Epiphany 1: All God’s Children

My second son was the sunshiniest of all my children. With a precociously verbal older brother always nearby, he didn’t say much, but he smiled constantly.   When he should have been experiencing peak stranger anxiety, he’d happily hang out with anyone: sitters he’d never met, neighbor friends, the older folks at church.  When he was a toddler, and his brother or one of his little buddies would push or bite or pull his hair, his eyes would widen, and he’d look at his small assailant with more astonishment than distress: What’s fun about THAT?  Like Tigger, instead of walking, he bounced.

He also lied. A lot.  He never lied in a way that got another person in trouble, and the lies themselves were so minor that with one exception, I can’t remember any of them.  He lied to avoid conflict and keep his world peaceful and happy when he’d sense that something he had or hadn’t done would make someone else (particularly his mother) upset or disappointed. 

Each time I caught him in a lie, he’d own up to it, and we’d talk.  Each time, I’d repeat how much  I loved him.  I’d tell him I wanted to trust him and how if he continued to lie, I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore.   He’d squirm and say he was sorry and, as quickly as possible, move on, back to his happy little world. 

One morning, as a homeschool assignment, I sent him off to his room to write a poem.  Reading and writing weren’t easy for him, so I was surprised and delighted when he came down an hour later with a simple but sweet little poem.  I praised him up and down. Over the next few weeks, whenever I’d ask him to write a poem (trying to encourage his newfound talent), he’d come back with yet another lovely little rhyme that would always make me smile and praise his work. 

Then, one day, when I was sitting in my room, he came to me in tears. Worried, I asked him what had happened,  and he confessed:  the poems he’d been “writing” came not from him, but from  Frances the Badger.

You might justifiably wonder how the mom who read him those books over and over before he was able to read them for himself didn’t recognize those poems in the first place.   The English teacher in me was honestly pretty embarrassed.

But here’s the thing:  I loved that little boy more than anything.  I wanted to see him shine, especially where he struggled.  I wanted him to have written those sweet rhymes.  And it was, I think, that blind, full-strength, admiring love that finally broke through.

As I looked at my son, filled with so much remorse, guilt, and worry that his mom would finally not trust or love him anymore, my usual speech fell away.  I hugged him.  I told him I was proud of him for coming to me.  I told him I thought he probably wouldn’t lie anymore.  And he didn’t. 

I’m not saying that as he grew older, he didn’t sometimes choose to not tell me things, but if I asked, he always told me the truth.  When he was a teen, he once told me, “I know you and Pop trust me and give me a lot of freedom, and I’m not interested in doing anything that is going to mess that up.”   That boy grew into an adult full of integrity, who values honesty and open communication as much as he still values living a happy and peaceful life. 

This week in our nation, we’ve seen the way words can destroy trust and threaten the core institutions on which our democracy stands.  We’ve also seen people of faith and integrity courageously risk their futures to counteract those words with the truth.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about this: about what motivates some people toward deception and others toward truth; why some are willing to sacrifice character to ambition and others their ambition to integrity.   I’m thinking about why it is so hard for all of us to admit when we’re wrong, to see the ways that our words and actions have hurt others. I’ve been thinking about our Presiding Bishop: how he can describe the violence around us so unflinchingly and passionately yet never stop imploring us to act in love toward one another. I’ve been thinking about that day long ago and my teary-eyed son.  And as I think, I keep turning over the words at the end of today’s Gospel, when Jesus has been baptized, the heavens open,  the Spirit descends like a dove,  “And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you, I am well pleased.”

Truth and integrity, kindness toward others, admitting when we are wrong, and doing our best to make things right are biblical values central to our faith. In the words of the Prophet Micah, what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? 

But who can live into those values who does not know that they are loved?  My love and admiration for my child broke through where my words did not. The love and open praise of God sends Jesus on his way to proclaim the love at the heart of God’s kingdom all the way to the Cross. 

The great Civil Rights leader Howard Thurman describes how his grandmother, a former slave, told him about the slave preacher who would end every secret religious meeting by saying, “You–you are not ni[**]ers.  You–you are not slaves.  You are God’s children.” These words, Thurman explains, did not solve all of their problems, but it “established for them the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth could absorb [their] fear.” He contrasts this with the explanation a woman who had escaped from Nazi Germany once gave him why so many young Germans were drawn to Hitler’s Youth.  Hitler, she said,  told them,”‘No one loves you–I love you; no one will give you work–I will give you work; no one wants you–I want you…overcoming their sense of inferiority.”*   In the first case, God’s life-giving love helped enslaved people rise from their bondage; in the other, the professed love of a narcissistic, genocidal leader drove those who felt hopeless deep into the shadow of death.

God sees us.  God knows us.  God loves us, entirely and absolutely.  God recognizes our deepest shadows only as a place that light can fill.  We are called, again and again, to accept that we are God’s beloved children and then to let that Spirit of Love fill us and work through us until we, also, learn to see the shadows all around us as nothing but space to be filled with God’s light. 

*Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, Chapter 2. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.260684/2015.260684.Jesus-And_djvu.txt