Living word by word: Holy Week

On Holy Monday I wrote the following - - but it being holy week I didn’t get around to posting yet:

The cobbler’s children have no shoes. Or, you could say, the pastor’s children aren’t in church. Well, my children are in church – more regulary than most for sure. But what worries me is that our home reflects the classic split between liturgy as something we do at church and home as a place where more worldly concerns rule the day. The reason, in our case, is quite simple: in the “holiest” seasons of the year, I simply haven’t the time or energy to create a lot of home observance. We don’t serve a big Easter dinner and welcome friends and family. (Heck, we generally don’t have anyone over on ANY sabbath, though we do at least refrain from going to the mall.) My daughter will probably go to preschool this Good Friday because I am going to need the child care in order to get my sermons done and retain my sanity.

I grew up in a pastor’s family, and we were no holy rollers, but I do remember a sense of time being different. We were quiet on Good Friday. We had Sunday dinners. Yes, my mother DID work outside the home through a good part of my childhood. But she was not the pastor. My dad was. Maybe that’s the difference. Like it or not, the creation of family holidays – or even Sabbaths -- has traditionally been the work of women. And this women can’t do it for both a parish and a family at the same time. And my husband, no matter how good his intentions, has no gender-conditioned training in how to do such things. He just doesn’t think of it. He lives in guy time, which is basically “I’m either working or I’m not. And when I’m not I can play, and help out around the house. But I don’t plan.”

So the cobbler’s children have no shoes. Our children’s sense of sacred time is no better than that of any other family consumed by the daily demands of keeping the house reasonably safe (if not clean), food in the fridge and the parents reasonably sane. Maybe it will be easier when everyone in the house can feed and dress themselves. . . maybe.

NOW, on Good Friday, I’m re-thinking this confession. Maundy Thursday and Good Friday arrived all on their own at our house. Yesterday as Katie was playing with a neighbor girl, and since she was excited about going to an evening service with me (a privilege we can’t always grant due to bedtimes and her brother’s low tolerance level for anything after 6 p.m.), their first game was getting her magnetic dress-up dolls ready for church. Later as they were eating at the dining room table Katie pointed out her nativity set Jesus (Christmas is never over around here). “No!” Anneka replied “that’s God!” and then, “God died.” There you have it – Trinitarian theology right at the dinner table.

Then the real fun began they decided it would be a fun game to “make Johann cry”. Though I repeatedly said in no uncertain terms that that was not an acceptable game, the high spirits of a 4 and 5-year-old (the older of whom is herself a youngest child and doesn’t get much chance to bully a younger child) are hard to dampen. Despite my best oversight an opportunity to push the little one down (he’s top-heavy, so it’s pretty easy) presented itself, and Katie took it. There were tears, first from the baby and then from Katie when I angrily reprimanded her and suggested it was a good time for her playmate to head home.

And then we went to church.

The thing is, I in my J-ness often assume that faith formation is going to happen by my plan, and if I don’t get around to making my plans, then it’s not happening. But of course moments like these speak far more about what our faith is about than what we will eat on Easter. Sure, it helps to be prepared, but children and life in general are not a virtual template I can impose my teaching moments on. The cobbler’s children will grow at their own pace, just like everyone else’s.

Lent is nearly over and it’s time to come clean. I failed pretty miserably at my annual attempt at reducing consumerism during Lent. This practice started a few years ago when I realized that food restrictions did nothing for me spiritually – as a type A introvert I didn’t find that this kind of practice got me out of myself very much at all. So I decided to do something entirely different – I stopped buying books for Lent. If you have ever seen my house you know that this is no small thing. It was a helpful reminder to focus on what I already had, to stop looking over the horizon for the next idea, and it really saved me time browsing in bookstores and on line. (And no, it didn’t result in a book binge on Easter Monday – though going to the Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing every other year does seem to have that effect)

I liked the result so much that I expanded it the last few years to include other kinds of unnecessary spending – music, clothes, etc. Last year I threw away catalogs as soon as they arrived in the mail. This year, I imagined, I might actually call the companies and get off the lists permanently.

Well, that didn’t happen. And what I learned is that I’m very, very good at rationalizing behavior, and that I’m very very bad at getting “back on the wagon” once I’m off.

It was clothes that was the problem this year. And here’s my excuse: I’ve been either nursing or pregnant for the last 5 years, and I was finding that lots of my clothes don’t fit, or were hopelessly out of style. I honestly think I only had one pair of pants whose waistline didn’t go all the way up to my navel.

I started out thinking I would just clear out the old stuff – no need to buy new stuff right away. But the rush of clearing out the old got me so excited to fill the gaps that I went shopping one day – and then another day, and then another.

Now with 2 small children I can’t be in the mall very much. In fact, I hate malls so I only went there once. But a little bit of consumerism led to more. And then I was reading the catalogs again, and then I was actually paying attention to the fashion pages in the Star Tribune (why does a newspaper even need to cover fashion?). The low point came when I found myself not only perusing, but actually buying Lucky magazine at Walgreen’s. Why does a magazine entirely about shopping qualify as a magazine anyway? You’d think it would just be a big free ad circular. AND I PAID MONEY FOR IT!

So there you have it. I failed.

The point of Lenten disciplines is not to deprive oneself simply to remember Jesus’ misery and to feel bad. Nor is it to improve oneself in the classic American fashion. I think ideally Lent teaches us something about the state of our souls. By paying attention for a defined period of time we learn something that will hopefully carry over into the next season even when we’re not paying as much attention. Kind of like scales for a musician – you’d die of boredom if that’s all you ever played, or if you played them for hours a day. But by focusing for a period of time on the basic practice, you’re freed up to concentrate on the music when those same patterns appear in sonatas or nocturnes.

I haven’t done so well on the scales this year. But maybe I’ll be a little less dismissive of my fellow musicians when they are distracted by the latest shoe sale as well.