A moment of silent remembrance please…

Blogging from APCE in Philadelphia:

It was a sad shock to read of the death of Lois Anderson and her daughter Zelda White. Lois was a retired Presbyterian Church missionary. She and her husband Bill had served some 40 years in Africa.

For generations, the Anderson family has been arguably the first family in missions in the old UPNA stream of the church. Their exemplary dedication to proclaiming the gospel and seeing the Church of Jesus Christ grow has been passed faithfully from generation to generation. Their dedication and achievements have been an inspiration and a challenge to me. It has been a privilege to meet Bill and Lois and other members of the extended Anderson family.

This is just the latest in a series of tragic events to affect this family. And it is all the more shocking since they should have been safe in a diplomatic car traveling near Nairobi, Kenya, often considered one of the more stable African cities. But a carjacking turned deadly with tragic consequences.

May the peace which God promises his faithful servants fill the heart of Bill Anderson and all of his extended family. They have done so much to share the love of God with others. May they feel it now.

It does take a village: a better solution to children and violent media

Every few months, some public interest group or another highlights something most of us realize. Children live in a more violent world these days. It's not that the town they live in is more dangerous. But, since children tend to view the world through their imaginations, when the things that fuel their imaginations are more violent, their world is more violent.

Movies and music are more violent. There are more violent images, and those images are themselves more graphic. At the same time, that violence is more meaningless and random. The increase in violence in video games is off the charts. A generation ago people played "Pong" and "Space Invaders"; now it's "first person shooters" whose major purpose is to splatter as much realistic blood and guts across the screen as possible.

Interest groups that study the environment in which children grow up find themselves desperate for answers. There are few simple ones. A media columnist reported on one group's attempt to Do Something. "[C]oalition leaders acknowledged that 'legislation is rarely a perfect solution' – and yet they pressed for changes to the laws."

Changes, the columnist was probably correct to point out, that would almost certainly be ineffective. And what would be effective? Antonia Zerbisias wrote, "[T]he solution lies in one place alone." New paragraph for emphasis. "The power switch." Another new paragraph for emphasis. "You have the power." One more new paragraph for emphasis. "Use it."

I dispute the connection between the power switch and the power. The best illustration of that was at a conference a couple of months after one of Madonna's more outrageous creations was published. "How many of you are aware of Madonna's latest project?" the speaker asked the assembled parents and teachers. Dozens of hands — representing almost everyone in the room — went up. "How many of you are aware of it because you sought out information about it?" Only a couple of hands stayed up.

We don't have to turn on the power switch to pull the objectionable stuff into our families. It's so pervasive in culture, it pushes its way in uninvited. The solution lies in another place, one more difficult to reach than the power switch or the halls of government.

It lies in claiming the best meaning of the proverb "It takes a village to raise a child." Once we knew that meaning. Adults endured restrictions and inconveniences for the sake of children. Magazines were inconveniently stored behind counters. Etiquette kept us on our toes regarding deeds and words when children were present. There were many things in the "you can't do that on television" file.

Gradually life changed. "I'm entitled to my rights of self-expression." "When did your kids become my problem?" "Who do you think you are to stigmatize the things I choose to read?" Society became less concerned with the environment in which children were growing up and more concerned with maximizing the choices and options for adults.

Perhaps the best example of this is in efforts to regulate content on the Internet. Courts will not permit any regulation that encumbers adult access whatever adults want access to, no matter what the effect on children. And so the village has rejected its responsibility for its children.

We need to reclaim the best meaning of "it takes a village to raise a child." It's not a rationale for more government programs. It is a recognition that all the various choices we make affect the vulnerable children around us. It means we need to be willing to give up some things and endure a little inconvenience for the sake of the children.

If we can't make that choice in this generation, how will we live in the next?

What's missing from Mainline religion: the need for transcendence

"Is God Dead?" asked a seminal cover story in Time magazine. Yes, the western European cultural leadership eagerly affirmed. Not so much that God was alive and now was dead, but that the myth of a "Most High God" beyond this world was no longer a vital reality. It was no longer a living part of our culture.

A generation of church leaders embraced this insight, and developed what they called a secular Christianity. It would be a faith perfectly suited for the modern age. It was a faith that let go of outmoded and irrelevant concerns about heaven and eternity. It was a faith that would focus on the urgent and immediate concerns of human compassion and service. It would be a modern, relevant faith, worthy of the embrace of a new generation. It would focus on real problems like hunger and employment.

