Tag Archives: family

Family Deficit

Posted on February 24, 2015 | Leave a comment

marriage and family

The future of humanity passes through marriage and the family. So proclaimed Pope John Paul II. When traditional marriage and family is threatened, damaged, and destroyed, so is humanity’s future. Many have written recently about the severe decline in birth rates that will soon cause a global crisis.

Today the Baby Boomer generation is moving into their senior years. Born in the post WWII boom, they comprise a significant percentage of the U.S. population. They will require massive care as they age. Where will that care come from? And with increased longevity, they will require such care farther into the future.

Since the second world war, we have lauded individual autonomy. In our pursuit of happiness we find we may have taken a wrong turn, have embraced self and mocked the authority of tradition, faith, and family to our peril. We have redefined and weakened traditional marriage through no-fault divorce, as we no longer recognize producing and nurturing the next generation as the primary goal of marriage. Birth control began the winnowing, and abortion killed the others who were unwanted. Children, as well as the elderly, have become inconvenient in their demand sacrifice of time and money. As we have sought our own way and individual happiness, we have been inevitably destroying the family and thus the future of humanity.

The world is soon to face a critical shortage of workers. It is ironic or perhaps an obvious result, that my generation of Boomers who failed to provide a substantial next generation, will now have fewer to care for them as they age. In addition, we have not produced the next work force that will manufacture goods, the next police force that will ensure the peace, the next military force that will defend our borders. For a sneak preview, read P. D. James’ dystopian novel, The Children of Men.

I’ve counted at least five trends that will probably coalesce in the next few decades: a worldwide (and massive) graying population, the destruction of the extended family that cares for the aged, the absence of a younger generation that will care for the aged (due to population decline), the increased longevity of the aged, and the culture of self over a culture of  self-sacrifice.

As Nicholas Eberstadt writes in the Wall Street Journal,

“Our world-wide flight from family constitutes a significant international victory for self-actualization over self-sacrifice, and might even be said to mark a new chapter in humanity’s conscious pursuit of happiness. But these voluntary changes have unintended consequences… by some cruel cosmic irony, family structures and family members will be less capable, and perhaps also less willing to provide… care and support than ever before… (which) promises to frame an overarching social problem…throughout the world. It is far from clear that humanity is prepared to cope with the consequences of its impending family deficit, with increasing independence for those traditionally most dependent on others – i.e. the young and old.”

We’ve been warned about the population deficit, that we will not have the numbers to support our economy or defend our borders. But it may come home sooner than that, as we age and become abandoned by our own society.

Some of us have family. Some do not. Digging into the deeper and better part of our human nature, we want to care for both groups.

It is no surprise that with a national health care system that is economically unviable, assisted suicide is encouraged. What committee will decide who lives and who dies? What pressures will be felt by seniors to end their lives for the convenience of their loved ones? What happens to the mind (and heart and soul) of the physician who has journeyed down that path… one that no longer supports life. And should those in the medical industry who support life be forced to defend themselves?

In the end, I suppose, we do reap (as a world, a nation, a family, an individual) what we sow.

If John Paul II is right, and the future of humanity is indeed passed on through the family, we are in trouble. As marriage and the family dies, so does humanity.

And as the family weakens, the wisdom and culture of the past is not passed on. We are left bankrupt not only in terms of matters of defense at home and abroad, matters of health care. We are left without the moral compass of over two thousand years of Judeo-Christian ethos.

Let us renew life. Let us fight for every unborn child. Let us revere and care for our aged as long as we can. Ancient societies understood this and so should we if it is not too late.

Let us support marriage and family life whenever and wherever we can.

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Running the Race

Posted on February 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

Ash WednesdayToday is Septuagesima Sunday. I have read many confusing explanations for the term Septuagesima Sunday. The simplest one I have found comes from the classic work, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Eds. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1957, 1997):

“Septuagesima (Latin for ‘the seventieth [day before Easter]”). The third Sunday before Lent and hence the ninth before Easter. The name, which first occurs in the Gelasian Sacramentary [mid-8th century], seems not very appropriate, as the Sunday indicated is in fact only 64, and not 70, days before Easter; but perhaps it was coined by reckoning back the series ‘septuagesima’, ‘sexagesima’, ‘quinquagesima’, from Quinquagesima Sunday, which is exactly 50 days from Easter.”

