Pick Up Sticks

With the winter now almost upon us, the days are short and the nights are cold, and that means fires in our hearth many nights.  We've got an old-school woodburning fireplace, which...now that it's been supplemented by a hefty cast iron fireback...really does keep the heart of the house nice and toasty.

Not being a gas fireplace, it requires a fair amount of effort to get going and manage, and that includes not just acquiring wood and keeping a stock of matches, but kindling.  Kindling is absolutely key, as the building of a proper fire cannot happen without it.

As a tiny and pyrophilic pup, I'd pay close attention as my father set the fire, and he'd happily describe the necessary process for getting a good roaring blaze going.  Three stages were necessary, as I came to understand it.  First, ignition kindling, something one had in quantity that would catch quickly and burn fast.  Newspaper, crumpled and pressed into a bed?  That was ideal.  But if you only used newspaper and split logs, the paper would burn off before the wood caught.  So you needed an intermediate stage, which was a big mess of twigs and sticks and small branches.  They all needed to be dry, inside and out, the sort of sticks that break with a snap rather than bending.

Gathering those sticks was a child's job.  Go, O my Son, and gather kindling, that we might have a fire! Yes, O my venerable Father, I shall do so!  Or so that conversation never went, as I was sent scampering out into the yard to find appropriately sized bits of tree-fall.  That pattern continued with my own sons when they were little.

It's a perfectly kid-sized task, one with clear benefits and purpose.  The goal is achievable.  It engages mind and body, and the results are warmth and coziness.  On a particularly good night, when one is making S'mores, the acquisition of a good marshmellow roasting stick can be added to the mission.

Yesterday, I was thinking all of these things as I wandered through our wooded back yard.  The day was warm, almost unseasonably so, but the forecast was for rain, followed by a stark drop in temperature.  So if there was to be a fire, I'd need a good stock of wood bits to get it going.

In between housework, writing, and church work, I took a few minutes to putter about in the yard, gathering sticks.  Our kids are grown, and so the labor of gathering kindling falls to me.  It doesn't take long, less than ten minutes of bending and picking up.  My eyes flit across the ground, assessing every option, choosing a blend of sizes and thicknesses that fill a small bucket.  Occasionally, I'll test a questionable stick, keeping it if it snaps, tossing it into the ivy if it does not.

As I gather, I also consider this: I am a grown man, doing a child's work.  It's ten fifteen on a Thursday morning, and I'm not in a meeting or working on a memo or analyzing data or reviewing the work of my AI assistant.  I'm picking up sticks.  Am I bothered by this?

I am not.  Nor should I be.  It's true that it's a rudimentary task, blissfully simple.  It's not something one gets paid to do, so basic that it runs beneath the valuations of the marketplace.  But it also has a radiantly clear purpose, and a definitive outcome.  Your labor is necessary for the hearth, and the hearth warms the house.  It's the sort of task that gives us a sense that work has meaning, and that it has intrinsic value.

How much of how we fill our days is as obviously useful, and has such a pleasant result?

The Unwelcoming Neighborhood

It was a long walk, but I like it that way.

I'd rather not have walked it, because it meant an indefinite separation from my ailing steed, sidelined after yet another fueling problem surfaced.  One issue with riding a bike hard and year round is that they age a little bit more rapidly, and my formerly trusty Suzuki is feeling its age.  But whatever the circumstance, the three point six miles did me good, and at a moderately brisk pace, it took a little under an hour.

When you walk, you see things you'd miss as you barrel by in your cage.  In a car, you're focusing on the road and/or the blabbering inputs of your infotainment suite.  On foot, your pace lets you note nuance.  It lets you observe, and linger over an interesting thing.  You can't linger in DC, idling over to the side of the road like it's Mayberry.  Stop or slow down around these parts, and you'll have some ute-driving schedule-maddened DC parent/lawyer and the entire soccer team they're transporting yelling at you to learn how to drive as they swerve wildly by your stopped car.

Walking lets you see things on a human scale, and process them on a human scale.

I was at about the three-quarter mark on my walk when I came across the signs.

There was a row of them, on every house on a whole block, one trim little home after another on the access road off of Columbia Pike.

Well, every house but one.

They were neatly printed up, the sort of lawn signs you get professionally done if you're a small business startup, or a politician running for office in a little town.  "Say No to Bethany House Shelter," they said, one after another.  There was an address--the one house without the sign, as it so happened, sitting isolated on the edge of the block.  And there was a date, just a couple of days away, when there'll be a public hearing about whatever it was.

Because I was walking, I stopped, and lingered and looked.  I took a picture or two.

Beyond the signs, the houses were all very similar, in the face that they presented to the world.  Well maintained and clean cars were in every driveway, and--unusually for this area--they were almost entirely of American manufacture.  The homes--humble, straightforward, and of late 50s construction--were all primly kept.  Gardens were tidy and neat and tastefully conservative.  Lawns were mowed and edged.  Flags were in evidence on many doorposts.  These are people who are are proud of their homes.

Here, on the one hand, a group of neighbors, exercising their solidarity with one another and engaging in civic discourse.

