To My Youngest Daughter, On Her 18th Birthday and Move to College

Written a few weeks ago for my daughter. She leaves for college tomorrow. The letter, while personal, speaks I hope to the longings and yearnings and angst of so many parents like Sharie and me. Our daughter gave permission to post this slightly edited version in hopes that others will find hope and grace.

To My Youngest Daughter on Her 18th Birthday

My Dear Daughter,

In the great stories of religions, there come on occasions, though never on schedule, those wonderful surprises of God – those often unexpected, never carefully planned for, and always accepted with wonder, great, transforming joys. Hindus call them avatars, Buddhists name them Bodhisattvas, Sufi Muslims see them in the fana of mysticism, Jews in the Hashem, or with Christians, prophets. To many, Jesus was that surprise. But whomever they are, and by whatever name, they come as serendipity, they come as judgement, and they come as love. They shower unexpected and unexplainable joys on their recipients, they obviously challenge neat, reasoned plans and goals, and they pour out selfless expressions of caring and sympathy and hope. (They bring deep blessings unexpected, they force their recipients to rethink current plans, and they give great love.) In short, they call their recipients to a new world, a better place, an unintended but always new adventure.

Dear Daughter, you are one of these very rare, and very precious, persons. You are God’s surprise to us, God’s “Yes” to all of our future, God’s confidence in all of our new projects, God’s demand that we not become complacent, God’s reminder that true love is never planned or calculated or targeted but always free and courageous and bold and determined, and real.

These eighteen years have been so unbelievable, and yet certain. You grew up very quickly, with sister and brothers so far ahead, mom and dad so busy and tired. You had to. Your mother provides such special memories of you: “Can I get on the computer to do my homework?” when you were barely five. “I need to have the phone to talk to my friend” when you were even younger. You were helping Mom teach Sunday school before you were in school. You were walking to school, on your own, very early. You were pushing the lawn mower with me when most of your school friends did not know what a mower was. You were climbing the ladder and handing me tools to build a new bedroom before you were even in school. You knew the local Aquatic Center, where all your siblings swam before you, so well that you could walk to the water’s edge blind-folded and stop just at the right spot before falling in. And, by middle school, you were so ahead of your mother and father on technology and television and contemporary life that we were, well, growing old.

You watched your oldest brother leave for college when you were six, and you cried. The next two left not many years later, and it seems that we all became so different. It’s like you experienced what all parents do when the “kids leave home,” but you were still the kid, and we knew it but we did not always handle it well. So you found other siblings, of sorts – friends and boyfriends, some wonderful, some dangerous, and we responded in a variety of ways. Your mother was ceaselessly committed to helping you, to encouraging you, to correcting you, to caressing you, to giving you her very soul. I was less focused, caught up in work and travel and backyard meditation, too often ignorant or oblivious to the hurt you so often felt and the confusion of home life you so often saw. My dear daughter, I am so sorry. I know that overall, I cared for you and the whole family, and I would always have given my life to protect you, but I also know that my own world has been too often too busy to see you well.

Indeed we have had ups and downs. I will never forget the occasional painful days of later senior high school, when we all struggled to help you find happiness. On those few nights you left, I walked for miles, and then drove, not sure what to do, but somehow aimlessly hoping to find you. And I wondered what I would say if you came home.  

And you always did. And we got by.

And, you’d be baking cupcakes for swimmers or classmates or workmates the next day. You often put off studies to get the baking done – yes, a nice diversion from study you didn’t want to do, but yes, so nice a good diversion rather than a whole lot of other things you could have done. I’m betting over the years you’ve baked 50 dozen cupcakes for others. And then we can talk about the cards, posters, and letters. You have been an encourager, a life-changer, and dear friend to oh so many. I’ll never forget your support for, and friendship with, the disabled swimmer Beth, for example.

