Relocating To Elfland

“Let it be the principal part of your care and labour in all their education, to make holiness appear to them the most necessary, honourable, gainful, pleasant, delightful, amiable state of life; and to keep them from apprehending it either as needless, dishonourable, hurtful, or uncomfortable. Especially draw them to the love of it, by representing it as lovely. And therefore begin with that which is easiest and most grateful to them (as the history of the Scripture, and the lives of the martyrs, and other good men, and some short, familiar lessons). For though in restraining them from sin, you must go to the highest step at first, and not think to draw them from it by allowing them the least degree; (for every degree disposeth to more, and none is to be allowed, and a general reformation is the easiest as well as absolutely necessary;) yet in putting them upon the practice of religious duties, you must carry them on by degrees, and put them at first upon no more than they can bear; either upon the learning of doctrines too high and spiritual for them, or upon such duty for quality or quantity as is over-burdensome to them; for if you once turn their hearts against religion, and make it seem a slavery and a tedious life to them, you take the course to harden them against it. And therefore all children must not be used alike; as all stomachs must not be forced to eat alike. If you force some to take so much as to become a surfeit, they will loathe that sort of meat as long as they live. I know that nature itself, as corrupt, hath already an enmity to holiness, and I know that this enmity is not to be indulged in children at all; but withal I know that misrepresentations of religion, and imprudent education, is the way to increase it, and that the enmity being in the heart, it is the change of the mind and love that is the overcoming of it, and not any such constraint as tendeth not to reconcile the mind by love. The whole skill of parents for the holy education of their children, doth consist in this, to make them conceive of holiness as the most amiable and desirable life; which is by representing it to them in words and practice, not only as most necessary, but also as most profitable, honourable, and delightful. Prov. iii. 17, ‘Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace,’ &c.” (Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory, p. 451)

It has been some time since I read anything with so much enthusiasm as this three-part article by Leon Kass: part 1, part 2, part 3. I was first introduced to Leon and Amy Kass through their work, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying. The present article should be digested by every serious-minded modern Christian; I do not believe there is any hope for the revolution Kass longs to see – and of which our civilization stands in the direst possible need – except through a revitalized Christendom in which God’s people resolutely refuse to continue their compromises with the spirit of the age. (For those who may be interested, and who wondered about the ellipses in Kass’s article, here is a link to the full original piece.)

“This is . . . the glory and honor of man as king of creation: ‘Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue and have dominion . . .’ (Gn. 1:25). Each family is indeed a kingdom, a little church, and therefore . . . a way to the Kingdom. Somewhere, even if it is only in a single room, every man at some point in his life has his own small kingdom. It may be hell, and a place of betrayal, or it may not. Behind each window there is a little world going on. How evident this becomes when one is riding on a train at night and passing innumerable lighted windows: behind each one of them the fullness of life is a ‘given possibility,’ a promise, a vision. This is what [marriage ceremonies] express: that here is the beginning of a small kingdom which can be something like the true Kingdom. The chance will be lost, perhaps even in one night; but at this moment it is still an open possibility. Yet even when it has been lost, and lost again a thousand times, still if two people stay together, they are in a real sense king and queen to each other. And after forty odd years, Adam can still turn and see Eve standing beside him, in a unity with himself which in some small way at least proclaims the love of God’s Kingdom. In movies and magazines the ‘icon’ of marriage is always a youthful couple. But once, in the light and warmth of an autumn afternoon, this writer saw on the bench of a public square, in a poor Parisian suburb, an old and poor couple. They were sitting hand in hand, in silence, enjoying the pale light, the last warmth of the season. In silence: all words had been said, all passion exhausted, all storms at peace. The whole life was behind – yet all of it was now present, in this silence, in this light, in this warmth, in this silent unity of hands. Present – and ready for eternity, ripe for joy. This to me remains the vision of marriage, of its heavenly beauty.” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World)

My father was a primary school educator for thirty-nine years. He and my mother reared a family of three children, all of whom are walking faithfully with the Lord. He did all this while serving as a lay pastor for some dozen years. Let’s just say he knows a lot about people, and about little people in particular. When he speaks, I listen.