On the other, it stirred my curiosity about the thing they were rallying together to oppose.  The name whispered hints.  A homeless shelter, perhaps?  Or a group home for the mentally ill?

I continued on, and when I got home, I went online to see what it might be.  As it turned out, it was a shelter for women fleeing domestic violence and their children.  The shelter already exists, right there on the block in that house.  Those women and their children are already there.  But it is--according to the exhaustive plans and zoning approval schematics available online--conducting a modest expansion to open space for two to three more families.

Why there?  Why in that neighborhood?  Well, directly across the street lies the answer: the Mason District police station, with rows upon rows of police cars and dozens of officers just moments away.  If you care about protecting women and their children from violent abuse, that'd be just about the best place to do it.  Siting in this instance is a no-brainer.

But of course, that has an effect on property values.  And even though a small army of trained and armed law enforcement professionals is right there where you can see them, it's also the kind of thing that makes people anxious.  Mammon and anxiety go hand in hand, they do, and that's where this ultimately lies.

I do not doubt, when that hearing comes, that there'll be other reasons presented.  It will destroy the feel of the neighborhood, they'll say, though other little houses nearby have been massively expanded or completely replaced.  Or perhaps there'll be ad hominem arguments against management, subtle insinuations of profit-seeking or incompetence.  There often are, when people are up in arms about something.  And of course, what about the children!  The children!  Someone always has to say that, even when you're opposing something that's there to protect children.  It's everything and the kitchen sink, when you get to that place.

And I can understand that reaction, up to a point.  Homo sapiens sapiens is such a fiercely territorial primate.

But what I don't understand--can't, frankly--is being the sort of human person whose pride wouldn't include protecting women and children.

"In my neighborhood, there is a shelter where women and children can come and be safe.  We've got first responders across the street to help out.  And we pitch in, keeping our eye out to help those kids and women stay that way.  That's who we are here.  We're a place of refuge.  We're a place of safety."

So there, a row of signs that proudly say the opposite.  Those signs are visible, to every battered woman and every frightened child that comes to that house now, or that is sheltered in that house now.

"You are not welcome here."

I stopped, and I noted it, because that little community wanted me to notice it.  They mark the place, and the spirit of that part of the neighborhood.

When you put out a sign, you need to expect that people will read it, and listen to what it is you're saying about yourself.

Unaccompanied Children

The crisis du jour, outside of the eternal mess of the Middle East, is the arrival of thousands upon thousands of children on the doorstep of the United States.

With bleak economic conditions and violence in their streets, central American families are giving their children up, sending them off to be abandoned at the border of the United States.

Over fifty thousand children so far this year, which in and of itself is a mind boggling number.  Our response, of course, is the usual.  From some quarters, the usual ones, there have been calls for crackdowns.  More border patrols!  More security!  Take the hard line!  That appears to be the course we're on, but it's a problematic one.

These are, of course, children, which makes the hard line just a tiny bit more difficult.  Sure, poverty and desperation are being manipulated by those who profit from the transporting of the children.  Rumor and mis-communication also haven't helped.  But those things are immaterial to the reality at hand.  If we take a hard line as a nation, turning a cold hard shoulder to children who arrive helpless on our doorstep, then we'll have crossed a line as a nation from "being concerned about our borders" to "being evil."  It's a tricky wicket for those who prefer fulminating absolutism as their response of choice.

What's hardest to grasp, though, is just why a parent would send a child off to a distant land alone.

It isn't an act of calculation.  It's an act of desperation.  If you have children, you know just how hard such an action would be.  How desperate would you need to be to take that action?  To pack your child up, and send them off to the mercy of an unknown shore?

How can we understand that level of desperation?  How can we frame it, particularly those of us who draw from the long story of my faith?

My own denomination has made earnest statements about the issue, both heartfelt and practical, although a little lacking in theology or clear grounding in our faith.  And that ground is there, without question.  One image seems to pop most cleanly for me from the great sacred story of scripture.

A mother living under intolerable oppression casts her child away to an utterly uncertain future, abandoning them to fate, hoping against hope that they will survive.  That child washes up at the feet of the powerful.

The scriptural analogy seems so obvious.  Am I the only one who sees this?

Perhaps it's the scale of it that makes us miss it.

Fifty thousand Jocheveds, and the Nile running thick with baskets?   What a strange and terrible age we must live in.

The Voices of Children in the Church

This last Sunday, I performed a baptism.

As baptisms go, it wasn't the usual fare.  I've baptized babies and very little ones, and that's a delight, utterly different every time.  I've welcomed adults into the fellowship of the faith, and watched as the water that poured down their faces mingled with tears of joy.

But I've never baptized a kid before.  Meaning, not a baby, and not a teen, and not a grownup, but a kid.  It was a child of the church, loved by the whole community, who for various reasons just hadn't been baptized.

And he'd gotten old enough to ask whether it had happened, and old enough to ask...repeatedly...if he could please be baptized.  No one prompted him, or cajoled him.  It was his idea.  He was persistent enough and serious about it enough that grownups listened, and asked if he could talk with me.

