Category Archives: Greatest Generation, Boomers, Millennials, Alphabets

Will The Last Child Please Turn Off The Night Light?

A fragment of the Christmas story states that the announced messenger of the Lord, before Messiah’s coming, will “turn the hearts of parents to their children.” (Luke 1:17 NRSV)

The angel could be talking to us today: to rescue the family back from obsolescence.

The New York Times columnist David Brooks suggests we’ve become a society in which we don’t want children because they close off our options. We want maximum personal freedom throughout adulthood. Following such a policy to the extreme eventually threatens our existence.

We no longer need children for economic reasons. In fact, children now cost a great deal, in terms of care, schooling, and time. Not all of us are called to be parents. Better that we not return to the days when parenting defined a person’s, especially a woman’s, only purpose. Better perhaps that we look to children as belonging to more than the immediate family. They are the future of our communities. Our care for children may relate to our understanding of our need for community, whether we are parents or not.

Choosing Leisure in a Frantic World

Religious orders in the Middle Ages developed efficient methods of work in order to toil less and enjoy more leisure for prayers and other religious activities. As Europe entered the modern era, people began taking their surplus in goods rather than leisure. (Man, Energy, Society by Earl Cook.)

In prior generations, survival taught its own lessons: work efficiently, be frugal, or starve. After World War II, Americans found themselves in a golden age of plenty. One wage earner could support four or more people with a forty-hour work week. One could survive even though working less than ever before.

Americans, knowingly or not, faced a choice. We could work less and allow more time for other pursuits: family, religious activity, creative pursuits, community work, more education. Fathers could spend more time with their families, allowing mothers to explore outside career interests if they chose. Singles could work part time and obtain more education or pursue creative work that didn’t pay as well, if their talents led them there. Twenty-hour per week jobs might become the norm.

Or Americans could continue to work as they had and buy more and more things. Once “things” became the goal of work, however, the desire for more and more material goods required greater commitment to job and career.

To overcome consumerism, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that “we must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” By living “deliberately”—as Henry David Thoreau understood—we spend less, work less and enjoy life more.

We now are rich in things (or were before the Great Recession) and poor toward God, friends, families, communities, and our inner lives. To choose a Biblical metaphor, we worked the fields seven days a week, skipping our Sabbath days of rest. Now we find an enforced rest in unemployment and under employment.

Unbalanced Lives

Our work force is not the one of our parents. It now includes not only many mothers, but also fathers with a realization that they, too, want to share in their children’s lives. It includes singles who crave a life beyond work. It includes care givers with family members in need of attention. It includes those with a desire to take time off for a temporary stint with a non-profit or to gain more education or to experiment with new career directions.

Employers will profit by understanding that employees cannot always be only employees. Workers will shift goals when a new child is born or a parent needs extra care or a spouse suffers grave medical problems or one’s goals change. If the norm is for most adults to concern themselves with a career from the time they leave school until they retire, we need new patterns to balance our lives.

Long leaves should be expected from time to time. This doesn’t mean employers should be on the hook for long periods of salary payments when the employee isn’t working. It does mean an acceptance of the fact that workers will at times need extended periods of leave, even perhaps several years. The promise of reinstatement when the employee is ready to reenter the work force, within limits, as well as the continuation of medical benefits are items of consideration. Flex time or part-time work or work from home are possibilities in some careers.

The employees, too, must make choices. They cannot expect continued salary for long periods if they leave the work force for an extended time. The American habits of high consumption and low savings need drastic revision. Americans should expect not to work at certain periods in their lives and plan accordingly.

We need a rethinking of career. Taking time off from career for other needs should be the new normal, a normal of choice.

Confucius and the Holidays

Confucius, the oft-quoted Chinese teacher and philosopher said, “To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”

What a quaint expression—”to set our hearts right,” to order our hearts. It echoes the one for whom Christians celebrate the season, the one who said “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” Is it possible to seek the kingdom, to put our hearts in order despite the business? Probably not without the requirement for other worthy pursuits, that of self-discipline.