Simple? One way or another, I find the three weeks preceding the beginning of Lent a fascinating tradition. I’m grateful that a few Anglicans still observe this little season, at least those that follow the traditional 1928 Book of Common Prayer, dating to 1662, which in turn translates missals dating to the eleventh-century Sarum (Salisbury) rite and even earlier monastic hours.

Often called Pre-Lent, these three weeks bridge Epiphanytide and Lent. They help us focus on what is coming, to consider how we might observe Lent in this year of 2015. And of course Lent prepares us for Easter. So we enter the deep heart of Christianity in these weeks. We travel from Christmas to Easter, from birth to death to resurrection, mirroring our own journeys of birth to death to resurrection.

I have been focusing intensely this last week on finishing up my early draft of The Fire Trail. And I did indeed finish it. I printed it and boxed it and put it in the mail to a local editor who will help me improve the story from many perspectives, using many writers’ tools. We will sculpt the manuscript, adding and deleting, journeying to final submission to my publisher. I have been running a race to the finish, ignoring phone calls and putting off the dentist (that one was easy).

The Epistle assigned to Septuagesima is St. Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. Paul says to run a race to receive the price by striving for mastery of the body. Every athlete knows this prescription to be true, that the mind must train and direct the body to do its will, must educate the “muscle memory.” The Super Bowl athletes running down the field at this moment know this to be true. Concentration and subjection of the flesh lead to winning the crown.

Corinth was known for the Olympic games; Paul uses an apt metaphor. But he is speaking of Heaven of course, not so much a competition as a preparation for seeing God face-to-face. Will we be ready at the end of the course assigned to each of us? 

C. S. Lewis writes of the divide between Heaven and Hell in his brilliant fantasy-parable, The Great Divorce. He describes Heaven as being painfully real to the wraiths visiting from Hell on their tour bus. They have little substance to them. The blades of grass in Heaven cut into their ghostly feet. Most want to return to Hell. They do not choose to stay in Heaven.

At the end of our earthly race, we want to be so real that we can see in Heaven’s light, walk on the so-real grass, join in the joyous songs of praise. But how do we run this race? Septuagesima helps us, by calling us to train our minds to discipline our bodies, to order our wills. In such discipline lies freedom to do more, love more, to live the life that God intends each one of us to live.

I’m a little winded from my own race this week. But then The Fire Trail is about such discipline, about what defines our humanity as opposed to our bestiality, about the jungle versus the civilized, about the wild versus the tame. It is about the place for custom and tradition in a free society, and the vital role that history plays in the conscience of a nation. It is about the sexual revolution and its destruction of marriage and family. It is, in the end, about what makes a civilization civil, and how we choose to live with one another, charitably and safely, freely and respectfully.

The course to Easter is set before us. We begin to consider considering our own hearts and minds and bodies. What to add, what to take away. What to permit, what to deny. In this way one day we will become strong enough to walk on real grass in blinding light with glorious song. In this way we will learn how to love.

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Thanksgiving for Families

Posted on November 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

It has been said that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. We don’t always get along with our siblings, our parents, our children. But we know they will always be our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Family bonds, however fragile, bear stress better than other bonds, but even these can break when hearts are broken.

Just so, we speak of our parish family, using similar words. Here too, the bonds are stronger than friendship, or perhaps different than friendship, more like family bonds. Common beliefs run deep like underground rivers, not always seen, but necessary to the watering of roots. As sacramental Christians, we believe that when we partake of God at his altar, he unites us with one another, past and future. God joins us, and he enjoins us to love one another in a special way. He enjoins us to invite all and everyone into this holy family. All are invited to his table; we are siblings, with one God the Father and one Mother the Church.

And like biological families, we do not always get along. Sometimes I think that because the belief and altar bonds are so deep we trespass on kindness, we assume assent and approval. We might push one another too far, for we sense things will all sort themselves out in time. I hear many such stories of other parishes, and witness such events in our own parish life. Because we love one another, we are close, and because we are close we have more to gain and more to lose, just like a natural family. Our hearts and souls are exposed for all to see.

We are all in training for Heaven, to sing with the family of God and the angels, the white-robed martyrs and the great prophets and apostles, with our ordinary, extraordinary brothers and sisters who have made the journey ahead of us. Our time on earth is a testing time, a time of trial and formation, of growth, of sanctification.