Oh, dear Daughter, you are so much more dear and precious and beautiful and special and prophetic and kind than you may ever know. You have your faults, of course. (Perhaps you shop too much?) But you are dear. You are God’s special gift, God’s serendipity to Sharie and me, and the world. Your mother tells me, and I agree, that you have helped us to understand God’s Grace more than we ever could. I am so happy you are going to pursue a vocation that is about helping people. Your gifts of love and kindness will continue. You will be God’s grace-giver.

I know you probably had different expectations for an 18th birthday party. After all, you live in a secular, greedy society, and your friends and coworkers expect more.

But I also know that you, deep down inside, realize how very blessed you are to have a loving mother and father, and

how very blessed you are to have been called by God to be a special surprise, a dear serendipity, a rare chosen one, who will continue to be such a blessing to all you come to know, now and in the future. Daughter, you are a special chosen one. You have been prepared well, sometimes challenging, always with love. You will continue to be a blessing to all you know.

Go with God. Live well. Work hard. Love deeply. Laugh fully. Repent sincerely. Reflect with commitment. Rededicate intensely. Laugh more fully. Work with calling.

And love more deeply.

I love you, my dear daughter, as does your mother. We are so very proud of you.

Go with God.

Love, Dad

Martin Luther King as Christian, Even While Barack Obama is Inaugurated

So I am sad not to be watching the inauguration live, and sad to be working as well, but my institution chooses to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., with a special chapel.  Sometimes I am asked to present it.  Here's my words for the big day, which I will literally be reading as Pres. Obama is giving his speech.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:  Another Story

LCU Chapel, January 21, 2013

Popular theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to remind Christians of what he calls the Tonto Principle.  When the Lone Ranger and Tonto once found themselves surrounded by 20,000 Sioux Indians, the Lone Ranger turned to Tonto and said, "This looks pretty tough; what do you think we ought to do?"  Tonto replied, "What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?"  Our tendency, Hauerwas says, is to view life through the assumptions and perceptions of the dominant American culture and to fail to see that "we" are not all alike, all sharing the same heritages and present realities and life goals. 

            Neither Hauerwas nor I mean to focus here on ethnic and cultural diversity but rather on Christian particularity.  What does it mean to say we are Americans, and to say we are Christian?  When we stress, for example, our "rights" to big cars and big homes, who is the "we" that we are talking about?  When we pray for our soldiers going off to war, who are our soldiers?  When we teach our children to grow up and be responsible citizens, what kind of citizenship are "we" implying?  When we focus on getting a good job after we finish college, what do "we" mean by "good"?  When we honor and celebrate  the heroes of our past, who are we, and who are they, and why are we continuing to honor them in such ways?

            The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday provides us with an excellent example.  To virtually every American, Martin Luther King brings to mind certain fixed phrases and images.  We all know the phrases.  "I Have a Dream;"  "We Shall Overcome."  And if we Americans had to sum up his life with one descriptive line, it would likely be "Civil Rights Leader."  We've all seen the crowds, the marches, and even the monuments, and we have a fairly consistent and often repeated picture of him and of this day.  And on this particular day, we’ll see a more pronounced emphasis – President Obama will invoke both King and Abraham Lincoln, with themes of rights, justice, and freedom.

            But do we Christians realize that Martin Luther King, Jr. was first one of our own?  That at his very core, he was not really a civil rights leader or a political activist, but that he was a Christian, a disciple of Jesus Christ? 

Do we hear him, not quoting legal documents but the words of Jesus?  Do we even know that the driving force in his life was not a racial agenda, a political idealogy, or a personal lust for power but that it was Christian love?  Listen with me to his own words.

            What is the goal of life?   "The end of life is not to be happy nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may." 

What is the greatest good of life?  What is the summum bonum? I think I have found the answer, America. . . . The highest good is love.  This principle is at the center of the cosmos.  It is the great unifying force of life.  God is love.  He who loves has discovered the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality; he who hates stands in immediate candidacy for nonbeing.

And why should we love even our enemies?  He responds:  "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.  Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.  So when Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is setting forth an inescapable admonition.      Have we not come to such an impass in the modern world that we must love our enemies---or else?  The chain reaction of evil . . . must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."