The trouble was, the new generation did not embrace it. People stayed away in droves. The "mainline" churches that embraced the new secular gospel (mostly members of the National Council of Churches) saw their attendance drop sharply. The Christian churches that were able to maintain their attendance were those that embraced the old fashioned ideas of transcendence.

At the heart of the traditional view of Christianity is Jesus Christ as simultaneously human and divine. He is the very power of God in human form. And yet, he is also one with us in our weaknesses and challenges. In his life we can see a hope of something more for our lives.

Perhaps the place where that plays out most dramatically is in Christ's struggle in the Garden of Gesthemene. On that night, he was seized with the enormity of the task before him. The gospel accounts don't explain why, they simply report his desire to let the task pass. Was the task too big? Too difficult? Too painful? Too much? It was too something, and so Jesus asked that the cup pass from his lips; a way of asking that he be excused from the task.

And yet he went beyond that: not my will but thy will be done. In that choice, Jesus found the power to be and do more than his humanity could do on its own. And in that we can find the hope of power to be more than we can imagine now. (The picture to the left illustrating that is "Getsemane, harjoitelma Savitaipaleen kirkon alttaritaulua varten" by Magnus Enckell, 1902, from the Finnish National Gallery.)

And in that victory, there is hope for all people. We also can find the strength to do things we find too much. We also can be more than we can imagine. When modern religious leaders moved away from transcendence, they moved away from that hope, from that victory. They moved away of what made a religion worth professing and following. No wonder people stayed away.

As Anglican blogger Captain Yips observed,

there's always something we can't do, don't want to do, that stands in the way, and every one of those mirrors in small the reluctance Jesus felt that Thursday night in the garden. I'’d rather not do this, Father. But of course, he did. And that is why Jesus is the way to the Father.
All this is missing from Social Work Anglicanism, why it has become a shell, a political action committee.

A transcendent God is not an empty myth. It is instead a real hope what we can be more than we ever thought was possible. Far from being a dead idea, it's a realty that makes life worth living.

A little more reverence, please: we dare not deflate all our cherished institutions

For many years, children have sung the twisted holiday carol “Jingle bells, Santa smells, Robin laid an egg...” Kind of irreverent, a little twisted, but not all that far from the classic Spike Jones take on the holiday. “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth” and “I’m getting nothin’ for Christmas” have a kind of innocence, even if they don’t exactly toe the standard reverent Christmas carol line.

But somehow it feels like a line has been crossed as I heard some children singing “Deck the halls with poison ivy...” That was the beginning; in later lines the song descended into celebrations of decorations causing even more pain and suffering.

Every generation has its own versions of sophomoric comedy. Every society has jesters dancing out on the margins, deflating the solemn traditions of the elders. In previous generations, those impulses have been harmless comic release valves because there was a strong affirmation of the traditions that give shape and form to the culture. And the jesters had the positive value of helping our society avoid the pride that comes from taking itself too seriously.

But what becomes of a generation raised on the sophomoric deflation of the traditions? What if defending the tradition becomes the marginal activity, and deflating it becomes the main thing? Reverence and respect go together. A culture with a strong sense of reverence is a culture that can cultivate a strong sense of mutual respect.

Many people find the Three Stooges funny because they’re so off the wall and unusual. Imagine, though, a world where Curly, Larry, and Moe set the standards for how people should treat one another. Suddenly they’re not so funny. If irreverence displaces reverence, and everything is something of a joke played out for our entertainment, why should any of us take any respectful notice of anyone else?

And I suppose that’s why I find it so troubling to hear kids singing about decking the halls with poison ivy. A little irreverence is harmless. Things begin to fall apart when that cynical impulse begins to displace the traditional ennobling aspirations of the holiday.

Was it Chris Johnson (at the excellent blog Midwest Conservative Journal) who wrote about how nervous he was that the work of defending the core societal institutions was in the hands of a generation that knew more about how to tear down traditions than build them up? Whoever wrote that was onto something important. It will be a challenge to see the problem and rise to the occasion. But can our generation muster the strength to meet that challenge?

If we can, we will truly be heirs of the title “Greatest Generation.”