Sermon: Wisdom

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Wisdom

By Charles Rush

February 27, 2000

veral years ago, I was one of those people that were asked to go to the White House for President Clinton's infamous coffees. Now I am still a pretty simple man, so when this invitation came in the mail, the very first thing I did... was to call my Mom. I'd never been to the White House, probably never would go again... to talk to the President. It's the sort of thing that my Mom wants to hear.

This invitation produced some generational rumbling in my parents' home as I discovered the next time I went to visit. My father had nothing but snide remarks to make about the President. "Son, ask him how my wife can get in on a bond deal like Hillary did?" "Ask him how to spell Whitewater". And so on. This comes from a man that has a picture of himself shaking hands with Dan Quayle at a fundraiser on his desk.

Now, my grandmother was also present. She is 92. My grandmother kept saying, "thank God, he's not going to talk to that Brownshirt Gingrich." A few years ago, I asked my grandmother why she is still a Democrat despite the fact that it generally was a vote against her personal economic interest. Her response was straight to the point, "Because Franklin Roosevelt brought lights to Louisiana."

My father rolls his eyes at comments like this and says something like "but what good have they done in the past 60 years?"

My brother, who lives on Capitol Hill, jumped in with a spirited defense of liberalism, until my Grandmother cut him off. "Andy", she said, "don't waste your breath. The fact of the matter is political wisdom seems to skip generations." My grandmother may not be right... but she is never wrong!

It is true on an important level that wisdom skips generations for the majority of us. Teenagers rebel. That is their job. Parents only get confused in their job when they want to have a significant and friendly relationship with their children. A parent's job, as a psychologist friend of mine, has pointed out, is to give their children something substantial to rebel against. In due time, on their own, they will find their way back home to substantial values that you can really live by.

The movie Mr. Holland's Opus , contrasts two generations with poignant irony. Mr. Holland starts off with a dream to become a musical composer. His passion is working on a symphony that he began right out of college. But after he tired of traveling the country in a band, and he couldn't find full time employment as a composer, he became a Music teacher in the local High School.

His love for music permeates everything he does, leading the band, the orchestra, even the marching band, plays, graduation performances, the countless students he mentors towards proficiency.

He and his wife have a son. They name their son Coletrane because the music of John Coletrane had so profoundly influenced Mr. Holland at a pivotal part of his life. The son is born deaf. This was not in the plans. Over many years, he learns how to sign and they have a relationship but the relationship has some distance in it. The relationship takes work for the father to learn how to communicate with his son. His wife puts more energy into signing and often times has to help the two translate for each other. More than that Mr. Holland continues through his life just doing his job- he spends a lot of time at night at rehearsals for the play, spends time early in the morning with his students that need extra practice.

As his son begins to become a teenager, Mr. Holland's lack of intentional creative imagination creeps up on him. There is a natural distance that begins to develop between father and son. Son challenges authority. Father is annoyed by son the slacker.

Add to this another dimension. It never occurred to the Father to share music with his son, for crying out loud, the kid is deaf. So the father, unwittingly, has never shared the passion that is the most central to his life. Despite the fact that they occupy the same living space, they have hardly ever shared the love of music together. The kid internalizes this because he sees his father's time commitments over the years. He sees how he invests in other students. He wants some time too. He wants to be loved. It does not occur to the father that he is doing anything wrong.

One day, Mr. Holland comes home from work grumpy and sad. He and his son are arguing over the car, when the son says to him, "What is wrong?" Mr. Holland signs back to him, "John Lennon died. You wouldn't understand." The kid blows up at him, "You don't think I know who John Lennon is just because I'm deaf." And then the kid gives him the speech about how he has taught everyone else in the world about music but not him.

By the way, Mr. Holland does figure out a way to communicate about music with his son. There is time for the amendment of life.

But the moment is very sad and poignant. Very often the two generations seem to have these built in barriers to communication and relatedness. The very people that you most want to love and nourish, you seem unable to connect with. Close in proximity, and for reasons that you cannot even bring yourself to articulate, there is this spiritual distance, a détente, an armistice but no deep discussions. It causes the best of us concern. We are sure that others are doing a better job of relating to their kids than we are. We are sure we are alone on this front. If it makes you feel any better, everyone else is about in the same boat too- or they will be in due time.