Can we leave our shopping, our texting, our twittering, and our Facebooking for a few minutes a day during this season? Practice the quiet “to set our hearts right”?

Black Friday Meditation

We are told that the only way we can come out of the recession is for Americans to spend the greater part of their salaries on goods and services, even go into debt. Especially on Black Friday, retailers count on the greatest spending spree by Americans of the entire year. If accounts don’t reach into the black on that day, retailers foresee trouble.

Most Americans reached a level of affluence, a luxury level compared to past generations, by the 1960’s or so. Yet we continued to build larger houses for smaller families while we deserted the six ounce soft drink for the jumbo sizes.

“How much Is enough?” asks the title of a book by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life. This book and another, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel, were reviewed by The Economist in their July 12, 2012 issue.

“Even if . . .the West could do with more . . , the pursuit of wealth for its own sake is folly,” states the reviewer of the two books. Perhaps these books should find a place under our Christmas trees this season.

Lost Generation

The New York Times columnist, David Brooks, wrote a piece titled “The Widening Opportunity Gap.” It dealt with the gulf that separates children who grow up to function successfully and those who don’t. Brooks discussed several reasons for this divide between children, but he pointed out that the amount of time parents spend with their children is a major factor in their success.

This gap between the parented and the unparented has increased since the famous baby boom following World War II. The boom gave way to other generations, born from the mid-1960’s onward. These groups are variously called Generation X, Generation Y (also known as the Millennials), and Generation Z. Until the economic recession that began around 2008, these children were born during an era of unprecedented economic growth, of the two-career family, of the housing boom.

Yet the good times knew a darker side: The high divorce rate of baby boom parents led to the fashion of their children forswearing marriage. Why bother with marriage at all, since it so often ends in acrimonious breakups? they asked. Casual relationships developed a mainstream following. Babies born of them often appeared an afterthought.

Our emphasis on self fulfilment rather than on responsible membership in society, including parenting children instead of merely birthing them, may stunt an entire generation.

What’s a Sister? Or a Brother? Or a Cousin?

George Weigel (author of The Cube and The Cathedral, which describes the death of Christianity in Europe) was interviewed for Response magazine several years ago: He stated: ” . . . by 2050, on present trends, 60 percent of Italians will not know from personal experience what a brother, a sister, an aunt, an uncle or a cousin is.” This is, Weigel says, what happens when parents mostly have only one child, and only children marry only children.

Even couples in countries with traditionally large families, like Mexico, are choosing to have smaller families. If present trends continue, cheap labor from these countries may be a thing of the past, for good or ill.

What is happening is not a dastardly plot to kill families but has developed gradually. Birth control, the economic necessity of a paid career for all adults, and education that delays marriage and family all contribute.

Parenthood is not suitable for every adult. It’s good that we have a choice. However, many couples want to have children, but economic needs and the demands of career discourage parenting.

We are told that several jobs over the lifetime of an individual is the new normal. Perhaps we should consider new patterns that include parenting as one of those jobs for those who desire it.

Nones and the Rest

Recent polls cite the growing “nones” in American society, those who profess to have no religious preference. Judging by the declining numbers in established churches in much of Europe, religion appears less and less important in all Western countries. At the same time, recent revolutions in the Middle East have led to religiously affiliated governments. In some sense, the “nones’ of the West are balanced against the “rest” in a new array.

The current movie Argo pinpoints a beginning to this sea change. The movie is set in 1979 during the Iranian revolution. The revolution removed power from Iran’s secular leaders, including the Shah, and bestowed it on religious ones. The United States had supported the Shah and allowed him into the United States for medical treatment. In protest, Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy and took hostages.

