The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to ‘creation out of nothing,’ . . . Thus, Berdyaev is able to say: ‘God created the world by imagination.’”
—Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

A Different Kind of Struggle

An article in Writer’s Digest suggests that Americans now question long held beliefs: “American verities (e.g., equal opportunity, fairness, decency) have worn thin, revealing the naked aggression, vanity and greed underneath.” (David Corbett, “No More Mr. Nice Guy, September 2018)

Thus, we have novels with no heroes or heroines, like the characters in Gone Girl, or the unreliable narrator, behaving in disgusting ways, as in The Woman on the Train.

Then, in a surprisingly delightful book, A Man Called Ove, we are driven to sympathize with a man who, at first, is presented as someone obsessed with order, who doesn’t like animals or children. He even resents being asked to help a neighbor struggling to care for a husband suffering dementia. Then we are shown his prior griefs, and we sympathize.

Writers today do use more offensive characters. Yet, Corbett advises writers: “When using struggle and desire to create empathy for an otherwise offensive character, don’t neglect to explore just what risks the character faces.”

In other words, we can sympathize with someone pretty badly messed up if we understand their struggles.

For those of us who believe that evil can and should be redeemed, such characters can give us hope in a world turned overnight into Dante’s inferno.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, as he struggled to overcome the evil of apartheid in South Africa, “I am a prisoner of hope.”

Novels like Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Patton, with its imperfect characters, perhaps helped move the country out of apartheid.

For Americans, divided and anger-stricken, fiction and non-fiction can mirror the dysfunction while at least hinting that we still have choices.

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective