My Grandmother and Me

My husband, John, and his grandmother, Blanche Todd

I often think about how faith is transmitted across generations.  Last night I heard a story about the power of shared faith across generations.  I was listening to a book entitled The Spiritual Child, by Lisa Miller.  It’s about the neuropsychology of spirituality, and how nurturing children’s innate capacity for spirituality helps them thrive.  The book is very repetitive and a bit sleep-inducing, and I am still listening for practical applications.  However, this story was striking.

The author describes what happened one Sunday morning aboard the New York City subway.  When she boarded, she saw that the passengers were crowded at one end of the car.  At the other end of the car was a disheveled man clutching a bag of fast food, brandishing a piece of chicken at the other passengers and yelling, “Hey!  You want to sit with me?  You want some of this lunch?”  The author took an empty seat across the aisle from the man.  At every subway stop the man issued the same invitation as people boarded.

At one stop an elegant older woman boarded with a young girl, about eight years old.  They appeared to be a grandmother and granddaughter.  They were beautifully dressed for a church service.  When the man saw them, he issued his invitation: “Hey!  You want to sit with me?”  The grandmother and granddaughter looked at each other, nodded, and sat down right next to the man, looking into his face.  “Thank you,” they said in unison to him.  The man and all the passengers were shocked.  “Do you want some?” he bellowed as he offered his chicken.  They replied, “No, thank you,” and again looked at each other.  He asked again, in a calmer voice, and they patiently replied with kind voices, “No, thank you.”  This was repeated a few times, and each time, the man grew calmer and calmer, until he was quiet. The grandmother and granddaughter looked at each other with understanding and agreement.

It was clear to the author that the grandmother and granddaughter had a shared spirituality.  The look that passed between them, which the author calls “the nod” was a sign of something deeply shared.  It was a sign of spiritual direction and values taught and received in a loving relationship between an elder and someone younger. The author felt like she was witnessing the passing of a sacred torch.

My hunch is that this granddaughter had accompanied her grandmother and  observed her kind manner and respect for others many times before.  And soon this way became a part of who the granddaughter was, too.  The author went on to point that out that the strength of this kind of connection across generations makes a big difference as children learn to live with the ups and downs of life.  Among its blessings are a sense of security and resiliency.

I give thanks to God for my grandmother and all the elders in my life who gave this gift to me.  I’m still looking for ways to pass that sacred torch on.

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Everyone can sing.

Singing Christmas songs together.

It used to be that everyone, or almost everyone, sang regularly, in church and at community gatherings.  Group singing has become an endangered species even in the church.  Encouraging everyone to sing, from our infant saints to our oldest saints, is one of my missions.

In his post Everyone Can Sing: How to Stop the Non-Singer Epidemic in Our Churches, Jonathan Aigner talks about remedying that situation.  One of Aigner’s most important points is to use music in worship that is suitable for group singing, i.e. doesn’t require a soloist’s interpretation.  It’s singable by ordinary people with ordinary voices.  He is critical of church music that he views as too performance-oriented.  He gets some pushback about that and other points in the comments.

At any rate, I’m going to keep working on this.  I really believe that everyone can make music, and we learn to do it in the same way we learn to talk, by listening and giving it a try, with lots of encouragement from someone who cares about us.

Here are some of my earlier posts on making music:

Music for Jesus’ Little Friends.

Music for Jesus’ Youngest Disciples.

The Blessings of a Hymn Book.

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Old fashioned neighborliness in a new day

Saying hello at the curb.

When we think about sharing Jesus’ love and inviting people to follow him as disciples, a big part of it is simply being neighborly.  I once wrote a sermon called Front Porch Church reflecting on recovering the kinds of neighborly interactions that front porch living facilitated.  Often we work outside the neighborhoods where we live, and when we are home, we hang out on back decks and in fenced back yards.

Here is a post from the Slow Church blog entitled “Three Shifts Towards Neighborliness.”   I recommend the whole post, but here is a quote that I really resonate with:

“We need to give ourselves permission to waste time with our neighbours. When we choose to be present—around dinner tables, on porches, and in local parks—we create space for life-giving relationships to be deepened, for collaborative opportunities to arise, for creativity to be co-inspired, and for the cultural idol of productivity to be subverted.”

For more thoughts on neighborhoods and neighborliness, see my post “You shall love your neighborhood.”

Credits

Photo Credit: “Neighbors”, © 2012 Tony Alter, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

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