Recently he and I were discussing why communication breaks down between parents and their “teenage” children (I don’t believe in the whole notion of “teens,” incidentally, but that’s another story). He gave me a huge window of insight when he told me that, in his experience, around the age of eight children stop looking for meaningful engagement (“connection,” as it is sometimes called) with their parents and start looking to their peers instead. But a main reason, he said, why children stop trying to engage with their parents around this age is that the parents have made it clear they’re not really interested. Often, the children have been not just neglected or ignored; they know their parents find them downright irritating. The reason for the social and attitudinal transition, then, lies in general with the parents, not the children (who simply take their relational needs to those who will respond, i.e., their peers).

Running this through the grid of my own experience, it’s important to know what my father has in mind when he speaks of meaningful engagement. I know a lot of Christian parents try very hard to be involved in the lives of their young children. They are not passive – the kind of dads who sit in front of the television all evening, the kind of moms who visibly want to escape from their children at every opportunity. But it needs to be observed that one can do a lot of things with and for one’s children (take them to soccer games, attend school plays and PTA meetings, even read books and play games) and still not necessarily engage them meaningfully. One can, as a Christian parent, even have consistent family worship, catechize, and talk to one’s children, and still not engage them meaningfully. The last preposition is important: talking to a child is not the same thing as talking with a child in a way that opens up his or her inner thought-world, the heart out of which issue the springs of his or her life. And it is this latter kind of communication my father has in mind, and which he and my mother practiced brilliantly in rearing me.

Building a bridge to another human heart takes effort, whether that human is young or old. One must ask questions without intimidating. One must take more time than one reasonably has. One must learn to think the way another person thinks, which is often about as much fun as learning to speak a foreign language. One must encounter alien fears, alien joys, alien sorrows, alien ways of processing information. This is acutely difficult with children, especially young children who know next to nothing about communicating (do tantrums count?). It takes effort to figure out why a child is angry or sad. It takes effort to figure out how to help a child connect what she knows with something she doesn’t yet know. It takes effort to value what a little boy values. It is painstaking to intuit what is making a child’s eyes gleam with pleasure, or flash with frustration. How is one to see and feel what a child sees and feels when the child can’t articulate it? But then, are these problems so very different from those we encounter with other adults? Is it ever easy to cross the grand canyon between ourselves and another soul?

But the proof of a pudding, as they say, is in the eating. When a child has grown up with parents who expend the effort to “connect”; when a child has never known a day when it is not the most natural thing in the world to talk eye-to-eye with mom and dad; when a child learns from day one that mom and dad care deeply about what’s going on inside him, even when (especially when) he is being a real brat; this is the capital from which a family draws in challenging years when self-consciousness emerges with a vengeance, and the world is filled with recalcitrant questions and drives. I passed through some very troubled water as a “teen,” but it was too late – my heart was already knit to my parents. Even when I slammed the door as hard as I could in their faces, I couldn’t escape the fact that I wanted them to beat it down. I wanted to talk to them about what was going on inside, because that was how it had been for years.

I might add that parents who have the hearts of their children, and energetically maintain this privilege, need not fear usurpation by peers. Influences will come, but there is a basis to work with a child in responding to those influences, as one sees in the opening chapters of Proverbs. There is no formula here, and cases are different, but as a general rule the child who enjoys meaningful engagement with his or her parents from the earliest years will not be eager to give this up. It will even be possible to draw peers into this engagement; it will be possible for parents to care for their children’s peers whose home lives are a wreck. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Scenario #1 [in a Christian home near you]: After a family dinner in which all present have been noisily discussing vacation plans, the father pulls his Bible off the shelf and reads a chapter to his family, interspersing one or two comments. The atmosphere in the room is instantly changed: the mother listens politely, without response; the children stare off into space, visibly waiting for this to be over, and answer their father’s occasional questions in bored monosyllables.

Scenario #2 [in the same home, at the same meal]: After closing in prayer, the father asks, “What did you all think of Iron Man 2?” The room fairly explodes with breathless responses (including extended quotations and reenactments), which carry on for the next thirty minutes.

So here’s my question: What has happened in this Christian home (and a thousand others like it), that the Word of the Lord of heaven and earth is treated not even with respect, let alone genuine interest, while a silly popcorn flick can carry the conversation for hours?