It is unlikely that we are going to be able to transmit wisdom from one generation directly to the next, although this does happen from time to time. Most of these discussions have to wait for many years if they take place at all.

No, most of the time, wisdom skips generations. And that is why the vocation of being a grandparent is such an important calling. God gives parents the possibility of becoming a grandparent as an opportunity for healing... and as opportunity for pay back. The common wisdom says that Grandparents and grandchildren have a common enemy, a future fact that teenagers and young adults seem constitutionally unable to grasp.

The great promise of grandparenthood is the possibility of passing on such wisdom as you have been able to accumulate to the next generation. For most of us, we don't really know what that is until we begin sharing it with a 3-year-old. The good news is that 3-year-olds come with a built in openness. They want to believe that we are wise in fact. They need to believe that we are wise.

No question, the context for sharing this wisdom has changed in the past 3 generations. But my sense is that the coming generations actually have real promise for creativity on this front.

My mother grew up in the 30's. In my family, and probably in the majority of American families, for a good portion of the summer the kids were shipped out of Memphis to their Granddaddy's farm. What they remember about childhood is following their grandparents around the farm in awe of the wonderful simple things that farmers did on a daily basis. They not only milked the cows, Grandma took the milk, made butter out of some of it, picked fruit from the trees, put it all together for a delicious homemade fruit pie. Since the whole day on a farm is composed of the chores that it takes to get through the day, the kids spent all their time doing chores in the fresh air, getting gloriously tired, swimming down in the creek, learning to saddle and ride the horse. Grandparents had a natural trove of wisdom that consisted of aphorisms on rules for dealing with the animals and prohibitions regarding snakes, coyotes, and other wiles of nature.

In the midst of this routine, Grandparents were able to pass on pretty viscerally the ethic of work that they lived day in and day out, their ethic of conservation that found some productive use for every left over ort and tittle. They passed on a natural appreciation of the beauty of birds and the morning sunrise that greeted them every day. They passed on their spirituality, which in that generation generally included daily Bible readings with instruction and regular times of prayer, and Sundays were simply never missed. [The Baptist paper that came out when I was a child would feature elderly people who had a record for perfect attendance at Sunday school. Each year they got a pin in June. There would be ladies on the front page of the paper named Thelma, aged 86, who was recently recognized at her church for 50 years of perfect attendance at Sunday school.]

My generation was really one of the first to have vacations in the manner that we regularly expect them today. Our family took some vacation every year, but a very large part of what we understood vacation to mean was going to visit our relatives in Memphis. My grandparents had the custom of taking the grandchildren, a couple at a time to the river at Pickwick Dam, where we would fish for several days.

The days of the farm were over but in some ways this was the next best thing, in other ways maybe even better. It was a chance to see my Grandparents in the element of their choosing. Both of my Grandparents worked but I don't think either of them found a huge fulfillment in their work. It was just what you did to pay the bills.

Out on the water, you got a sense that this was where they both wanted to be. My grandfather was a real handy man. He could fix anything, a virtue that was held in far higher esteem in the South than it is on the East Coast. Today, we just hire guys to come to our houses and fix everything- it is almost a badge of success that we can afford to pay top dollar and have all these workingmen answering to our spouses. My grandfather's generation would have rolled their eyes in disdain. Wimp... I can hear him now "Owns $23,000 in outdoor lighting fixtures and can't figure out how to set the timer- pitiful!... Absolutely pitiful!"