Ideally, within the natural family we learn discipline and delayed gratification. We learn to look out for one another. We learn work habits – beginnings, middles, and finishings. We learn to pass the potatoes and share a meal with one another. We learn to converse, to lace words into phrases so that we can touch the person alongside, to bring our minds and hearts together for a brief moment, like dancing. We learn the liturgy of the family, the morning rising and breakfasting and heading out for work and school, the coming together in the evening, lighting a supper candle, holding hands and saying grace, the washing up, the struggling through homework, the shared moments of recreation in the time left, the evening prayers, the slipping into sleep. It is a dance in which we never lose touch never let go of one another, as we follow the notes and the rhythm of family life. We learn to love by learning the law of love – the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not murder, lie, steal, covet; thou shalt honor God, honor parents, honor husband and wife. The law of love is straightforward, simple. The law of love is crucial, the center of the Cross.

In this daily dance we may not always get along, but the rituals pull us through anger and frustration, through selfishness, greed, envy, and other mishaps of our souls. We might fight with one another, spar, test, lash out or “vent” as is said today (as though we were machines), but with God’s grace, we apologize, we make amends by amending ourselves in humility, by repenting and reforming, by turning around. The family, hopefully, teaches us how to do this, or tries to, and in this daily hymn of life, we school our children to be part of larger families: the community, the town, the nation, the world. 

So we give thanks this Thanksgiving not only for families but for our national family, for the United States of America. We give thanks for this incredible experiment in democracy. Earlier this month we gave thanks for those who fought for our country to preserve her freedoms. Now we give thanks for those who founded her, who birthed her. 

Will America need to be re-found, re-born? Will she survive these challenging times? Will she crumble as the family crumbles under the weight of easy divorce, easy sex, easy abortion, easy love? Without the school of the family, this remarkable training ground in the law of love, will we find ourselves in a wilderness, a wild-ness, a human jungle in which an elderly woman is punched out by a heartless teen or a tourist is shot for the fun of it, a jungle in which girls and boys die from binge drinking, drugs, and Internet bullying, in which babies are slaughtered, thrown out, before they breathe their first breath?

As Americans, our beliefs in freedom run deep like a river, unseen, assumed and unquestioned. Do we take these freedoms for granted? Do we exercise our rights without considering the accompanying responsibilities that support those rights? Are our American roots in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, roots that tap the deep waters of freedom of speech and religion – are these roots shriveling underground and unseen? Are we paying attention to their dying?

This Thanksgiving week, as we gather together the fragments of of our families, those from near and far, those members whom we like and those whom we don’t, we give thanks for this a-gathering, in church and at home, before altars and hearths. We give thanks for our freedom to gather in the squares and legislatures of our land. We give thanks for law and order, such as it is. We give thanks for family life that trains us for participation in a greater American life. 

And we pray that we, a nation founded under God, will preserve and protect those institutions that water liberty and a love for one another: the family and the church.

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On Princes and Kings

Posted on July 28, 2013 | Leave a comment

This last week a prince was born to the House of Windsor. 

A sudden intake of air, a soft gasp of delight, was heard around the world. We sighed with joy when we learned of the birth of Prince George Alexander Louis in a London hospital. Royalty comes and goes, rises and falls in public opinion, but this week all the world watched and waited for the birth, then listened for the name. We heard the melody, the song that births new life. 

We do not have royalty in America, at least none that we officially recognize. We treat Hollywood stars like royalty, to be sure. And we place some politicians on pedestals that crumble all too quickly beneath them. We yearn for the royalty we do not have, so we make it up as we go along. We yearn for the kingship of God. 

There must have been a similar moment of sudden delight two thousand-plus Christmases ago when kings in the East saw the magnificent star rise in the night sky, portending great things for the peoples of the earth. They too must have experienced a hushed expectancy, wonder, and joy. They sensed a right and good thing had happened, was coming among them. They followed the star to the manger-cave outside Bethlehem. There they knelt before the Prince of Peace, the King of Kings, the Son of God. 

Humanity, I believe, has an innate, if not always recognized, love of God and desire for Him, a hope that streams through our very being. So when a prince is born, even though he be royalty of human making, there is a collective sigh. The prince in the London hospital, third in line to the throne of England, recalls the true prince, the Prince of Peace. 

This love of God informs our ceremonial rites of passage, times when we join man and woman in marriage, times when we celebrate birth in baptism, times when we support the family that is the protector of life and the genesis of the future, in inter-generational gatherings. And the family extends to church family which reaches out to community and country and world, the family of God. 