To be clear, I am not saying our response to the Word of God should resemble the way we react to a popcorn flick. Family worship shouldn’t look like movie night, any more than a Shakespeare reading should look like movie night. But something is wrong, surely, when those in a Christian household “check out” at the opening of the scriptures.

Few things are more discouraging to me as a pastor than seeing this household issue writ large in the church community. Sometimes I ask myself: What would it take to see fathers speak to their families in worship, with every member on the edge of his or her seat? What would it take to see discussions of Sabbath sermons in which every participant, young and old, is intently engaged? What would it take for God’s people to be so “into” the thought-world of their scriptures that they prefer to speak of its teachings, histories, promises, and precepts rather than the latest cheap entertainment? Warfront soldiers do not tolerate news of battle plans and progress; they long for any word that will give them encouragement, direction, and help in the struggle at hand. Yet to observe the soldiers of Christ in many homes and churches, one would think they are soldiers on holiday, who want nothing less than to hear anything about the realities of war.

In fairness, it may be that the father in our scenarios has never done the hard work of engaging the minds, hearts, and imaginations of his household. They may be bored because he is boring; and they imagine, then, that God and His kingdom are boring. Or he may be a hypocrite, full of pious words while living a pagan life, and they see right through it. And certainly a word must be said about personality: there are strong silent types who will never say much in response to the Word – but I have known big burly quiet types whose silence conceals a burning heart, and who stand ready in the moment of battle to do mighty exploits for their King.

“He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments; and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God” (Ps 78:5–8).

I know of no more urgent task in the modern church than to recover and execute this mandate. O God! make us faithful to it.

What would it take, I ask myself, to see the young generation in our Reformed churches develop what one friend of mine calls “an intelligent passion” for Christ and His kingdom? What would move them beyond mediocre conformity to pop culture or (perhaps even less savory) “churchy” culture? What would bring them to a place of reflective, critical, responsible, transformational engagement with the real world in which we find ourselves today?

It’s going to have to start at home, and to be honest, I can’t figure out what a lot of parents are thinking these days. Their offspring are given unlimited electronic access to everything under the sun, with no apparent supervision, and very little apparent instruction. The children spent most of their waking hours fraternizing with fools, without even the add-on of consistent catechizing and family worship, let alone serious conversations about a Christian philosophy of life. And then the parents are mystified when their kids turn out to be functional pagans by the age of twenty. This whole way of doing things has got to change. What is the better way?

Children develop an intelligent faith by interacting extensively with people who love them and who have an intelligent faith. Children don’t develop an intelligent faith by being told simply to believe certain things, without explanation, without interaction, without exploration of the hard questions that inevitably hang around the fringes of our finitude. If they can’t ask such questions and feel that the questions are being taken seriously, they will eventually (and sensibly) conclude that the faith they are being told to believe just isn’t defensible.

Children develop a passionate faith by interacting extensively with people who love them and who have a passionate faith. Passionate faith is faith that is profoundly connected to God through worship and to the real world through whole-life discipleship.

Passionate faith is systematically eroded when children are taught they are in “limbo” with God until they sustain some kind of spiritual rite of passage (dramatic “conversion,” for example). It is nurtured, conversely, when children see their role models passionately loving and worshipping God, and when they are taught that this wonderful God is their God from conception, fully and truly, without qualification.

Passionate faith is also eroded when children are taught that the real world is bad, dangerous, and best avoided by staying put in a Christian ghetto. Parents with a separatist view of culture and a pessimistic view of history will not be passionately engaged with the real world, and neither will their children (until they grow curious enough to go exploring on their own). Conversely, parents who enact before their children a delight in all created things, who have a robust theology of celebration and cultivation, who are up to speed on cultural developments and manifest a great love for what is good and a great hatred for what is evil, and who expect the kingdom of God to grow and flourish through the taking captive of every thought and every human enterprise, will be parents whose passion – both loving and hating – will be contagious for their children.

But if intelligent passion begins in the home, it can’t be confined to the home. Children need influences other than their parents; at any rate, such influences are unavoidable. So let young boys “hang out” with older men in the church, shooting guns, catching fish, building campfires, playing ball, reading poetry, grooving to music, watching films, and talking theology – and let them see that this manly life is good. Let young girls “hang out” with older women in the church, baking bread, decorating bedrooms, refinishing furniture, discussing economics, chasing little ones at the beach, making clothes, visiting museums, and taking in opera – and let them see that this womanly life is good. It does indeed take a community to rear a child, because children need to see that their parents aren’t crazy, but are part of an entire active polis called the city of God, the wildly diverse yet passionately thoughtful and engaging fellowship of His covenant people.

