“Teach Your Children”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
May 14, 2006
READINGS :
Our first reading is from the Biblical Book of Mark:
And they were bringing children to Him so that He might touch them; but the disciples rebuked them.
But when Jesus saw this, He was indignant and said to them, "Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
"Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all."
And He took them in His arms and began blessing them, laying His hands on them.
Our second reading is from the book, “Teaching Peace: How to Raise Children to Live in Harmony, Without Fear, Without Prejudice, Without Violence ,” by Jan Arnow.
Play is the way children practice for the adult world. Anyone who has watched a small child playing with a simple wooden airplane knows how a toy can stimulate a child’s imagination. Toys and games are the turnstile through which the child passes to enter the adult world. Playtime should be a magical juncture during which children can feel strong and empowered. When they play, children should be able to work on their understanding between make-believe and reality; they should begin to comprehend and process basic ideas about morals and values; and they should be learning about cooperation and the needs of others. Increasingly, however, as toys of aggression, conflict and war proliferate, playtime is beginning to resemble more tour of duty than a series of magic moments…
Violence in our society is at an all time high, and children are increasingly involved as active participants. Children’s toys, it seems, are teaching them that war and killing are perfectly acceptable methods of dealing with conflict.
SERMON:
Today, being Mother's Day, I want to give fitting tribute to mothers, those who are here and those who mothered those of us who are here. I was a stay-at-home dad and so I know a little something about mothering and motherhood. The parts I don't know anything about -- it's OK with me that I don't know about them. I can honor those parts wholeheartedly, from a place of very grateful ignorance.
Some of us here had great relationships with our mothers; some of us had not such a good relationship, and the rest of us had relationships somewhere in between. I include myself in that last category, although my mom's and my relationship was definitely weighted on the positive side of the spectrum. A sadness in my life is that she has lingered with Alzheimer's without mercy for the past dozen years. On a less serious note, another sadness regarding my mother was that she was a terrible cook. Fortunately, I didn't realize that until later in life when I was introduced to much better cooking. In high school for example, I seriously didn't understand my classmates bemoaning cafeteria food. I thought it was great!
But I'm not here today to talk about my mother. In fact, I'm not even going to remain focused on motherhood except as it relates to parenthood. I just wanted to begin by acknowledging mothers and to say to those who are present here, in body or in spirit, thank you. We couldn't have made it without you. To some very large degree we owe our lives to you. So, thank you.
There are two particular parenting issues which I do want to address with you this morning, issues that are important to all of us whether we have children at home or not. These issues may seem to be unrelated on the surface, but I suspect the case to be quite otherwise on a deeper level. The reason that I wanted to sing, "Teach Your Children," with you earlier, mixing it in with all of the other beautiful music that Artis Wodehouse and the choir have provided, is because in the end – with both of these issues – the song points us in the direction of finding ourselves in right-relationship with our children. The direction can be found in the balance of the two lines: "Teach your children well “and,” Teach your parents well."
The first issue is one that arose for me last year, when our General Assembly of UU congregations was held in Ft. Worth, Texas. My daughter Shana, being an environmental political activist, also goes to General Assembly every year. She runs an information booth for her group, Forest Ethics, in the display area. One morning Shana asked me if I would be willing to attend a panel workshop being presented by a group of older teens and young adults, who had grown up in Unitarian Universalist families and had experienced trans-cultural and trans-racial adoption.
She explained that this workshop was the second of a two-part series. The first session had taken place the day before, when the young people had tried to share some of the difficulties that they had experienced in their adoptive families, in their schools, in their churches, and in the broader culture. Evidently, the parents of a couple of the kids had shown up to protest the workshop. These parents had complained that their parenting had been misrepresented, and they attempted to keep their children from saying things that would be painful for them to hear in public.
You may not be familiar with the power of Unitarian Universalist youth when they gather to express their support for, or to demonstrate against, a cause. Those of you who were here for our Coming-Of-Age service last week might imagine just how much pressure could be brought to bear by a couple of hundred young people of a similar spirit. The youth were going to be there and it sounded as though the second workshop was going to turn into more of a political melee than an informative discussion. I thought it would probably be a good idea to be there, not just because Shana had asked, but as a member of the Board of Trustees of the UUA just in case my presence might prove to be helpful.
The parents who had felt that they had been wronged the day before must have thought better than to challenge the presentation on the second day. At any rate, what I experienced from this panel discussion was one of the most informative and moving experiences that I had for the entire General Assembly. I heard five or six young people, representing Asian American, African American, and Latin American adoptees, talk about the experience of living in middle to upper middle class white families. They had had many similar experiences. In the broader culture a number of them felt invisible and often discriminated against. In their schools they were often verbally jeered at, and felt despised. Even in their Unitarian Universalist congregations, many of them felt that there was an assumption that their identity was culturally that of predominantly white middle-America, despite any of the characteristics to the contrary.
And in their homes, they often felt that, despite their parents’ best efforts otherwise, they had not been free to explore, to experience, and to develop the identity and culture of their native heritage or ethnicity. An annual camp experience with other children of similar backgrounds, or celebrations of native holidays, or even monthly trips for special cultural events, weren't enough. They felt that too often their native heritage had been kept from being a regular part of the milieu in which they were being raised. They didn't speak in an accusatory manner, nor was anger their predominant emotion. Tears flowed freely as they spoke to the over 250 people that had gathered. Some of the parents who were in the room also spoke. The respectful dialogue that ensued felt like somehow this public airing of their shared pain had allowed some deep wounds to begin healing.
