The trees in Ipswich are showing that transparent, yellow-green beloved by Lynn-nore's Mom. I noticed several of them out the window of the breakroom during lunch today. I'd huddled next to a windowsill in order to warm in the incoming sunlight. On my lap, the book-of-the-week, with Eberhard Busch just beginning to lay out an insight into Barth's teaching of human responsibility in the light of grace that very well may update a conundrum faced by John G. and myself that goes back over 15 years! The windowsill was just large enough to serve as a convenient shelf for pen, highlighter and lunch, some of Lynn-nore's shepherd's pie from yesterday evening.
Until this week, my break reading has consisted of a little compendium of Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto, selections from Das Capital, Engel's English-language tract on socialism etc. It is hard to know what to do with Marx. But, he is at least teaching me one thing: the secret to wealth. As a Wall Street banker said when asked if he'd ever read Marx, "Oh, everyone here reads Marx. He understands capitalism!" The secret is simply this: wherever you can, own a means of production - property, stock, bonds, a business, etc.
This is one of my weaknesses, though. Honestly, I don't get things until they are explained to me on such a fundamental basis! Youth Ministry was awful for this. I spent most of my stint helping Lynn-nore trying to figure out just what the point of it all was. That was me, to cite something else, at pep rally's trying to figure out why everyone is getting so excited over something which resets every year and doesn't really *do* anything. I remember clearly Wes and I resolving to really "get into" a pep rally once and just being totally unable to do it, much to our own dissapointment. I have to have the suppositions down before I can really do or understand nearly everything, and this often causes immense interior and exterior frustration. On the other hand, mastery of anything is about majoring on the fundamentals, right? And don't we live in a world where less smoke and more sober and creative thinking would go a long way? (Ultimately, I determined that youth ministry is actually another word for the dual function of baby sitting those with children and removing children from the sight of those without. Teens scare people and make them uncomfortable. Come youth ministers and take these teens elsewhere! In short, youth ministry does far more harm than good. Teens would be much better served by being integrated into the real body life of the community, taking on responsibilities and learning with and from real adults than in being shunted off into a ghetto until they are old enough.)
Lynn-nore and I attended our fourth (?) session at Beacon on issues in parenting. (I may have referred to this a month ago.) Last night's session was all about discipline and, frankly, it made me think. Want to guess who the parental softy is in our house? This doesn't mean that Lynn-nore and I don't believe the same things - actually, we match up point for point on many goals and values (a real strength of our marriage is that we at least share the fundamentals - it is the communication of our mutual satisfaction with these that trips us up.) Rather, I tend to be a little softer on some things which I probably shouldn't. For example, I give in to the "just one more kiss/hug" lines at bedtime far too often. Whoops, don't you love/hate it when you get to talking about your kid(s) so that you start missing them?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
That parenthetical comment about youth ministry gave me pause. During my official "youth" days, I remember we would go on these retreats and trips to beaches and mountains where the youth:adult ratio was somewhere around 25:1, and we all loved it, basking in the illusion of quasi-autonymy. Whether that's healthy, well, I do wonder.
"Teens scare people and make them uncomfortable." I wonder if that's not the other way around, too, what with teens being made uncomfortable by adults, perhaps exceedingly so?
This "shunting into ghettos" happens with college students, too; at churches (at least in Columbia) large enough to have a separate ministry for the college students, they are separate from both the "youth" (teens) and the "adults." I think this is a ploy to give more "relevant" content for the segregated groups. The worries of adult singles or married couples ("mortgage") is categorically different than those of college students or teens ("romance"). Is this, though, IYO, damaging for all parties involved? What's the ideal?
Your comments are certainly true enough - even in a ghetto songs are sung, right? Yet, time and again youth pastors have the problem of disaffectation as kids move up into adult responsibilities. There isn't a sense of what is coming, or of how to think and respond to the challenges of such changes in a Christian fashion. The pursuit of relevance is ultimately irrelevant. The old need the young, and vice versa, and instead of expending multiple thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands to create false bubbles of faith, flesh and blood, face to face, prayer, discussion, confession, struggle - real life which requires only time and opportunity goes missing. We need to re-think our church structures toward integration - that's what I'm getting at, but this is certainly not to deny that nothing good goes on in the structures as we have them.
Post a Comment