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The spiritual and religious background of a childhood

Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover festival.

Luke 2:41 (NLT)

My favourite podcast for a decade now has been On Being with Krista Tippett, and she opens every interview with the same question: “Can you describe the spiritual or religious background of your childhood? (In whatever way you interpret that question).” The answers vary, with probably half describing an upbringing rooted in one of the world’s major religions, and others bringing their own take to how their family embraced love, community, responsibility and perspectives on life. Hearing how those early experiences shape the lives of people is fascinating, and enlightening. Everyone on her show has quite an amazing story in their adult life, and the links to the spiritual and religious background of their childhood makes you think. Especially as a parent of young kids.

This morning I was reading one of the few stories from the bible about Jesus in his childhood1. There’s only a few things I know about Jesus’ upbringing:

  • His birth story was pretty unexpected (which we talk about every Christmas. I hear a lot about this one!)
  • His family left their home and fled to Egypt as refugees
  • At some point they returned and settled in a town called Nazareth (which had a bad reputation)
  • When he was 12, he was on a trip to the temple and got left there, and had some big chats with the rabbis.

This morning I noticed one extra detail on that last experience: “every year”. I’m sure there’s a lot I could learn about the spiritual and religious background by learning about what was normal for first century Jews under Roman rule. But even this little detail is fascinating.

Each year as a family they made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Google Maps thinks it’s about a 138km walk. So several days of walking even for an adult. I imagine when you’re travelling as a family it’s even slower. And they obviously knew lots of other travellers – enough that it was normal for a 12 year old to be in the company of other travellers and not his parents. (I think about my annual trips to the Pemberton Caravan Park as a kid, and meeting some of the same families year after year. And then later the annual youth Summer Camp with other high school kids from my church.)

Google maps is also telling me it’s largely uphill on the way there: that’s why the psalms associated with the pilgrimage to Jerusalem are called “the songs of ascent“2 – I’m guessing Jesus and the other travellers would have known these and sung them on the way.

This whole pilgrimage – a week or so of travel, a week or so of the festival, and a week or so for the return – I’m sure would have been included in Jesus’ answer to Krista Tippett’s question. How could such a regular, huge, intentional, communal experience not shape the way you see the world?

And then there’s the story of him staying with the teachers of the law and having the big conversations. Where did he learn all this? I think some of the answers I heard as a kid in Pentecostal churches suggest it was all the Holy Spirit and divine insights… and while my experience says God does connect with children directly and they can learn spirituality from revelation and not just from culture – I also have no doubt that Jesus would have soaked in the religion and spirituality of his community and culture. They did this pilgrimage every year, and I doubt this is the first time he’s had conversations with the teachers. It’s just memorable because it’s the time his parents lost track of him. (Terrifying!)

And what about the rest of the time with his family? What was their spirituality like at home? If the birth story was as full on as the gospels suggest then his parents would have been indelibly changed by the experience. They would have had a strong sense of God’s involvement in their lives.

They also would have been forever changed by their experience of fleeing persecution. I doubt anyone can be a refugee and then experience the rest of their life as if that dramatic escape hadn’t occurred. They would have been so aware of the power systems of the empire they lived in, and more culturally aware than many of their neighbours who may not have travelled as far as they had, and may not have experienced other cultures up close.

And once they’re back in Nazareth, and living as Jews in a Jewish culture: did they treat Jesus differently? This verse makes me think not:

And his mother stored all these things in her heart.

Luke 2:51

Combined with other stories from the gospels about Jesus’ home-town community viewing him as “the carpenter’s son” and not particularly special, I wonder if Mary tried to let the kid just grow up, without placing expectations on him. He was in his 30s by the time she prompted him to help out with the lack of wine at the wedding, prompting his first miracle and the start of his ministry. By that point Jesus and Mary have obviously talked about something, because he has a sense of the purpose in his life and it’s timing: “my hour has not yet come”.

It is a beautiful thing to imagine Mary as a mum, holding all the promises she believes for her son, and having faith for them, enough faith to let it happen in its own time.

No extra-curricular religion classes were needed. Nor any messiah training or exposure to zealot groups. Clearly Jesus gravitated to the temple and the teachers all on his own.

And there’s also the experience of being a people living under foreign occupation. And the experience of growing up in a small village with not a lot of people and not a lot of opportunities. So many of these things would have been in the backdrop of his life, shaping who he ended up being as an adult – the things we remember him for.

And all this makes me think about me as a parent, and what I want to impart to my kids.

Growing up as a child of pastors, I had so many beautiful and formative moments. And while the rhythms of a Pentecostal / evangelical church don’t feel as rich as Jewish culture or even liturgical Christian calendars, there were regular rhythms – like the summer camps I mentioned, these were so crucial for how I formed into adulthood.

I love how big the annual pilgrimage was for them. How much it would have dominated their annual calendar. How much it must have been a big thing for them as kids, taking in a little bit more, with a little more independence each year (and then too much!) What would an equivalent look like for our family? And our church community as a whole?

Only as an adult have I started practicing Lent and Advent more deliberately, respecting the whole season rather than just Easter Weekend and Christmas Day. But even then I’m engaging with these seasons mostly through readings and reflections – it’s very cognitive and not often visceral. I’m wondering what kinds of communal rituals would build memories and form character in a more deliberate way.

For my boys definitely. But also for me. And also, the church.

  1. Apparently it is, or was, the Feast of the Holy Family today? I’m having trouble following the logic of the liturgical calendar combined with the timezone differences from the newsletter that alerted me to it! ↩︎
  2. A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson was a formative book for me – it’s centred around these psalms and the idea of pilgrimage. ↩︎
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Elections and bush-fires

I’ve paid far too much attention to the US election, consuming media and commentary about it for years in the lead up, with addictive behaviours to check-in on news websites and blogs regularly especially over the last few months.

With the result coming in today that Trump has won a second term – despite all the things that I would have wished were disqualifying – I was dismayed. Not surprised – I’d read enough analysis to know it was basically a coin flip chance. But dismayed.

And left wondering how much I should feel with this: it’s not my election. But I’ve followed it so closely, I’m invested in it. And Australia is so closely linked to the US – obviously in defence and foreign policy, but also culturally – that the direction they’re turning worries me. I especially worry for the Ukrainians. And for young women in conservative states. And for the gay and trans communities who are very much being used as scapegoats.

I tried to get through today without doom-scrolling. I cared for my boys, I had a call with a friend, I worked, I went to my piano lesson. I didn’t really know how to process it.

Then while I was driving I remembered an experience I had in 2017, it was a lesson I needed to learn then, and I think I need to remember it now too.

In 2017, I was a several years into trying to do something in education and software and startups. Working in schools, building various educational products, launching a startup, and then when that didn’t work, joining another one that was even more ambitious. I was determined to do something “big”, to make a dent in the universe, as many of us in that scene dreamed of.

Alongside this work/business ambition, I’d also been dreaming big in church circles. First at Riverview (the church I grew up in and have now returned to). But then also with First Home Project, an attempt to not just serve the refugee community but re-shape the Australian culture to be less scared and more welcoming. And then in Melbourne I was part of a small church – only a few dozen people – but that was so determined to be a counter-culture, almost a prophetic voice critiquing what’s wrong with many church communities and painting a vivid picture of what an alternative could be.

Big dreams in work, big dreams in church, but they were all sputtering along by July 2017, and it wasn’t really going anywhere. Our church was soon to close its doors, from burnout and disillusionment amongst those running it, and the startup I worked at was struggling along, and I wasn’t sure if they’d have enough money to keep paying me each month.

The big dreams felt like they were dying. And that’s when we went to visit my aunties in the Southern Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

While we were staying with them, we made a day trip out to the farm Annette grew up on, and while giving us a tour and telling us stories – she tells great stories – I had a “holy ground” kind of moment.

She was telling us the story of the 2014 Bangor fires that had swept through this area. I remember their Facebook updates each night as the fire burned for weeks and weeks, each night filled with fear that it might break containment lines and burn through the bushland, through the farm, through people’s houses.