And why are we compelled to act for the hurting and oppressed of the world?  Because love is "the true meaning of the Christian faith and of the cross.  Calvary is a telescope through which we look into the long vista of eternity and see the love of God breaking into time.  Out of the hugeness of his generosity God allowed his only-begotten Son to die that we may live. By uniting yourselves with Christ and your brothers through love you will be able to matriculate in the university of eternal life.  In a world depending on force, coercive tyranny, and bloody violence, you are challenged to follow the way of love.  You will then discover that unarmed love is the most powerful force in the world."

 Not long after King's death, the young poet Carl Wendell Himes wrote,

            Now that he is safely dead

Let us praise him

            build monuments to his glory

            sing Hosannas to his name.

                        Dead men make

such convenient heroes:  They cannot rise to challenge the images

                        we would fashion from their lives.

            And besides,

it is easier to build monuments

            than to make a better world.

Himes, I think, was quite prophetic.  Fourty-five years later, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday is honored by some Americans, largely ignored by most (“why are we out of school, today?”), and turned into partisan political spectacles by still others, and King himself is captured in only one or two repeated scenes from moments in past history. 

I wonder what might happen if on this day we heard more sermons and prayers of King and saw less film footage of crowds and marches.  I wonder what might develop if more churches and less political action groups would listen to him.  I wonder where we might be if we spent the day, in the manner of King, reflecting on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and its ethical implications for our lives, if we took Christian love as seriously as King did.

            Ah, but we're back to the Tonto principle again.  Who are the "we" that we are talking about?  My guess is that most of us see ourselves as Christians and Americans, as some kind of ChristoAmericans or AmericoChristians.  We pray to God and ask God to bless America, we value American goals of rights and freedoms as if they were God-given licenses to personal excess, we tend to see the world in terms of American Christian good and foreign religious evil.  But the two --- American and Christian --- are not the same, and it's Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminds us of this.

           

By 1965 King had already made a name for himself: ten years of work for civil rights, Time's "Man of the Year" in 1957, the march on Washington in 1963.  He had already been arrested and threatened many times, and in 1958 he narrowly escaped death when a black woman stabbed him.  He had already gained worldwide fame, receiving in 1964  the Nobel Peace Prize, at age 35.  So, by 1965, the world was his.  We are told that he had always wanted to get a university professorship, to have time to write and think and teach.  Now, it seemed, was the perfect time to retire from the public scene and to enjoy the good American life.

            But King did something really foolish, something very unwise.  He rented an apartment in a dangerous ghetto of Chicago and began to work against injustices there, and then he continued similar practices in other parts of the country.  And this man who could have claimed any number of privileges and exclusions, this Ph.D. in philosophical theology and world leader, went to Memphis in 1968 to help some garbage workers who weren't being treated fairly.  And we know the rest of the story.

            Two months before his death, King was preaching in Atlanta and reflecting on how he would like to be remembered after he was gone. 

            "Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize.  Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards – that’s not important.  Tell them not to mention where I went to school.”

"I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others. 

“I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love somebody. 

“I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. 

“And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. 

“I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.

“I want you to say that day that I tried to love and serve humanity.

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice.  Say that I was a drum major for peace.  I was a drum major for righteousness.  And all of the other shallow things will not matter.

"I won't have any money to leave behind.  I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind.  But I just want to leave a committed life behind."

What kind of man has these goals?  What kind of person denies success and wealth and rights and safety and life itself for the sake of love? 

What kind of man?  A Christian. 

And it's high time we reclaimed him, and started listening to him, as one of our own.

Thank you.

-- Stacy Patty

Giving Up on Facebook

For some time now, I've felt that Facebook is too impersonal, too incendiary, too short, too casual.  I'm quitting Facebook.  I look forward to the time to write and think, and post occasionally, meaningful reflections, whether others like them or not.  I look forward to not being so easily engulfed in difficult political or theological conversations that are impossibly handled with short quick, late-night, posts.  So, if you care, look here on occasion.  But if not, no regrets. Life is good.