My niece visited this last week and introduced us to her fiance.   We shared their announcement with other family members, and made a special visit to my mother so that my niece could introduce her young man to her 93-year-old grandmother. Once again I heard the melody of divine purpose, repeating in a different key that song streaming from the heart of God. This man and woman will join together in public ceremony, for marriage is important to societal well-being.  They will vow to love one another in sickness and in health. They will exchange rings. They will become one flesh and will welcome new life into their newly formed family. They will give to the world the next generation, just as Kate and William have given the next generation to the House of Windsor. 

Of course there were wars and rumors of wars in the news this week too. Many are suffering, troubled, lost. Many do not know God, do not hear his music or his invitation to dance with him in the great dance of life. Many are alone, have chosen to cover their ears, not wanting to hear the music.

My week hovered in my mind as I gathered the children around the shiny yellow table in Sunday School this morning. The younger ones colored, and the older ones worked on memory assignments. As we worked together we talked about the Resurrection of Christ, the Prince who became our King, about God’s great love for us, sending his son to die for us. Now, as I write this, I see how it all forms a pattern, a poem, a concerto. Marriage, children, God’s stunning love song weaving through our midst. How do we hear his song? Because a woman named Mary Magdalene was witness to the risen Christ and ran to tell the others. Because the others wrote it all down and we have the words they wrote. And the words form a melody.

A child was born that Christmas night two thousand years ago. A prince was given to us. Heaven’s melody rose to full symphony with harps and strings and trumpets. The world rejoiced, the forests wept with happiness, the stars danced, the seas roared, for a royal prince was born. The prince would live, die, and live again. He would be crowned King of Kings.

Earthly kings pale to our Heavenly King, yet we respond to the birth of an earthly prince because we have known, and know, a true Heavenly Prince. God’s love song fills our hearts and minds and we give thanks for every marriage and every birth, every miraculous joining and every breath of new life.

Thanks be to God.

 

 

 

 

 

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On Freedom

Posted on July 1, 2013 | 1 comment

It is with a reflective pause that I approach this Fourth of July, 2013, for it seems to me we have never before faced so many threats to our freedoms as Christians and to our freedoms as Americans, as part of a culture steeped in a Judeo-Christian ethos.

The encroachments have been small and sliding, one here, one there, hard to trap, painful to face, difficult to define, control, and challenge. The most recent – the Supreme Court’s definition of marriage – has, I believe, harmed the traditional family and thus has harmed the Church, two pillars of our society. The answer perhaps is to change the naming, the wording, and call marriage “traditional marriage” and not simply marriage to separate it from other forms, for polygamy and incest will soon follow (there is no legal argument against either now). Either way, the government has decided to no longer support the traditional family as a vital institution in American society, one to be encouraged for the sake of the country.

Of course the family has been assaulted for many years, at least since the 1960s. The birth control pill divorced sex from procreation, and redefined marriage. We wanted our sexual freedom without responsibility. We wanted to marry and not necessarily have children. These desires naturally led to the right to kill those children in the womb. When we fell out of love, when the bliss settled into everyday reality, we embraced the chance to deny our marriage vows.

I have been divorced, and I know the heartache and trials that preclude, include, and result in divorce. I do not defend easy divorce – we must take stock seriously any act that threatens the family.

Yes, I pause each year and count our freedom-losses as we approach Independence Day. The Founders knew the importance not only of faith and family, but of free speech, and the harnessing of free speech is part of that  freedom-loss count. For language has been vandalized, truth has been put on trial, and in many cases Christians have been muzzled, afraid of offending.

If we deny our Judaic-Christian ethos, what have we as a nation? What rights, what freedoms are left to protect?

I read recently an article by Mary Eberstad, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, that was most encouraging. She believes that when we hit rock bottom and realize that the government cannot possibly afford all it promises, that it cannot replace the family as a social institution of caregivers and educators, passing on the values of our society, that the government will wake up and support the institution of family once again. We pray this will happen sooner than later, at least the realization, and that there will be an America still to protect and an institution of family still to revive.

So this year, I celebrate the freedoms we have left, which are many. Conservatives and Christians – Christian conservatives and conservative Christians – can still speak out. We can still meet in the public square. Our voice can be still be heard, even if faint, often muzzled and, more effectively, ridiculed. There is time, but the clouds gather. The pulpit is threatened, print is threatened, public education is threatened.