Few at that time took seriously the notion of a revolution propelled by religion. Gary Sick, in his detailed book about that time, All Fall Down, includes a section on “Religion and Revolution.” He states: “We are all prisoners of our own cultural assumptions, more than we care to admit . . . the notion of a theocratic state seemed so unlikely as to be absurd.”

Since that time, religious movements have expanded in Africa and South America. They have increased in Asia, even in Communist China. In Russia, straddling the divide between Europe and Asia, the Orthodox Church realizes growing influence . The fiery conflicts in the Middle East, so prevalent in news reports, are part of this worldwide rethinking of secular and religious.

We are not seeing a clash so often between religions in the world today (though that certainly happens) as much as we are seeing a clash between the religious and the not religious, the rest and the nones.

Titanic, Where Victorians Meet the Age of Aquarius

We’re much more realistic about racism and class prejudice these days, as the finely-crafted epic Titanic shows. Revived for the 100th anniversary of the big ship’s sinking, the 1997 movie appalls us with its portrayal of the disdain the upper class showed for the working class. Yet we take in stride the liaison between the Victorian heroine with a working class man she has just met. Granted, the woman’s fiancé was a stuffy jerk, and she was being forced into a marriage she didn’t want, and the other man had saved her life. Still, the affair was straight out of our current age, totally alien to the atmosphere the movie successfully portrayed elsewhere.

Other current films have followed the same pattern, sometimes indulging our current taste for gore and violence.

A movie where romantic attraction stays out of the bedroom is so quaint as to be almost counter-cultural. A few movies have won high acclaim with little violence or permissiveness, often based on classic novels with strong characters. Apparently, if the characters are intriguing enough, such movies can be profitable. Violence and permissiveness don’t have to be as common as movie popcorn.

In past decades, it was typical for the U.S. Calvary to be heroes and Indians the villains. Today we’re more realistic about that era, just as the Titanic portrayed a more realistic class prejudice.

The bar is higher. Mediocre movies can succeed if they incorporate a certain amount of R-rated scenes, but a movie without them must be superior.

American Churches: Dying or Dynamic?

The Christian church once again experiences dynamic changes, but those who speak of Christianity’s demise indicate a sense of American/European chauvinism. The color of the church is changing, certainly, as its main growth now takes place in Africa and Asia and South America, but the church is alive and well.

The church has gone into reverse mode in Europe, though signs of awakening dot the landscape. In America, the record is mixed. Some churches have died or are dying, but others exhibit glowing life. Churches of ethnic immigrants, for example, thrive in some communities and have literally replaced the older, dying churches of European origin.

Is the church in America losing its young people as many polls indicate? Dr. Chris Seiple, president of the Institute for Global Engagement, argues otherwise in an article in Foreign Affairs. His words are a rebuttal of a previous article in that magazine which concluded that young people were opting out of religion.

Dr. Seiple speaks of those Christians with which he is most familiar: “Theologically orthodox (lowercase o) and seeking to be biblically faithful, this sector is . . . relatively silent and leaderless but large. This group is of all ages, but they tend to be younger. They do not identify with capital-E Evangelicals—whose national and global reputation is political, strident, and unforgiving.”

He continues: “Instead, if the people in this group use the term at all, they use it with a lowercase e. They want to be defined by what they are for—an orthodox reading of scripture, the interpretation and application of which they must faithfully grapple with—instead of what they are against. For example, they want to be seen as being “for marriage” and “pro-life” instead of anti-gay and anti-abortion. In other words, they largely hold the same values as Evangelicals, they just aren’t angry about it.”

The church has gone through periods of tremendous change from the time the apostle Paul took the gospel to the Gentiles. Perhaps the fact that Dr. Seiple’s discussion was published in Foreign Affairs and not in a religiously oriented magazine hints of the new frontiers for tomorrow’s church in this country. If so, American Christians must learn new vocabularies and acquaint themselves with a larger world, as Paul, the orthodox Jew, did.