So for a few Sundays after church, I sat down with him and we talked.  We talked about God, as I do with the adults, and worked our way through ecclesiology and the doctrine of the Trinity.  I don't generally weave dinosaurs and Lego Star Wars and karate into those conversations, but in this case, it seemed to work.  He got it, grasping with his child's mind what the church is all about, and what God's love is all about.  It was clear he was serious about it.

We didn't get into the convoluted theology.  None of the fuddly stuff that tangles and snares us, and that we mistake for the real.  It was very simple...but it was the same thing I do with the very-slightly-older humans we call grownups.

And for the baptism itself, he had his sponsors, up there with him.  But he also answered questions, the very same Affirmations and Renunciations I place before the adults.  Those questions were straight out of our very decent and orderly Book of Common worship, but they...errr...needed a bit of tweaking.

Why?  Because those words themselves only point to what happens in baptism.  They are not of themselves magic.  It's why we have multiple versions open to us.  And the Big Words for Adults would have required too much unpacking.  Other words, simpler and stronger and bearing meaning to a child's spirit, those words can serve precisely the same purpose.

And so I asked, and he answered, renouncing sin, turning to Jesus, committing to the community of the Way.  And then, through water and the Spirit and with the Words of the Great Commission (those I left, of course), we welcomed him in.

Later, during the Lord's Prayer and during the final hymn, I was struck by something.

His friends had stayed to see him baptized.  When we prayed that great prayer together, I could hear them praying, raising their young voices so that they could be heard along with the adults.  And I could hear them singing, strong and confident, as we belted out What A Friend We Have in Jesus.

It felt good to hear the voices of children in church.

Adoption, Discrimination and Conscience

As the Virginia State government moved vigorously to the right following the mid-term elections, it is perhaps no surprise that it has chosen to move aggressively.  For years, it was constrained by the counterbalancing force of a moderate Democrat in the State House, or a moderate majority in the Senate.

This is no longer the case.  Absent that counterweight, things in Richmond have gone precisely the way you'd expect.  Folks on the right are releasing all that pent-up paleoconservative tension, as drunk with freedom as the child of helicopter parents in those first few blurry weeks of college.   And Lord have mercy, have they gone on a legislative bender.

They're pitching out new laws right and left.  Or right and further right, to be more accurate.

They would permit multiple simultaneous handgun purchases, much to the great delight of our friends in the Zetas drug cartel.   They would mandate medically unnecessary ultrasounds for any woman considering an abortion, because health care mandates are what American Conservatism is all about.

And now, there's a bill...likely to pass...that would explicitly allow private faith-based adoption services agencies to refuse to work with couples who don't meet the standards of their faith tradition.  This would include agencies who receive funding from the state.

This is being described as a bill that would protect the consciences of faith-based providers, and is generally understood as being a Trojan Horse for keeping children away from gay couples.  If you believe that homosexuality is inherently sinful, or so the not-really-spoken argument goes, then you shouldn't be required to place children with same-sex couples.  That is, rationalizations about preserving freedom notwithstanding, the sole, entire, and only purpose of this bill.

Understand that this has nothing to do with protecting the child from abuse or neglect.  Under federal law, adoption agencies are required to do significant background checks on parents and individuals who seek to adoption a child.  The effect of this bill is to permit discrimination against individuals whose beliefs do not mesh with the agency.  Federal law forbids racial discrimination in adoption, but is silent on the subject of religious discrimination.

Having known gay couples who have adopted kids, and who are wonderful parents, this bill bothers the bejabbers out of me on that level.  It is woefully wrong on that front.  But my issues with it go deeper.

Sure, it's meant to be anti-gay, but in being coy about it and couching itself in what it imagines is the language of freedom, it's more than that.  Reading the text of the bill as written, it is also potentially anti-Muslim.  Or antisemitic.  Or anti-mainline Protestant.  Or anti-atheist.  Or anti-Christian.  

Let's imagine for a moment that the state-licensed and funded agency in question is run by a literalist Christian group.  As far as they are concerned, failure to believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God is a sure path to Aitch-EE-Double-Toothpicks.  

Now imagine for a moment that a Bible-believing woman is married to a Christian-ish man who's not quite so sure about what he believes, and they find a child through this group.  The state-funded agency in question would now be perfectly within its legal rights to stop the adoption process mid-cycle if they feel that such a family might not raise a child in keeping with its values.  "It's your husband.  We just can't risk little Tyler going to hell, Ma'am."  

Again, it's not that they'd be bad parents.  Just that they'd be the wrong sort of people.  What of a conservative Catholic agency that receives state funds and licensing?  Could such a group refuse a child to a nondenominational couple on the basic of their beliefs?  Under this law, the answer is yes.  

Given that conscience, at its heart, means "knowing together," the internalization of a shared ethos, does such a bill really represent conscience across the entirety of the state?  Does it represent our shared statewide understanding of what is in the best interest of children?  Does it even represent what the Apostle Paul would have described as "doing what is right in the eyes of all?" 

No.  The answer to those rhetorical questions is of course not.   But that's the way Richmond rolls these days.