So that day as we walked through the bush, past trees and dried out creeks, with their dogs running ahead, the leaves crunching under my feet with each step, and the stories still being told, I started to see the evidence of the fire. Scars on the trees. The lack of undergrowth. It had come right through here, right where we were walking.

But there was life. Trees still standing tall. New plants sprouting everywhere. The birds. This place was coming back to life.

The family didn’t operate the farm anymore, they had leased out much of the land, but this land, around “sheep camp hill”, they’d wanted to give back to the country. And so they were letting the bush grow again. And after the fire, it was coming back to life.

And I remember being so inspired by that little resilient ecosystem.

Here I was trying to dream big and change the world, but nature was teaching me a lesson. Instead of grandiose plans to re-shape the world to our liking, there’s something beautiful about loving a small patch of land, and fostering the kind of resilience that can survive and bring new life, even after a fire destroys everything.

And so I had a revelation about love at a small scale.

Love, placed in individual relationships and families and small communities and tiny systems. In sports teams and work teams and social groups. Love that can self propagate and spread. That can evolve to the conditions and that can recover after catastrophic events. That love could change the world, far more than the biggest startup or the most dynamic church.

To quote Jesus and mix my metaphors, a little yeast spreads through the whole batch of dough.

And so today, as I feel disappointed in the failure of the big political movement I wanted to see “win”, and dismayed at the state of the culture that wants this alternative, and a little bit of shame for treating the whole thing like as an entertaining sport with winners and losers but not actually doing anything to help… I’m brought back to this idea that maybe where I need to focus is on building resilient love, self propagating love, into communities at a small scale.

There’s a beautiful interview between Krista Tippett and adrienne maree brown that captures this so perfectly, I want to quote it at length:

brown: So I was doing electoral organizing in 2004 — 2003, 2004. We’re gearing up — it’s post-9/11; we’re going to war with Iraq, Afghanistan, and we’re like, we’ve got to get Bush out of office. We have to. He’s just going to keep perpetuating all these unjust wars with all these people and not help figure anything out. So we’re doing all this organizing, and it clicked for me, in a way that I couldn’t — it’s one of those things, you see it and you can’t un-see it. And I was like, oh, we are trying to just change the top layer of this very layered cake, this very layered process, this system of governance. We think that if we just win the presidency, that then we’ll be able to change the world.

And it clicked for me that actually, it’s a fractal system. And it’s layer on top of layer on top of layer. And if none of us are practicing democracy anywhere, it’s not going to just suddenly work at the top layer. [laughs] And I got it, and then I realized — so I started asking people, because I was touring a book we had written. And I started asking people, Do you practice democracy — anywhere in your life? [laughs] Not even politically, but just in your household? Who makes the decisions about the budget?

Tippett: [laughs] What did people say?

brown: No.

Tippett: [laughs] Right.

brown: Nobody was practicing it, or if people were practicing it, they would be like, oh yeah — you know, there would always be like one really happy person who was like, I practiced it. And then I would be like, okay, in your household, you practice it. Do you practice it with your neighbors? And then they would have to be quiet. Or, do you practice it —

Tippett: Okay, that’s fascinating.

brown: There was almost nobody who was practicing it on their block or in their community or in their organizations or other places. Everyone’s kind of dodging the actual work of democracy, small-d democracy.

So then, of course, we are in this crisis right now where we cannot figure out a way past this political impasse moment. To me, what it reveals is we haven’t been practicing democracy for such a long time anyway. We’ve really outsourced almost every aspect of governance, and the only part we’ve held onto is complaining. People sit in their living rooms, they form opinions, they’re upset about stuff, they don’t do much about it, but they’re apoplectic. [laughs]

Tippett: And they also don’t know what they can do about it, right — at that mega level.

brown: Exactly. That’s on purpose. [laughs] So it’s like, trying to keep people in a place where they’re angry and they think they can buy their way out of it. That’s one of the reasons organizers exist, is to be like, actually, you can’t get out of it that way, but there are ways. We’ll have to work together to figure it out, but there are other practices.

But that’s when it clicked for me, that I was like — something about smallness, I was able to gain respect for, because I was like, every single large system or structure or network or political protocol, all of it is made up of small things — of humans either having or not having necessary conversations, and humans being willing to stand up for what is right and stand up against what is wrong. It’s all these small activities that we need to get great at if we want to actually have anything that would be a real democracy.

Tippett: This way you make the connection between what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole society — how we are at the small scales, how we are at the large scale.

On Being with Krista Tippett – adrienne maree brown: On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life
adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life
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An anchor for the soul

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire
  9. Which promises?
  10. Write it on their hearts
  11. The community’s relationship to God
  12. Everyone will know me already

Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.

Hebrews 6

These words and metaphors have been ones I’ve found myself clinging to and meditating on through what has been a pretty rough ride in my life this year.

Fleeing to God for refuge. A hope that gives us confidence. An anchor to hold us steady.

These images have helped give my soul a sense of stability when life has felt incredibly unstable.

But I’d usually imagine the anchor holding us in place in the storm. Then I listened to Krista Tippett (host of On Being) interview Kate Bowler (host of Everything Happens). Kate was diagnosed with terminal cancer as a young mother at 35. Somehow, she’s still here, and so her take on “Hope” carries extra weight.

Tippett: What at this point is your working definition of hope?

Bowler: I think before I would’ve said it was something like certainty. I might have looked from a doctrinal perspective and been like, “Well, Krista, thank you for asking, I actually have six things about God I’d love to tell you.” Because depending on your story of faith, it’s a long timescale — that it’s the consummation of the earth and the great triumph of good over evil, et cetera, et cetera. But I think hope now feels like God and love is like an anchor that’s dropped way in the future. And I’m just, along with everyone else, being slowly pulled toward it. And that feeling won’t always feel like the details of my life have somehow clicked into place and that I get to feel the fullness of my life. But that, ultimately, that this is a good story. It’s just not only mine.

From an interview with Krista Tippett and Kate Bowler on the On Being podcast

Not an anchor holding us in place, but “an anchor that’s dropped way in the future. And I’m just, along with everyone else, being slowly pulled toward it.”

That’s hope.

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Barbara Brown Taylor and “This Hunger for Holiness”

“On Being with Krista Tippett” has long been my favourite podcasts, and this interview with Barbara Brown Taylor is a new favourite episode. In their conversation they follow Taylor’s life and some of her teaching, exploring the wandering and wilderness of a life of faith, the idea of the body, ecology and the incarnation being crucial to spiritual life, and what “the death of God” and “the death of the church” look like in a world where churches are emptying but “spiritual but not religious” or “none” just don’t do justice to the new thing that people are seeking and experiencing.

I think it is so true that people are talking about loss of faith, loss of God, and I think it’s loss of church. I really think it’s church that’s suffering now. And it was suffering long before COVID put it in isolation. But I think a lot of people during that couple of years, I’ve talked to them, who discovered either how eager they were to get back or that they weren’t going back. So I do think this is about church. And I didn’t understand Altizer this way, and his colleagues. He wasn’t the only guy. He just got famous for saying, “God is dead.”

But I remember not too long ago looking back into that theology again, and realized that at least some of those people were talking about God emptying God’s self into the world. That’s a familiar thing for people who’ve been initiated into Christian language, that Jesus poured himself into the world, emptied himself into the world. So I am intrigued by the idea of what it means for the church to be emptying now. And I am still naïve enough to believe…

… I trust the Holy Spirit, Krista. That’s where I’m still real religious, is I still trust that wind that blows things around, and you don’t know where it came from and you don’t know where it goes, but it’s going to blow. And it’s blowing all the time.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in interview with “On Being with Krista Tippett”
Barbara Brown Taylor — “This Hunger for Holiness”
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Dead Stars by Ada Limón

I was listening to an interview with Krista Tippett and Ada Limón, and it was a beautiful, fun, hilarious interview. When she read the poem “Dead Stars” near the end of the interview I was brought to tears.

Here’s the interview.

And here’s the poem:

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising —

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

The lines that cut through me: “Look, we are not unspectacular things We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”