Mayhem, Gore, and Torture

What does our current appetite for violence-laden entertainment do to our society? Well-adjusted individuals may leave the theater or put down the book and go on with their lives and enjoy their roles as spouse, friend, parent, employee, or whatever.

But what of those of us who are not well adjusted? What of children living in dysfunctional families? Teenagers facing a world of confusing values? Veterans returning from serving in a war zone and struggling to deal with horrors they knew there? Civilians, such as the emergency rescuer I read about, who needed counseling after witnessing a terrible accident?

The atmosphere of the present day leads to a revisionist portrayal even of literature written in the past. Take Sherlock Holmes as an example. A presenter at a conference that I attended introduced us to Conan Doyle’s sleuth as the cerebral detective. Readers are enticed into the story world, the speaker suggested. Violence is seldom used. The pace is not hyperactive. Relationships draw us in.

I thought I would find these qualities in a current movie resurrecting the Sherlock Holmes story. The movie, however, portrayed Holmes as a ruffian upholder of justice. Violence, gore, and torture impregnated the plot, as well as adrenaline-laced chase scenes. (One wonders how our current appetite for such movies affects veterans with post traumatic stress disorder.) Though the relationship between Holmes and his sidekick, John Watson, was portrayed, it took back stage to the frenetic action scenes.

We do not, like the ancient Romans, stage gladiatorial contests where combatants face life or death situations to entertain the masses. Wonder where those reality TV shows are headed?

Brush Your Teeth, Eat Your Vegetables, and Other Quaint Sayings

No cavities, Mom, I wanted to shout as I rose from the dentist chair after my six-month checkup. In raising me, my parents stressed the old admonitions: brush your teeth, eat your vegetables, look both ways before crossing the street, share with others, and so on. Only now do I realize how much I owe them for my current health and happiness.

I realized how fortunate I was when I read a New York Times article with the new statistic: More than half of babies born to women younger than thirty now are born to unmarried parents. In many cases, to two young people who don’t even plan to be married, at least to each other. Are these parents dedicated to raising their children as mine were, or are the children simply an afterthought? (See a previous blog, The Parent Divide.)

Some of the unmarried parents express disillusionment with their own parents’ marriages, but it appears marriage, perfect or not, gives a child advantages. The article states: “Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.”

Children are a nation’s most precious resource. No country can succeed if it wastes the lives of its children.

Religious Freedom: Going Deeper

The Institute for Global Engagement encourages religious freedom worldwide. Robert and Margaret Seiple began the organization when they decided Christians should do more to foster religious freedom. Seiple, a former head of World Vision, was the first to serve as the U.S. State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, from 1998 to 2000. The organization encourages knowledge of one’s own faith and enough about another’s faith to respect it.

I lived for several years in foreign countries, including one in which I could practice my Christian beliefs only in private. When I returned home to the United States, I became aware of a lack of interest on the part of my fellow believers in the United States about other countries and cultures. Though Christians were called to go out into the world from the beginning, many American Christians, it appeared to me, fixated on domestic issues.

How do those of us who are Christians interact with other cultures and their religions? Do we want religious freedom only for, say, Christians in Saudi Arabia? Or are we also concerned when Tibetan Buddhists are persecuted in China? What about freedom for those who wish to practice no religion?

Baptists in Virginia after the American Revolution struggled for the freedom to practice their beliefs outside of the established churches. Are those of us who profess Christianity still as adamant for religious freedom as those early Baptists? Are we interested in religious freedom only as long as we are the odd ones out?

I would be interested in hearing from you, Christians and non-Christians alike, on this issue of religious freedom. The idea of publicly commenting on a blog may inhibit some of you. If this is the case, feel free to email your comments to me at islandfiction@hotmail.com. I won’t use your name or other personal information in my blog response; I’ll only comment on your thoughts.

The Undisciplined Life

A fiery crash in which three young men were killed grieved our small community. Alcohol appeared to be a factor. A couple of years ago, an alcohol-related crash killed two other young people. In still another tragedy, a drunken driver took the life of a young mother of two children.