What I remember as a child is a mystery. It was being in the dark rural night, hearing the sounds of the night that come off the lowlands in Mississippi. I remember waking before dawn, eating breakfast still asleep, fiddling with stuff by flashlight. I remember the chill of the air taking the boat across the lake before dawn. I remember praying with my Grandparents at meals and for a longer session before bed. I remember falling asleep in the pew in some teeny Baptist Church in rural Mississippi in the humid night air with the Cicada's chirping in the background and the congregation singing hymns. I remember walking around Civil War battle sites and hearing a story about our people and our country, hearing it many times over many years, that told us about who we were and where we came from. I remember my Grandparents telling us things they wanted us to know about how to live our lives with spiritual integrity. I remember my Grandmother letting her hair down late at night in her nightgown, watching

My sense in this next generation is that we have more possibilities to make a mystery like that take place but we are going to have to go get our grandchildren. This generation is scheduled up to their teeth, sports, tutoring, fun camp, sports camp, family vacation. It is incredible. "The Far Side" recently had two kids with their Calendar's on their bikes, scratching through date after date, finally landing on a Friday in the next month to get together and trade pokemon cards. Enrichment.

We are going to have to claim some time and nearly demand that our children block us in for some time here, some time there. Perhaps, as no other time in history though, we have the opportunity to take our grandchildren with us on an adventure. We have the economic means and the travel possibilities to make an adventure come true, not that it has to be exotic in order for it to be important. It just has to be a dramatic change from the uni-culture that increasingly defines childhood for the entire East Coast, spreading through the television to the whole country. We have a chance to explore our passion and let our grandchildren explore it with us. What a terrific context for passing on our wisdom.

Think about it for a minute... Where is your spiritual habitat? Where have you been when you have felt that spiritual congruence? The mystery of Being? The awe of being alive in our world? You have a chance to not only go there yourself (more than the previous generations) you can take your grandchildren with you. That imprint will last. It will outlive you. For better and worse, it may be the most important contribution you make to the family in that phase of your life.

I heard about one Grandfather that kidnapped two of his grandkids a couple days before a long weekend, just woke them up in the early morning, got them packed, got them on the plane to western Montana for a few days of fly fishing on one of the rivers at the base of the Rockies and some hiking to boot.

Grandpa wakes the kids up in the morning, tells them they are doing something special. "What?" says one of the kids. "Skipping school", said Grandpa. The kid is getting dressed. After a few minutes he says, "Grandpa, is this legal?"

I can only imagine the beauty of the mornings. He taught the kids how to fish. What is important to remember is that this is when you can work in a bit of discussion about morality, about how to live. This is the time when you can model a few of the basic spiritual disciplines like reading a short passage from the Bible that is genuinely edifying as a thought for the day, or maybe another spiritual thinker. Maybe most importantly, this is a time when it is important to pray or to meditate with your Grandchildren. And it is very important that little kids see their Grandfather's leading them. Don't just leave this to the women. It is way more important than that.

The next generation is not going to develop values by osmosis. They need to have them spelled out, modeled. This will be a challenge for some of us because we don't want to cram religion in the throats of the next generation since we choked on it when it was crammed in ours. Good point.

But neither does it seem to me a good idea to avoid the whole subject and assume that they will get it on their own. I got very bad instruction on how to play baseball when I was a kid, so when I became an adult, I simply determined to read around a bit, talk to some other people and teach my kids baseball in a healthy way. I'm sure it wasn't perfect but it was a lot better than the previous generation. But to omit teaching baseball because I had a bad experience? What a stupid idea.

No, we can only model what we are already becoming, who we are already becoming, what we are growing to believe is true and important. And I know that for some of us, it may seem a little awkward at first to pray, to read a thought for the day, to share on a moral and spiritual level. We are not all that experienced in these disciplines ourselves. But you are not done yet either. You are coming into a fuller realm of being, hopefully a more rounded mature realm of being. Share what you are learning, what you are coming to embrace and be. Remember that your grandchildren are looking for you to fulfill this role, expecting you to do it.

I wouldn't trust our children to shoulder this responsibility on their own. In some ways, they simply can't because they are parents. You will have an access and a rapport with your Grandchildren that will be more intimate and more profound in many ways. And we sure as heck shouldn't trust our wider culture, our schools, or even our churches to teach our kids moral and spiritual values. They will grow up in a world of dramatic cultural currents that will wend in many different directions, the most beguiling often at odds with spiritual integrity. Truth be told, it will be here that you will have the chance to pass on that which you have also received, that you will be given a chance to bless the next generation, that you will be able to give a full expression to some things you were unable to do with your own kids. There is hope for the future.

Amen