Succeeding at the New American Summer

With summer rapidly approaching, the hum and flutter around the nation's capital has to do with a major challenge facing our culture.  Here we are, the most educated, most driven, most competent community in these United States (if we do say so ourselves), and we're wrestling with an existential question that faces every household in America:

What in the name of the Sweet Lord Jesus are we supposed to do with the kids?

Summertime is when our agricultural past comes smashing up against our dual-income present.  The schools let out, just like they always did in the early twentieth century, and the kids come home to help with the planting and the weeding and the harvest.  They'd help, and then they'd run feral, playing and hunting and mucking about.

Only now, that ain't us.  We've got multiple jobs, both spouses, because we've got those huge mortgages to pay on our overpriced houses.  Plus, there are our connectivity bills, and those payments on the cars we need to get to the jobs we have to pay for the cars we need to get to the jobs we have to...well, it goes on like that for a while.

Sort of like pi, only more anxiety-inducing.

And we can't let the pups just go play in the creek, because, well, we're afraid.  We're afraid of danger all around, as the stress-profit-media pours anecdotal woe into our minds.  We're afraid that they'll fail to keep up in a society that is unforgiving to the weak and the slow and the unfortunate.

So the summer must be filled with activities, camps and tutoring sessions.  We tell ourselves that this is for enrichment purposes, that we are creating opportunities, but really?  That's only a part of it.  We do it because God help us, we have work to do.

There are a couple of ways to win at this strange game.

One involves plans and structures, ones that are well into their pre-staging at this point in the year.  This is, of course, the route that most inside-the-Beltway parents take.  There are charts and spreadsheets.  There is color coding.  There's logistical sophistication that reaches planning-for-D-Day levels of complexity.

This is the New American Summer.

When it works, the New American Summer is like an elegant dance of moms and dads and minivans.  It can be a delightfully satisfying contraption, sort of like the wind-up-music-box-feel of a Wes Anderson film, only with camps and children.  Look what we're accomplishing!

Assuming that nothing unexpected happens.  No one gets a stomach flu, or has an unanticipated deadline at work, or has a vehicle break down.

Meaning, it sort of works, some of the time.  And the rest of the time, we bark panicked orders on the smoking, burning bridge of our family starship as the red alert klaxons wail, and wonder what we could possibly have done to avoid this outcome.

For those who manage to pull this off most of the time, I salute you for your ninja parenting skills.

I prefer another approach.

I'm convinced, because I see very little countervailing evidence, that trying to play the game the way our society asks us to play it doesn't work.  Oh, you can force it to work.  You can pour energies into making it work, like pouring fertilizer and insecticides into a Monsanto field.  But I don't have the sustained energy for that Sisyphian task.

So we haven't played the dual-income-with-kids schedule game, because to me it feels like a Kobayashi Maru simulation, one that cannot be won if you play it by the rules.

Our summers for the last decade or so of multi-childing it have involved a balanced level of activity.  There's been the occasional sleep away scout camp, and the everpresent neighborhood swim/tennis team commitment.

And underlying that is an existence that...while busy...makes room for transitions and the inescapable intrusions of entropy.  We're moving quickly, sure, quickly enough to get where we're going.  Warp factor three.  But we're not squeezing every last drop out of the engines at every moment.

My wife?  She works and goes to meetings and presses hard to build her career and her networks.  I don't quite so much, part-timing it, because "success" in this stage of life for me does not mean the striving to clamber up that ladder.  It means: are we together feeding/clothing/sheltering/enjoying this brief time when our offspring are children?

That's the goal.  No one starves.  We don't freeze to death.  And life is worth living, to the point where we wouldn't feel like we'd wasted our lives on scrabbling stress if it all went south. Because you never know when that mass-extinction-event asteroid will come flaming in through the mesosphere.  Maybe tomorrow afternoon, when we're stuck in traffic on our way from baseball practice to that tae kwon do belt ceremony.  Oh, man, we'd say, as our world gets bright.

So to make this possible we have a smaller house, and humble and efficient vehicles.  We have no cable, just a cheap big pipe for the net.  We have a job-and-a-half, and both of us have sacrificed career for stability and nearness to family.  There are tradeoffs, sure.  I do not travel to meetings, or make a point of developing connections.  This is by intent, by discipline.  If I fret that I've not made a name for myself, or worry that maybe I should be doing more, more, more?  I remind myself to step back.  We move a little more slowly.  A little bit.

What is success, after all?  It is reaching a goal.  My goal?  A life of living into my created purpose, instead of a life of striving driven by socially-inflicted anxieties and stresses.  My goal is being in balance enough that stress does not hide my love from my loved ones.  My goal is sanity.

Sometimes, I think that makes me a little crazy.

Pastor, Chill Thyself

My summer begins today.

Every year since I entered the ministry, I've wangled an arrangement with my church. We Presbyterians are supposed to take two weeks a year of study leave, time to go off to conferences and seminars and retreat centers, where we can hobnob and connect and diligently keep ourselves up to date on the latest and most trendy new trends in our 2,000 year old tradition.

I don't do that. Not because it's a bad thing, even though I can usually get that data through the blogs I feed and the books I read. Instead, I apply that time to my summer, one day per week, and take care of my kids. On that day, I sit by poolside and read and write, while the boys swim back and forth and back and forth. That's study, of a sort, I suppose. I shuttle them to go have fun with the few kids who are fortunate enough not to have every last moment of their summers prescheduled by their hovering, overachieving parents.