What I came away from that experience with – besides a great deal of respect and appreciation for these young people, and for the complexity of the experiences they'd had growing up – was a realization of the need to address this issue here in our congregation, where there are many adoptive families with children of other races and cultures. I had the opportunity this past fall to sit down with two parents from one of our trans-cultural adoptive families. They assured me that this was an issue about which they were well aware and that they had spoken with other parents in the congregation who are also aware of the struggles.
I recognize that no one lives a life without struggles. I suspect that there is no one present who did not, or is not dealing with issues regarding differentiation from their parents. It's a natural part of the human process. Still, when there are cultural and racial issues that compound the differentiation process, they add layers of complexity to the relationship, which require heightened awareness and sensitivity.
I know that many of the parents from trans-racial/trans-cultural families in this congregation are already in communication with each other. I wonder though, if there is the need or the desire for an organized effort to get the families together, to allow the parents to teach the children and to allow the children to teach the parents things that some day they might otherwise all wish that they'd learned earlier along the way.
This isn't just an issue for these particular families. It is a cause for concern, awareness, and sensitivity for all of us. Together, we are going to send our collective children out into the world. What do the rest of us need to know in order to be responsible community partners with these families? At the very least, I think that we need to be in conversation. Beyond that, I think there are unlimited possibilities for partnership in creating a community in which all of our children know how very much they are cherished by the rest of us. I have no question at all regarding the preciousness with which we hold our community’s children; I do wonder sometimes though, just how much we communicate it to them.
The other issue of parenting, again that involves us all, which I wanted to at least raise this morning, is the issue of teaching children that in order to have a real value in this world, their Day-at-a-Glance notebooks or their Palm Pilot calendars should have no open spaces representing nonproductive time in them. I know that this is an issue in most of our adult lives, and it's one I suspect we are inadvertently passing along to our children. It's a cultural issue in a culture that is sweeping the nation, but one whose birthplace or epicenter is very close to us here. Many of us feel that our schedules are just something that we have to put up with. The truth is though, that our actions speak much louder than our words. Our message to our children is often too clearly – there is no time to spend going deeply into yourself or anything else – there are too many things that need to be juggled in order to keep our culture afloat.
I can remember not so many years ago when my own kids were coming through high school. With band practice, school newspapers to be written, literary magazines to be edited, TV news segments to be produced, volleyball practice and student government, I don't know how they added the three to four hours of studying at home that they managed at the end of their day, each evening. It's not like we told them they should do those things. To the contrary, we tried to tell them to slow down and take it easy a little bit. But evidently our actions were giving a different message.
I understand that what was a common workload for my kids in high school just a few years ago, is now becoming more the norm for kids in junior high and in middle school. "If our kids are going to make the most of their lives," we tell ourselves and inadvertently convey to them, "... we have to encourage them to get as much of a head start as possible."
Somewhere along the way, I think we've got some wires crossed. What parents instinctively want for their children is not merely for them to be busy. Parents want their children to learn how to care for themselves and to care for others, how to love and how to serve, and out of all that, how to be happy. Somehow in this overly commercial culture of ours, we began to equate success – particularly financial success – as the equivalent of all those other values. To some considerable extent, we've even replaced the other values with the value of success. We need to get our priorities in order. Being the best at something isn't necessarily understanding how to be the best at being. We need to help our children figure out how to be in order for them to determine what they need to do.
"Teach your parents well..." I suspect that we older folks would do well by taking a page from our kids’ books in this regard. Young people tend to be way better at slowing the pace and noticing the world around them. At least that's true if they haven't already fully adopted our breakneck pace and tunnel vision focus.
In her book, "Teaching Peace," Jane Arnow says that, "Play is the way children practice for the adult world." I would suggest that it is also true that play can be the way for adults to practice building a world that our children will deserve to inherit. In the book of Mark, Jesus puts it this way, "Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all." However we might interpret or imagine the kingdom of God, I have to suspect it is some kind of aspirational world where we have transcended the traditional boundaries we typically are only too willing to fortify.
There are many elements that relate these two sets of parenting issues that I've put before you this morning. Both of them – trans-cultural and trans-racial adoption, as well as cramming our lives and our children's lives with opportunities for success – tell us to pay attention to what's really important. They tell us that parents teach children what's important to them, even when they don't mean to be teaching, even when it's not what they want their children to learn. And the children tell us that if we are wise enough, we will recognize that they can be our teachers, not so much about facts and data, as about who they are, who we are, and who we are together.
There's a passage in the Old Testament where Moses asks God, "Who are you?" And God responds, "I am who I am becoming." Through the ages as one generation gives way to the next, the transfer of wisdom and values, all that is abiding, this transferring of all that is truly important is humankind's way of being what we are becoming.
On this Mother's Day, on this day of honoring parentage, and on everyday, may we be mindful and grateful and of service to this great gift of life that we have been given. And may we pass it on lovingly, as the cherished gift which we have been blessed to be a part of, to those who come and will come after us.
Teach your children well. Teach your parents well.
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