How can we curb our suicidal march toward the undisciplined life that allows immediate desire to overcome our God-given ability to reason? Even our politics seem driven by “unreasoning” hatred.

Our young people imitate their elders who over-eat, over-drink, over-shop, and over-entertain themselves without any thought given to deeper purposes. The consequences can suddenly horrify as in automobile fatalities caused by drunken driving. They may surface over longer periods, as in routine gluttony or a country’s slow decline following decades of self-gratification.

We need a purpose that encourages a longer view than a news sound byte or the next election or what we buy on Black Friday. What are our goals? With whom can we share our blessings? Our talents?

A generation or so ago, parents wanted their children to “amount to something.” Now we prefer them be “happy,” but isn’t happiness a byproduct rather than a goal?

On Looking Into Jane Austen’s World

I just finished reading Death Comes to Pemberly by P.D. James. It’s something of a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The book’s protagonists are a long way from Adam Dalgliesh, the investigator in James’ detective series. Yet the characters still engage in brooding inner dialog, in this case about honor and family loyalty.

Like many, I find enjoyment in Jane Austen’s novels, as well in the movies and Masterpiece Theater remakes. What is it about life portrayed in the Austen stories that accounts for the revival of interest in her work? Few of us would want to live in those days of rigid social systems, poor sanitation and medical practices, and lack of modern conveniences. Why, then, the appeal?

Perhaps we yearn for the order and civility that we lack in our lives today. Even more, the sense of family and of family loyalty, of honor and common values, appeals to us, I think.

Those times were brutal to the poor and vulnerable and stifling to others, such as women forced into limited roles. We have greater equality today and more enlightened views about women and class. We enjoy freedom of religion and are not forced by community expectations to sit through boring sermons in established churches, already calcifying even in those days.

Yet we have lost something, too, a sense of community and of belonging. We have lost standards of decency and behavior. Those in Austen’s day frequently fell from the standards they professed, but at least they had standards.

Taking Atheists Seriously

When what we cherish is threatened, we often react with anger and hatred. Yet God commands us to love even our enemies. Surely, then, our love extends to those atheists who have caught the recent attention of established Christianity.

After the death of Christopher Hitchens, a well-known atheist, some Christians celebrated his passing like others did the death of Osama bin Laden. Such an attitude not only is counter to the teachings of Jesus but appears to spring from insecurity in their own beliefs.

Some unbelievers profess honest difficulty with Christian claims. Do we want them to pretend to believe what they cannot? Perhaps God is less troubled by an honest nonbeliever than by one who claims he is a believer and denies Christ by his actions. In fact, one reason for unbelief is the hatred expressed by some who call themselves Christians.

Jesus welcomed the questioning Nicodemus to his lodging for a discussion. Jesus answered his questions frankly, but he did not belittle Nicodemus or his questions.

Those Christians among us must realize that religious wars, intolerance, and vituperative comments serve to distance unbelievers from any true understanding of Jesus. Do our attitudes spring from a fear that we will be led down that dark alley of unbelief? Perhaps we should admit our fears to God and trust him for enlightenment and help in the resolution of our insecurity, rather than react in hateful attacks on unbelievers.

A thoughtful column ponders Hitchens from a more Christian perspective.

Here’s another, written by Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s brother, a Christian.

Simple Solutions Can Be Deadly

” . . .when a man is driven to despair he is ready to smash everything in the vague hope that a better world may arise out of the ruins.” So wrote a former German official, Erich Koch-Weser, in 1931, as the spellbinding Hitler hovered on the periphery of power. A beaten down people saw in Hitler a chance to rise again. Their misery was real, but their choices in dealing with it caused tragedy for themselves and most of the world.

