Daily Archives: November 2, 2011

Sheldon’s mother and parenting.

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I have been working until midnight recently wrestling with a problem that has beset a friend, but is more common than that. It is the retreat of some women into a kind of hyper religious state at the time of divorce, dragging their children with them. The mother isalmost continually at church or using religious terms. The father is basically called evil. The mother is seen as a good woman, and the father driven out of the church.

This led Sheldon, that wonderful character from the Big Bang Theory to panic when couple separate as “My father turned to the bottle and my mother to her church”

Now this is a disaster for the father, for it tests his faith (It tested mine — I have lived through this with my boys) and it stops the parents praying. And, as Terri notes, this may be the bigger disaster.

So let me be clear: we absolutely embrace the role of the father as his unmarried daughter’s covering. Unmarried daughters (and sons) should seek their parents’ blessing when making major life decisions. However, I believe that a young adult who is following God needs to have the freedom to follow God’s path for his or her life. Our roles as parents of young adults are to be prayerful and guard our own hearts so that our desire to keep our children near doesn’t cause us to fight against God’s direction in their life.

via My Problem With Christian Movements « Traditional Christianity.

One of the things that Christian parents have to do is allow their children to come to God. We have to trust that God will honour our vows when we baptized our children: we a duty to bring them up in a Godly home, but in the end there are no grandchildren in God’s family. Each person has to have their own faith. And we only have our children for a short time. As Terri says, we are not parents forever… since my boys are teenagers, it will only be five or six years and they will be young men and should be striking out on their own.

I will not like that day. But that day will come. We cannot hide ourselves from this grief, nor from the questions our children will have about our behaviour and our faith. Part of our job is containing these anxieties and issues — letting our children relax enough to work through these issues without being over punitive and rigid nor being a doormat or jellyfish parent. Because running to religion or the bottle is to abandon our duty.

The forgotten family of Christ.

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From the comments yesterday….“…I still think Catholic? But these past few months I’ve been trying my best to not think like a Catholic. Surely I’ve made some progress.”

Well, the commentator is getting wiser and more appropriate in many of her comments. This passage, however may offend Catholics… for it mentions the children that Mary, the mother of God had.

Matthew 13:53-58

53When Jesus had finished these parables, he left that place.

54He came to his home town and began to teach the people in their synagogue, so that they were astounded and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? 55Is not this the carpenter’ son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? 56And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?” 57And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house.” 58And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.

via Daily Lectionary Readings — Devotions and Readings — Mission and Ministry — GAMC.

From this we note:

  • Mary was seen as blessed as a Jewish women. She had five sons and daughters.  Children were seen as a blessing, and many children seen as a great blessing. As one of my friends said some years ago(who left NZ to marry her beloved and live in Israel… the women who is single or without chlldren is to be pitied”
  • The cult of perpetual virginity does not make sense. Mary married Joseph. She had kids, and they were conceived in the usual  manner.
  • The familiarity of the locals in Nazareth meant that they could not listen. Instead they doubted. Interestingly, this meant that Jesus did no miracles. I will leave the implications of this to the scholars, for many have talked about this.
  • We do meet James again, for he became a leader of the Church. What we forget is that God has mercy. He gave Joseph and Mary a marriage, and it was not loveless, nor did he leave Mary in shame when she dealt with the village women.

I note that the church tends to be silent on uncomfortable parts of scripture. This passage is uncomfortable for Calvinists because there is an implication that our belief matters because we need some faith, like the Nazarenes, for miracles to occur, and salvation is a miracle. It is uncomfortable for some monks because Mary (who we should honour) had children, and they don’t want to think of her except as a virgin.

But… Jesus was raised by a Carpenter and his wife, in a large family, in the poorest and least prestigious part of Palestine. He did not come from nowhere. And we tend to forget that.