As a Christian, I believe what the Church says is true: God wins in the end. But I love my country, I love my culture, I love the freedom and creative energy of Americans. I love that someone like my husband, a “poor boy from East Oakland,” as he has often called himself, could rise in a major corporation through sacrifice and hard work.

But the values of sacrifice and hard work are part of this body of traditional values that is dying. Without marriage and the family this treasure will not be passed on to the next generation. Many of our public schools no longer teach those values or where they came from. They no longer teach American History, World History, the History of Western Civilization, the past that shows us what makes civilization civil. And what does make civilization civil? The Judeo-Christian heritage upon which our Founders founded our nation.

Many have fought for these values, many continue to fight around the world. Martyrs die daily for their faith. Soldiers lay down their lives.

We celebrate these men and women, and our Founders and our freedoms. We raise the flag on the Fourth of July. But we also kneel in prayer as never before.

Here’s to thee, America the Beautiful!

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On Fathers

Posted on June 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

Fathers are like shepherds. They find us when we are lost. They protect us from scattering too far. In their love for us, they un-scatter us. They bring us home. 

Mid-June often seems to me a time of summer scattering until the gathering together of fall. It is both an ending and a beginning. 

We graduate, we vacation, we shift into a different tempo. Children move from school’s structured days to summer camps and summer sessions. They continue their lessons, but in one-week or two-week time bursts. I sometimes wonder if any spend their summers as I did in the ‘fifties – biking to the library, reading, climbing trees and building tree-forts, digging with teaspoons to make mud pies to serve alongside imaginary tea from real china cups (yes, my mother knew), selling lemonade from a card table (5 cents), dancing through sprinklers in the heat of July. Frequent games of tag. Lotsa running. Hopscotch and jump-rope. Badminton. Jacks. Playing outside till dusk turned dark.

I don’t recall being bored, but I have to admit, when mid-August arrived I looked forward to school starting in September. My mother bought plaid wool by the yard and sewed new skirts for my sister and me. We looked forward to the yearly shopping trip to Union Square in San Francisco for matching cardigans, winter coats, and saddle shoes, maybe white bucks. We looked forward to our special treat – Coffee Crunch Cake at Blum’s.

For the most part we stayed home or carried home with us on house trailer trips. We did not scatter into classes, sports, structured times that would entertain us, pull us apart. It seems to me, looking back, that my sister and I also saw more of my father during the summer, because of the slower pace and the lack of scattering, but that might be an illusion of the past. 

We honor our fathers this Father’s Day. We honor those who pull us back into our family, un-scatter us, regroup us, reground us. Mothers of course do this too, but fathers have a role unique to their gender, unquantifiable, indescribable, perhaps unlimited in its stunning influence. Mothers give life; they feed and clothe, no small thing. Fathers make it possible for mothers to mother. Fathers shelter and protect; they guard and redeem. They carry their children home like shepherds carrying lost sheep. 

My father’s income as a pastor, shepherd to his Presbyterian flock, was meager and our sole support, for my mother did not work outside the home. We had one car and it seemed adequate from my child’s viewpoint. We lived in a manse. But there were fights over money and spending and pennies saved, heated discussions that flared on the edges of my younger years. Even so, my sister and I were sheltered from the brunt of these storms, and we led an un-scattered childhood, one focused on family, church, school, and gathering together at meals and bath and bedtime. And even though there were few pennies saved, I learned discipline as I worked my way through college. I valued every penny earned. 

I recall a giant fir that shaded our front lawn. How many summers did I spend stretched out on the grass, munching an apple and reading in the cool of that tree? A father is like that tree, offering a place to rest in the heat of the day. My father was like that, and I was happy. I grow happy now as I write this, thinking about those years. And I am so thankful. 

It was a simpler time, they say, and today is different with more distractions. I suppose. Simpler time or not, meager income or not, my father gave me a grounding that I shall never lose, even as I scatter myself and am scattered by the grown-up winds and rain that rage about me, scattered by the structured distractions of this un-simple time. 

My father passed away from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 1981, age sixty-four, thirty-two years ago on May 14. We didn’t have much and that may even have been a good thing, for we were rich in our love for one another. We held each other close, not pushed apart, and my father always found us if we stayed out too long playing on those hot summer nights. He found us and brought us inside for Scrabble, Clue, and bedtime stories. 

He was a shepherd and he cared for his sheep.

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