I take them on bicycle outings. I putter around the house, while they read and play and enjoy being a kid. I do still take calls, and keep an eye on things. But I make a point of slowing down.

It's not a very Washington, DC way to think. For all the invective leveled against it by folks for whom "inside-the-Beltway" means just another level of hell, DC is a crazy-hard-working place. Washingtonians endure long hours, big stress, and soul-sucking commutes, and all this while suffering through the sultry heat that should have us spending June through August on a big wraparound porch sitting under a fan slowly sipping mint juleps.

That lifestyle of gogogogogo is, to my observation, also the way the pastors who flit and fret across my field of vision tend to live. The institutional church can be a high maintenance bride. She demands constant attention, and is more than willing to pitch a Bridezilla hissy if you don't meet her expectations. Endless meetings can stack up upon even more meetings, which pile up on stomping out interpersonal fires, which are followed by an aging air conditioning system that punks out on Sunday morning. And while dealing with that Cavalcade of Very Important Crap, we're supposed to teach and preach and be deeply rooted in Christ's grace. More often than not, it seems that pastors let themselves be consumed. They let themselves be stretched and stretched, until that stress frays them. Under that self-inflicted stress, we respond less graciously to others. It becomes easier to be broken, to be hostile to those around us, to gossip, to promote faction, or to withdraw.

When I permit myself to overextend, I feel it in myself. I snap to judgment. I snark. I fume. I fail to be centered in Christ's peace.

This is not a sign of a healthy faith life. Faithful folk, as a recent study at the University of Toronto showed, have a tendency to be less stressed out about stressful situations than those who have no orientation outside of their own selves. Being oriented towards God provides a foundation for dealing with the stressors and difficulties of life, one that makes it a whole bunch easier to cope with messiness.

That's certainly true when we're afflicted by crises. But we shouldn't be letting our lives put the Lord to the test. Our faith needs to form the way that we structure our lives outside of those crisis moments. If those who are the spiritual leaders of a faith community are running on an endlessly spinning gerbil wheel of stress, trapped in a cycle of internal and external expectations, then there is something wrong. There is something wrong in us, as we allow our own need to be in control to consume us. There is something wrong in our communities, as they expect their pastors to conform to the frenzied pace of the secular workplace.

So stop fretting. Seek the kingdom. And consider, for a moment, that perhaps the best place to find that may be poolside.

And yes, the pool has WiFi. And a good cell signal. You are so incorrigible.

Light Summer Reading

There's nothing like kicking back with some light summer reading. "Light" is relative, and for me, "light" doesn't mean Stephen King or the latest Twilight-knockoff about Sexii Vampyres.

I try to read those things, but whenever I do, my entire brain just shuts down completely. I think it's some kind of allergic reaction. The EMT folks told me that they won't even try to restart my heart next time around.

"Light reading" this summer means Voltaire. Yes, I'm getting into enlightenment philosophy for entertainment. Please, please do not go hatin'. Sure, I'm reading the Dictionnaire Philosophique, and that may sound seriously snooty or possibly French to most of My Fellow Americans, but Voltaire ain't Hegel or Derrida. The Enlightenment permitted philosophers to play with words and wit in a way that seems to elude most postmodern academics. He's tres amusante. Really.

What's particularly interesting about my reading are those sections that speak directly to matters of faith, and to Christianity. What I'm finding about Voltaire is that he utterly despised the church for all the right reasons. Voltaire saw the corruption that wealth and power brought into the institutional church, and reviled it with a passion. He saw churchmen of his day who lived like kings, surrounded by servants and the biggest houses and the best things, and he realized that such a life was completely antithetical to the form of virtue that they claimed to profess.

He'd have just loved Joel Osteen.

Though Voltaire hated the church with a deep and abiding passion, he apparently did not feel the same way about Jesus.

In the section of the Dictionnaire Philosophique that is simply entitled "Religion," Voltaire describes a fictionalized religious experience. First, he describes how deeply he glories in the wonders of creation, in its complexity and inherent gracefulness. Then, he has an exchange with an angel, who shows him the horrors wrought by sectarian violence. From there, he moves on to speak with some great wise men. Finally, he encounters a nameless man who is obviously Jesus, lamenting over those who have suffered and died in conflicts over him, and over the wealth that has been gathered in his name.

The man will not give his name, so Voltaire "...implores him to tell me in what true religion consisted." The man replies: "Have I not already told you? Love God and your fellow creature as yourself." At this, Voltaire declares that he takes him as his only master.

Voltaire clearly felt that this ethic was at the heart of all faith, at least, all legitimate faith. That ethic, he argues repeatedly, is a true universal, something that reaches across cultures and languages and peoples. It is this line of thinking that lies at the foundation of that famous Voltaire quotation: "There is only one morality, just as there is only one geometry."

What I find myself thinkin' on is this: how does this relate to the emergent, postmodern church? In this era, we're fond of declaring that morality and ethics are culturally mediated. There is no "higher" truth, because truth is relative. Even progressive Christians tend to make this statement.

But I tend to come down with my Voltaire on this one. There is something about the core teachings of Jesus that goes well beyond cultural norms and societal expectations and down deep into the basic structure and purpose of human existence.

Believing that seems necessary if you're going to bother calling yourself Christian.