Thursday, December 3, 2009

History

Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, "As anyone who studies congregations knows, history matters. The story of a church's birth tends to shape that community's identity for the rest of its life, with each new generation adding its own variations to the foundational themes." I've had some time to think about those sentences lately putting them into various thinking terms of my own contextual experience. I don't believe Brown's words are limited just to congregations, but to individual people as well.

For example, while living in rural central Iowa, the town of Story City (not a city by any means but most people and places have delusions of grandeur at one point or another) has a welcome sign off Interstate 35, placed right next to the McDonald's and Happy Chef, which is supposed to infuse weary travelers to exit the highway and come to the happy place of Story City (neither a city nor particularly storied for anything). The sign, decorated with happy, caucasian, blond haired children in outfits right out of the 1850's, states the welcome in Norwegian - "Wilkommen" which every time I saw it reminded me of my grandma's house. When we'd show up at her door she'd yell out from the kitchen "Well, Come in!" Certainly, if I spoke Norwegian, was blond and predisposed to wearing britches and aprons from the mid 19th century I surely would have swerved off Interstate 35 to feast on the famous Norwegian delicacies of Chicken McNuggets and French Fries which, I can't remember if they translated the menu at McDonalds into Norwegian for all the native Norskes, would have been "Kyllingen McNuggets and Franske Venn." If you go to Oslo and visit the local McDonalds, make sure you use these words.

Obviously, the burg of Story City wanted to hold on to its past traditions, roots of its beginnings. They somehow wanted to cling to the Northern European Protestant work and life ethic of stoicism and sub-zero temperatures. The people of Story City we found to be likable, if not a bit standoffish for Christine and I were neither Norwegian nor particularly stoic. Funny thing was, almost every person we came into contact with would wave the banner of their Norwegian heritage. They proudly proclaimed their last names of Oleson, Larson, Johnson, Nelson but if I were to ask if they could speak Norwegian, they stammered that they were out of practice. When they'd tell me they still had relatives in Norway, I asked if they'd ever been there to meet them. "Well, um, we couldn't do that - we wouldn't want to be a burden to them."

I asked one of them if, when they proclaimed their 'full-blooded Norwegianosity', they claimed America as their home country. They promptly smiled through thin lips (no self-respecting 'full blooded Norwegian' would dare confront or even speak about the feelings that I had hurt), turned their back and hoped that I had a good day (even though they hoped that I'd go back to Germany where all my relatives came from).

It is not a bad thing to hold on to our roots, but there comes a point in time when all of us find ourselves in a place of new growth. Our family trees have been established, they have taken root and those trees have budded and produced seeds. The seeds cannot continue to live on the tree, they must fall and, at times, feel the pain of being separated from the tree. Sometimes, the seeds are carried by the wind or other ambulations to places far beyond where they were little nuts.

The trend, though, is changing. Before massive advances in travel and communication (i.e. cars and phones) most young people lived near the family farm, marrying other young people in the community and rarely every left their own county and even more rarely, the country. The advent of technology allowed people to travel but still be connected with home. The computer, cellphones, i-phones has allowed people of all ages to stay connected with their families even while being apart. This is, for the most part, a good thing. But a curious thing is happening with young people of today: the technology is actually stunting young people's growth as adults. Students who attend college (many of whom still live at home to save money) have the umbilical cord, the cellphone, attached to their parents who still desire some semblance of control over their children's lives. It is thought that some college students and young adults speak to their parents at minimum once per day. This may or may not be a bad thing, but a generation of young adults are finding themselves mired in the worries of their parents, frightened of messing up, and parents who worry that if they don't watch over their children, their children will make the same mistakes that they made. In the book When Parents Love Too Much: What Happens When Parents Won't Let Go" by Laurie Ashner and Mitch Meyerson, the authors write, "For parents who love too much, worry is a constant companion. Concern over their chldrens' lives and troubles can become so torturous that they cannot eat, sleep, or think about anything else." Parents forget that the very decisions they made to leave and cleave (leave their own parents and cleave to their spouse) are what make them responsible adults today.

Some statistics: In the year 2006 in America, according to All Academic Survey, 13 million post high school young adults lived with their parents. In Great Britain, the Office for National Statistics says that in 2008, approximately 1/3 of young men ages 20-34 still live with their parents and 1/5 of young women of the same age do. That figure increases in the 20-24 area: 52% of young men live with their parents and 37% of young women.

Is this a bad thing? There are many factors when looking at this issue. The economy truly hurts young people moving out of home. No jobs, no money, no affordable housing - the only option is to live at home. The price of education has sky rocketed in the last fifteen years. It is no longer truly affordable for young people to attend college and yet they can't afford not to.


Surely the financial climate has changed, but the responsibility lies on both sides. Parents, family, friends must find ways to encourage their young adults to take responsibility for their own lives. So often, because we love our children we want to help them in any way that we can. But helping often morphs into enabling them. Our helping actually hurts them in the long run.

Part of my history deals with chickens. My parents raised poultry: chickens, ducks, geese and a few mangy turkeys who had a proclivity to die in the strangest of ways. Every year we watched the seasons of poultry life - hatching, scratching and (gulp) chopping. My favorite was the hatching part. My mother was a 1st grade teacher at the local elementary school and every spring she did a hands on process with the life of animals. She would bring fertilized chicken eggs to school and place them in a metal incubator, turn them every once in a while, and then wait for the little white eggs to begin to hatch. As the years progressed, Mom would let us kids help out with the hatching process. As with most hands on experiences, there are teaching moments. One morning, as we worked quietly in my mother's classroom, my mother was called out to speak to the principal. After she left, I began to hear some cheeping noises emanating from the incubator and I walked over to inspect the exciting transformation. I lifted the cover and a few of the chicks had already made their way through the tough shell. They were ugly little things when they were fresh, kind of wrinkly and hairless like one of the cats we had later on in life. As I perused all the eggs, one in particular caught my eye. The chick's beak was sticking out through a small hole as it was attempting to push its way out. It looked like it was struggling so, after I had looked around to see if anyone was watching, I removed the lid entirely and began to help the chick to release it from the bondage of its white, enameled cage. I fancied myself something of a chicken savior - here I was helping a poor, defenseless creature to escape the struggles of early life.

My mother entered in quietly. She saw what I was doing but, as the wise woman she is, wanted to let it be a teaching moment.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

I was so startled I almost dropped the half opened egg. "I'm helping this chick get out. It looked like it was struggling."

Mom smiled. "It was. It was supposed to. The chick has to struggle to get out of the egg to build up its neck muscles so that it will be prepared to eat from the ground on its own. It struggles to be able to grow."

My mom, in her infinite wisdom that day, taught me a little something about myself that day. Even though I still have the DNA of my family tree coursing through my veins, I have been allowed to struggle in life, to learn to stand on my own two feet, to learn to feed myself. My parents, family and friends have watched me (the little nut) be taken to far away places throughout the world and have watched proudly (I think) as I am kept in God's hands to serve people here or there. But, struggles are part of life. Struggling induces growth. We all can learn a bit from our history there.

So, this week, as you have time, think about your own history - what incidents made you who you are today. What things do you hold on to from your past? What things do you need to let go of? What things in your history continue to shape who you are and where you are going?

Just call it a history test.

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