Double-Duty Christians
I turned 70 on my last birthday. One of the emotional tasks of aging is coming to terms with the continuity of our lives, reconciling the girls we once were to the mature women we are today. When we become mothers, we face a similar challenge, recalling ourselves as children as we see ourselves through the children we are learning to parent.
People talk about the wisdom that comes with age, but it’s really more a matter of perspective. Life is cyclical, and when you are older you’ve seen the cycles roll around, sometimes more than once, so it’s easier to imagine what may follow what is happening right now.
In my lifetime, I experienced the McCarthy era (though dimly aware as a child), the Cold War, the Civil Rights era, assassinations and riots, Vietnam, and working as a federal civil servant during the Reagan presidency (when I was “RIFFED”, that is “fired” during a reduction in force, while I was on maternity leave with my first child.)
Even so, the results of this election seem cataclysmic, especially following a period when it seemed that American society had come so far, and was promising to come even further, in terms of gender and racial justice and equity. And this time around it seems like all the institutions we trust are under attack, the laws and courts and the press, and even basic civility and the simple niceties of our humanity like literacy and accurate spelling. Even facts don’t matter.
Recently I found myself sorting for the first time through the papers I brought home after my mother died ten years ago. I discovered among them the papers she brought home after her mother died, including love letters dating back to 1865 between my great-great grandparents, and letters from a train trip to Seattle in 1915 when my mother was 8, which I had vaguely remembered from my mother’s stories as a car trip to Colorado. I found love letters written in 1933 from my father, who had just been ordained as a Lutheran minister, assuming his first parish in rural Ohio, to my mother, who was living a cosmopolitan independent life as a librarian in Rochester, New York, far from home. Reading those letters, my understanding of the balance of power in my parents’ relationship was turned upside down. Our memories aren’t always accurate, and our understanding as children may not hold up when we are adults, confronted by the evidence and with more life experiences of our own.
But one thing that struck me in the papers I found was the stock back-cover of a church bulletin from August 1951, from the small town church in Ohio where my father was then the pastor. This was only a few miles from Middletown, Ohio, the town J. D. Vance recently memorialized in Hillbilly Elegy, in which I recognized the neighbor children who were my daily playmates 60 years ago when they lived with their grandparents next door whenever their mother was between husbands.
The message, if not the language, of the church bulletin seems as relevant today as in 1951, and in it I recognized another continuity of my life. It is not a big leap from the liberal Lutherans of my childhood (ULCA, precursor of current ELCA) to the activist Episcopalians I affiliate with today. And the advice for advocacy without politicization comports with the Johnson Amendment, though it predates it.
“Injustice in human affairs cannot be ignored by Christians, because God is the god of justice. He expects his children to help one another in defending their rights. For this reason the church must be a spokesman for justice and for truth and goodness as well. But it must exercise restraint. It should not be the champion of mere human opinions. … In the light of God’s word the church can discover principles which reveal what kind of world God wants for his people. It must proclaim those principles. But it is up to individual Christians to decide whether a specific system, theory or piece of legislation will advance those principles. …. Of course we can save ourselves a lot of trouble by shutting our eyes to the world around us. But our closed eyes will shut out God too.”
