Terry Paul Choyce
April 30, 2006, Brunswick Street United Church
Today we had the blessing of being part of the baptism of two children into our church. This is a sacred event, which welcomes the children into our spiritual home, and makes us partially responsible for their spiritual growth. Through baptism, they have become a part of our church family. We are so fortunate in Brunswick St. United Church to have a congregation that truly cares for one another, and which has become an extended family for one another. In this materialistic, high-paced, competitive world - this caring is rare and it is priceless. The strength of this church is not in its numbers of people or dollars, but in the huge amount of love and care it can give.
Today families come in all shapes, sizes and configurations. The two parent, two children "norm" is no longer prevalent. Now we have many single parent families, blended families with biological children from different parents, adopted families, foster families, grandparents who raise their grandchildren, and people who come together to provide support for each other. I have a coaster on my coffee table that says " Friends are the family you choose." Today, with the common break-up of marriages, the transience of people, and the polarization of people from their birth families, it is often our friends, or our faith community, who become our family.
In their book Everyday Blessings, Myla and Jon Kabat -Zinn say that one of the functions of family is to teach values. They say that through our families we need to "learn to know and respect our own strength;...how to listen to our own feelings and respect them and how to express them; to know the importance of honesty and of keeping one's word;... how to listen to and respect the feelings of others; and to know the sacredness of life, and its interconnectedness." (P.269) These are among the traits that we learn in this church as well. I like to think that we are teaching, by word and by example, valuable lessons and virtues by the way we treat each other, and by the way we live our lives. It is not just our parents that teach us what is important in life. It is everyone we interact with that guide us to be whole human beings. So it is important that we treat everyone with dignity and compassion. It is important that we role-model positive behaviours to all children. It is important that we reach out to help whenever we can. As Hilary Clinton said, "It takes a village to raise a child." The church is an important part of that village.
Each of us have emotional wounds that were generated in our childhoods. Some of us never learned how to express our emotions in healthy ways. Some of us lash out when we are angry, using ugly words or even violence when we are upset. Some of us are afraid to say "I love you," for fear that we will never hear those words said back to us. Some of us are very possessive of what we have and do not want to share our things, our money, our time, or our selves. Some of us are driven to succeed, to be the best, to prove that we are worth something. There are so many types of wounds which we carry, and we express every day. And sometimes we do not even know what kind of negative energy and messages we are generating. Until we have children. Our children are our mirrors to our true selves. They bring out the best of us, and the worst. This is what makes parenting so rewarding, and so challenging, and sometimes, so destructive. How we are with children, yours or someone else's, shows your real strengths and weaknesses. Everyday Blessings says "we may come to experience completion, wholeness, and a healing of our emotional wounds precisely by tending to the needs of our children in appropriate ways." (P.229) Our children can become our greatest teachers, if we are open to the lessons. If we can see our shortcomings reflected in our behaviours toward children, and we work hard to correct those problems in ourselves, we can become much more happy and balanced and loving people. Through children we can grow emotionally and spiritually.
Last week I went to Vancouver to visit my daughter Sunyata. She is 26, and she is a Katimavik leader in BC. Katimavik is a government funded project which gives teenagers the opportunity to experience life in three Canadian locations in one year. The kids are in groups of 11, and they move together from place to place. In each location they are given a house and a group leader. They are sent out into the community to do volunteer work. They are also responsible for the meals and for the cleaning of the house. For one year, they become a big family.
Staying with Sunyata's present group was an interesting experience for me. It was wonderful to see how they worked as a team to get jobs done. And they took responsibility for one another when one of them was having trouble. They came from all over Canada, and were quite different from each other. But it seemed to me that they learned from those differences, and respected each others uniqueness. For instance, one of the young women was a vegan, and would not eat meat, eggs, or anything with dairy food in it. Cooking for her was a challenge, but they all did it. So with the chicken there were lentil burgers, and they made cookies with no egg and no milk. One young man was very active and loud, and they found ways to effectively deal with him. Another girl had her hair dyed bright green. No problem. They treated each other with much respect. They are a family in the best sense of the word.
Being with my now adult daughter was interesting for me as well. She has so many of my traits, my good ones and my challenging ones. Mostly we got along remarkable well, but her short fuse is also my short fuse, so things got tense a few times. Because we are so much alike, it was good for me to see myself reflected in her. I learned a lot about myself. And hopefully she learned about herself too, through being with me. It is through our family dynamics that we are angered the most, taught the most, and we are loved the most.
With these two children here today, let us reach out to help them become loving people. Let us show them how to respect and care for each other, and this planet. Let us instill in them the love of God, and the example of Jesus Christ in giving, loving and being all that they can be. And in the process, we will all be better Christians and better people. As the song says "We are a part of the Family."
©Terry Paul Choyce. Used with permission from the author.
