Plant a Radish: Thoughts on Dedicating and Naming a Child
Sermon by Steve Edington
November 4, 2007
Last Sunday afternoon I had yet another of those "where did it all go" moments, that seem to come to me with increasing frequency these days. It was up in our auditorium with our ROPES, or Coming of Age, program for our junior high age young people - 23 of them are in the program this year. I'm a mentor for one of the young persons, and the gathering last Sunday was for mentors and their "mentees," I guess you could call them.
Looking around the room I realized that at least two of those ROPES kids were ones I'd done a Dedication and Naming Ceremony for like the one we earlier had here for Katherine and her parents Mary and Chip. While I'm not ready to say at this point just what the full and final length of my tenure will be here, it is probably safe to say that I will not be involved in the ROPES program when Katherine is ready for it. I'll easily settle for being alive and in good health at that point. It was also last Sunday that our 23-year-old son was in the congregation, after coming back to Nashua to get his engineering career underway after graduating college. He was a four-year-old pre-schooler here in our Religious Education program once upon a time. He still enjoys the friendships and relationships he made when he was in the ROPES program and the About Your Sexuality - now called the Our Whole Lives series. It all tends to put me in a certain frame of mind.
Part of that frame of mind has to include telling myself that I honestly don't feel like I've become all that much more knowledgeable, or any kind of an expert, about the rearing of children for just having done it. What I mostly feel is just plain flat-out lucky more than anything else. And I'm greatly pleased with how we provide for the religious education of the children and young people of our church. The real heavy lifting with that is done by Chris Parker, the RE Committee, our Teachers and all the others who make that program go. But having limited knowledge of a subject has never held me back all that much when it comes to holding forth on it from this pulpit, so why should this Sunday be any different? We've had a very good and full service already today, so I'm aiming for more of a short, follow-up homily to our Child Dedication Service than a full-length sermon this morning. I figure that's good for all of us.
There's a song in that long-running off-Broadway play The Fantastiks that would come back to during the years Michele and I were raising our son. I thought its title, as I had it in the Newsletter, was "Plant a Turnip" only to find it's "Plant a Radish." Well, turnip, radish - I'm not terribly fond of either; but here are some of the lines: "Plant a radish, get a radish, never any doubt. That's why I like vegetables you know what you're about...They're dependable; they're be-friendable! There the best pal a parent's ever known. While with children it's bewilderin'. You don't know until the seed is nearly grown, Just what you've sown." Then a few verses later come the lines, "But with progeny its hodge-podgeny, you don't know what you've got until it's grown."
There's much truth in these lighthearted lyrics. Raising children is not near as predictable an undertaking as growing a vegetable garden. Kahlil Gibran, in his oft quoted collections of meditations, The Prophet, makes the same point with a different metaphor when he says that children are like arrows that are shot from a bow. We can very carefully tend to the bow and the arrow, we can use our strength and will and our good and well-intended efforts as we pull back the bowstring and carefully aim the arrow; but once you let it go, it goes where it will. So whether it's as a parent, a teacher, a religious educator (which is what anyone who teaches in our Religious Education program is) - or anyone who is in any way ever involved in the care and nurture of a child - I'd like to use some of the words we've already heard today in our Dedication and Naming ceremony to offer a few thoughts. They are reflections on what is involved in planting that garden and pulling that bow, knowing as we do that what eventually results will indeed be beyond our reach. I'm looking beyond the basics here like providing food, clothing, shelter, education and the like; knowing, as we do, that there are many parents in this community, in this country, and around the world who struggle mightily, and on a daily basis, just to offer these rudimentary kinds of things for their children.
Part of the charge to the parents that was given to Chip and Mary called upon them to have their child "become aware of the world as it is and as it ought to be." That's a tall order, and it doesn't just apply to a child's parents. It's a more widely shared responsibility. We want our children to be aware of the world as a safe and trustworthy place; a place where they can feel at home in a confidant and self-affirming way. But we also want them to have their antennae out, because not everything out there is safe or trustworthy. We know that there will be any number of times when their self-confidence and their sense of self-worth will be greatly tested. We need to be ready to stand by them when those times come. What I think we want is for our children to feel that their world is enough of a safe and life-giving place for them that they will want to devote at least some of their time and energies to making it a safe and life-giving place for even more of the peoples of this earth.
Another part of that charge to the parents - and to us - states, "She will learn that tragedy is a part of life, but may she also be made aware of life's glorious possibilities." There's another one of those many balancing acts that are involved in planting that garden or pulling back that bow. We live in a world that we want and need to both expose our children to and protect them from. Tragedy is a part of life - from the death of a pet to the loss of a family member, and clear on up to some of the more overwhelming cruelties that human beings can inflict upon one another. We cannot completely shield our children's eyes from these things; nor, in the end, should we. We can, as best we can, nurture their hearts and minds so they can both see tragedy, and see beyond it to what this charge also calls "life's glorious possibilities" - possibilities that are as real as life's shadow side.
The charge also calls upon the parents - and, again, all who have a hand in a child's upbringing, to foster an awareness of "the power of love to transform both individuals and societies, if that love has courage as well as affection." The bigger thought and question that comes to my mind as I reflect on these words is how do we teach our children the meaning of success? What do we want success to mean to them? I've never shied away from wanting, and motivating, (as best I could) our son to be successful in the more worldly sense of the word: Find yourself a good career, a secure income, a circle of friends, and plenty of enjoyable and uplifting moments; and, ah, take good care of your parents when the time for that comes. What parents don't want such things for their children as they come to adulthood?
As good and necessary as such things are, I think we do our children a disservice if we give them a limited understanding of success. A successful life is one that also reaches beyond itself. It is one that learns about and acts upon, in the language of the charge, "the power of love to transform both individuals and societies if that love has courage as well as affection." This is the kind of love we must be about teaching our children even as we urge and counsel them to pursue a successful life for themselves.
Finally, keeping it short for today, we try to raise our children with some sense of the sacred. At the risk of rushing the Holiday season even more than is already being done, I would hold up here my favorite Christmas meditation by the outstanding UU Religious Educator, Sophia Fahs. Her words are well known to many of us: "Each night a child is born is a holy night." Having never had the experience of giving birth, I'm not sure just how much holiness is felt right at that moment, but Ms. Fahs' words are well worth taking to heart nonetheless.
There is, I believe, a certain kind of holiness or sacredness in all of us; and it's that "spark of the Divine," as Ralph Waldo Emerson called it, that also connects us to a certain kind of sacredness that's embedded in Creation itself. When we can feel and affirm that sacred part of ourselves, and then link that part to the sacred dimension within the larger life that we're all a part of; we then do take a much more care-full (full of caring) stance and attitude to this very fragile world and earth, in which were each given a certain amount of time to live.
To a large degree, this inherent sacredness is something we each have to discover and experience for ourselves. It really cannot be done vicariously. The best we can do for our children is provide a setting, an environment, a garden if you will, where they can make that kind of discovery for themselves. This is what I hope we can do both in our family homes, and in the nurturing and challenging home we strive to have this congregation be. It's a setting we try to offer as long as we've still got our hand on the arrow.
Stephen Edington
November 4, 2007
