An Observance of Baptism at Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
On Children by Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
One of my favorite gospel stories in John is the account of the healing of the man who was born blind. In the 9th chapter of John, we read this story about a man who has been blind from birth and Jesus, according to the narrative, heals him but he performs this miracle on a Sabbath Day and so, John describes and ensuing controversy created by this violation of religious rules.
The part that I really love is when the religious leaders ask the man who had just been healed of a life-time of blindness where Jesus was, the man was able to say, "I don't know." I love that. The way John tells this story, Jesus was able to give a man a gift that was unimaginably wonderful and yet let him entirely free... free of guilt, free of obligation...free, indeed, of even knowing what Jesus did next.
He gave him a gift and left him free to do whatever a man who was finally set free from the limitations of blindness needed to do.
It is the freedom that attracts me to this passage of Kahlil Gibran's Prophet. I find most of Gibran's work to be pretty shallow sophistry but I have never been able to get this passage about children out of my head.
His suggestion that we should not make our children into little replicas of ourselves. Our children do not belong to us. They belong to the future. We give them life. We care for them when they are sick. We feed and house them. We protect them when they are young and we worry about them for the rest of our lives. But we do not own them and if we are good at being parents, they will leave us without the feeling that they owe us anything.
I hope that my daughter continues to visit me frequently in the future but I do not demand it of her and I fully accept that if I want to make that vital transformation from parent to friend, that I have an obligation to be a good friend. I need to let go of any control, be sparing in offering opinions, and to be enjoyable when we are together. I will do my best not to be a burden to her as I grow old and I will strive to leave her enough of an estate to make a difference in her life. But there is no more contract between us.... Just love and a lot of great memories.
She has told me not to worry about retirement that when the time comes she will just move me into her house but I am afraid that she has told her mother the same thing and I know that I couldn't go through that again!... but I digress.
But talk about setting your children free into the future without tying them to the past has very real implications. The religious and the non-religious, the conservative and the liberal, all have passionate feelings about children, specifically about babies, but opinions without personal sacrifice is just a spring board into hypocrisy.
The 19th century American evangelist, Alexander Campbell, said that if you get down on your knees and pray for something that you are not willing to then stand up and sacrifice and work to make happen that you are not only disappointing yourself, you are also insulting God.
For the past 40 years we have been vigorously debating whether or not a woman should have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The religious right joined arms with Catholic leadership in condemning abortion under virtually all circumstances. And while those of us on the left have been inclined to support a woman's right to govern her own reproductive life, we have tried to call our sisters and brothers on the right onto the common ground of supporting children when they are born with good schools and access to health care. That is a conversation that we seem to be having difficulty getting started.
In fact, a decade ago I published a column in which I pointed out that the abortion rate went down by over 50% during the Clinton administration, not because of restrictive laws regarding abortion but because of low unemployment and rising wages. When women believe that it is economically possible for them to properly care for a child, then abortion becomes less and less likely. Under economic hardship, it becomes more likely.
Conservative administrations try to make abortion illegal and if they can't do that they make it nearly impossible to obtain. Now, in the state of Missouri, we have only one abortion provider and that is in St. Louis. We have added a 72 wait that would require a young woman from our area to make a 400 mile round trip and spend three nights in St. Louis to obtain her legal rights. So, I pointed out that it is one thing to make life hard on the poor but it is another thing to actually do something about it. Conservatives pay lip-service to the value of human life while fostering the economic circumstances that make abortion happen more often.
I've received a lot of hate mail in response to my columns over the years but that was the only column that inspired a lengthy bit of hate mail from a local Catholic nun. That may seem funny to you but I can tell you very honestly, that sister had some talent with a poison pen!
We may never all agree on the moral issues around reproductive decision making but if we cannot agree on making the personal and social sacrifices necessary to give newborns health care and decent housing and an opportunity to obtain a decent education then the rest of the conversation is really just smoke and mirrors hiding our selfish hypocrisy. I assume that I don't need to say more about that.
Gibran talks about our children being the future and that sentiment has been really driven home to me this week as I learned that Chile has decided to make going to college tuition free... and they are doing it by adding a 24% tax on their corporations.
I was jealous when I heard that Germany was going to make their colleges tuition free.
Allowing the children of the poor to receive the same education as the children of the middle and upper middle class is a vote for the future generation in any country. In Germany, it was logical. Germany is very economically successful right now and they want to remain very competitive in the European and global market.
But Chile is a very poor nation that is not competitive at all.... Which is why it makes even more sense for them to sacrificially subsidize the education of their college kids. Chile is deciding that they want to be the next first world economic power and they are doing it by liberating their children from the hurdle of college tuition or student loans. At both ends of the spectrum, Germany and Chile, are sacrificing for their children.
You should already know but I am going to state it for the record, that is the opposite of what we are doing in the United States. We are cutting education from our state and federal budgets so that the cost of going to college is constantly rising making it prohibitive to all but the economically secure.
As my next girlfriend, Elizabeth Warren, has been ardently pointing out, we are not only not helping our college students to go to school, we are burdening them with high interest student loans so that we can make a profit off of them! (Look, Elizabeth, if you are watching this video, let's not let this get weird.... I know that you are happily married.... I was just kidding).
Every day our government loans money to banks at nearly 0% interest for the banks to use for their own profit. But student loan rates are set to double this summer, ending up at over 6%.
We have members of this church whose student loan payment is higher than their house note and that fact alone makes them delay if not forego making the decision to have children. What does that say about the future of America?
Germany and Chile are investing heavily in their young people's education, our government is currently taking over $50 billion in profit from poor and middle class students and so far has refused to even allow student to refinance at a lower rate if they can get a better deal at a bank. We are feeding our own college students into the gristmill to make profits for the present moment as if we did not believe that America even has a future.
Look, we talk here about evidence based faith. We talk about a spirituality that matters. We need to get honest about how our talk and our actions don't match up when it comes to children. Are children are the future and so we owe them a shot at a decent future and that takes more than telling them that we love them and saying that they are important.
Here in Missouri we need to expand Medicaid so that all of our children have access to health care. We need to adequately fund our schools which means paying our teaches enough to keep good people in those positions. We need to make our colleges and universities tuition free and make student loans interest free.
We need to shut off this insane school to prison pipe-line. We need to decriminalize non-violent drug users and put resources behind addiction treatment rather than incarceration and life-long criminal records... in short, we need to stop stealing their futures before they get out of pre-school.
These may sound like big things. You may feel like these things are out of your grasp. But in a democracy, exactly whose grasp are they in? If our kids are to have a future we have to stop saying that we care and start acting like we care, which includes voting as if it mattered.... Because it does.