There is much more to be said, but I hope this gestures in the right direction.

It is important to love our children. But how does God love His creatures and His children? He enjoys them. He declares them good. He sings for joy over them. Do our children feel this kind of love from us?

I know of no more urgent question facing Christian fathers than this: Do I have the hearts of my children? The father who does not see the importance of this question is almost certainly already losing the hearts of his children to someone else. Deep down our children love someone. Deep down they delight in someone. Deep down they trust and admire someone. Deep down they are open to someone and want his or her input. If that person isn’t you, Dad, you’re losing your kids. They may look okay on the outside, but you’re losing them. 

It’s easy when they’re young. Children want to be open toward their father when they’re young. They will hug you and kiss you and be glad to see you when you get home from work. But if you aren’t thinking about what it takes to win and keep and guard their hearts, a day is coming when their response to you will fall somewhere between indifference and hostility. And as they regard you, their earthly father, so they will regard their heavenly Father. Mark it down. I have seen it so many times it makes my heart sick. 

I don’t want my children to tolerate conversations with me at any stage in their development. I don’t want them to endure family worship or public worship at any stage in their development. I don’t want them just to have a head full of Christian facts, ideas, and rules, either, while their heart is elsewhere. I want children who want to know God, who really enjoy being His children, whose souls burn with sincere passion for the Lord their God; who ask unprompted the question, “What has God made me do? How can I bring glory to Him in the earth? Tell me! Let me at it!” 

If this doesn’t happen (and giving due allowance for causes outside my control), it’s because I haven’t done the hard work of interacting with my children lovingly, sincerely, and thoughtfully all the days of their lives. It’s because I haven’t fulfilled the commands of Deuteronomy 6:7. I’m not talking here about talking at my children: lecturing them, filling their ears with the noise of my voice. I’m talking about talking with my children as together we walk the path of life, sharing meaningful hours. This means rebuking and disciplining them, yes; it means catechizing and teaching, yes. It also means listening to music and watching films together, going on hikes and to ballgames together, building forts and reading great books together – and in all of this seeking to find out what is really going on in their heads, entering their thought-world in such a way that they become comfortable with my presence there, even welcome it. It means listening to their questions in such a way that they know I have really heard them (and, by the way, immediate longwinded answers are a sure way to ensure no further questions will be forthcoming). It means being courteous to my children, treating them with the same respect I extend to humans outside my home. I know Christian youth who from toddlerhood have been treated so rudely and sharply by their parents, that eventually (and naturally!) they simply respond in kind. Beyond all of this, it means enacting joyful faith in front of my children, so they get the idea my God is delightful, that He is worthy to be known and worshipped and served. 

Christians frequently talk as if all of this is fine with young children, but once the “teen years” roll in, all bets are off. Well, let me put it bluntly. The “teen years” are hard: this is a season of life in which major physical and intellectual transitions are occurring, and as in all transitional periods, there are difficulties to be traversed. Ugly teen years, however, in which Christian youth drift farther and farther from their parents and their God, are the fruit of bad parenting. Your child’s heart is a garden entrusted to you by God, and if it is full of weeds, it happened on your watch (again, giving due allowance for causes genuinely beyond your control). And make no mistake: a garden full of weed-seeds bears weeds, every time. An illustration: One Christian teen frequently posts quotes from great Christian thinkers on her Facebook site. Why? Because deep inside she is pondering this stuff; it genuinely interests her. Another Christian teen posts profanity and pictures of himself drinking with his girlfriend. Why? Because deep inside he is giving the finger to his parents, his Christian upbringing, and ultimately God Himself. What is in his heart comes out on Facebook. And it didn’t get there last week. 

“My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes observe my ways” (Prov 23:26). This is the pulse of Christian parenting. A child whose heart has been in the hand of a godly father all of his life will find, when he comes to adulthood, that his heart has been in the hand of God since before he can remember – it will be a joy to give his heart to his Father in heaven, because he has been doing that, under the tutelage of his earthly father, all along.