While the misery in this country has not reached the level suffered by the German people during that time, we can still note the tendency to grasp at simple solutions. They range from “down with government” to “down with Wall Street” to “down with religion.” Atheism would answer the problem of religious intolerance, for example, by simply ridding the world of religion. That solution gets rid of religious intolerance but offers no help for our intolerance of differing political views or ethnicity. Could it be that the underlying issue is not religion (or government, or Wall Street), but our sinful tendencies?

Solutions, most likely, will require difficult choices and the overcoming of our inclination to fight only for our tribe or group instead of the common good, not a magical waving of some political wand.

Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare A Place To Live?

Various estimates put the number of homeless citizens in America, on any given night, at over 600,000. We have different attitudes toward the homeless. Some believe the homeless deserve their situation and ignore them. Some ignore them but feel guilty. Some give something now and again toward relieving homelessness. Some work in soup kitchens.

I once saw a play given by a group of homeless individuals. The play convinced me that people are homeless for different reasons. The reasons range from a refusal to live responsible lives to poor choices to reasons beyond anyone’s control, like mental illness or medical expense or a lost job and home due to the recession.

Perhaps solutions should be as diverse as the reasons for homelessness. Some homeless are mentally ill and unable to assume responsibility for their lives. How much we assume responsibility for them can range from tough love to arbitrarily directing their lives. Others have worked hard but made poor choices and may profit from programs which teach better ways of coping and choosing. Others, such as the working poor, may be aided by low cost housing.

I would suggest that those of us fortunate enough never to have known homelessness see each homeless person as an individual, not as part of a collective mass.

We may discover something or someone we did not expect to find. After all, Jesus and his family were homeless for a season.

Barefoot Bandit: Justice and Mercy

Our little Island County (Washington), population 78,506, gained media attention yesterday for the sentencing of the so-called Barefoot Bandit. The Bandit, Colton Harris-Moore (now twenty), gained a cult following when he eluded authorities for two years. He broke into houses and stores, then stole vehicles, boats and planes to travel across the country. His final flight ended in the Bahamas.

However, his exploits caused significant financial loss to those he victimized. And, as the judge said in her sentencing, the security of normally peaceful lives in rural areas was shattered by the crimes.

The young man expressed contrition and full responsibility for his actions in a six-page letter to the judge he wrote himself, reportedly without telling his attorney what he was doing. He appears anxious that any earnings from a movie deal will go first for full restitution to his victims.

According to court records, Colton-Harris suffered in childhood from an alcoholic mother and even had to steal food to live. Judge Vickie Churchill noted that his exploits involved no physical harm to individuals. She said that in itself showed a triumph of spirit over his upbringing.

As the judge weighed her options in dealing with the young man and his crimes, I was impressed with her skillful blending of justice and mercy.

Abiya or Bikini?

When I was assigned to work in Saudi Arabia, I thought I would wear an abiya, the black robe worn by most women there. It was the custom, I figured, and I would follow it.

But once there, I decided not to wear it. It reminded me of the racial segregation that had been practiced in my own country. I dressed conservatively, long skirts and full outfits, but I didn’t generally don the abiya.

I was reminded of all this when I saw a recent cartoon of a woman in an abiya, making fun of the custom. For many in the western world, the abiyah or the burka is the symbol of male domination, of the discrimination against women, and of their lack of rights. I understand and generally agree, but I’m acquainted with another side of the story as well.

I knew a Saudi woman, educated in the U.S., who chose the old customs when she returned to her country. She indicated a disdain for much of what she had seen in the United States: the pornography, the broken homes, the casual sex. For reasons like these, some Middle Eastern and other women proudly don the abiya. For them, it is a symbol of the value they place on the family and the importance of a woman’s worth aside from her physical appearance. For them, it allows a focus on who they are and not on their worth as a sex object.

We are certainly correct to push for women’s rights, but is a woman in an abiyah any more to be pitied than a woman who chooses outfits only for their sexiness, as though her physical attributes are her only value?

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective