Untilling

Untilling

A weblog about discerning focal practices in a distracted world.

Parenting #1

One of the scariest things in parenting is to take seriously and literally the idea of God as Father. What that means is that God relates to us as a Father who loves us so much that, knowing all the wrong that we have done, knowing all the wrong that we will do, sends an older brother to die and redeem his younger siblings.

As an aside, of course, the older brother himself is willing and ready. It is not a case of cosmic child abuse as some allege, but the case of a loving father and a loving older brother seeking the lost younger siblings of a beautiful family.

What that means is that as we relate to our children, one of the best things that we can do for them is to love them.

Not to discipline them, although that is important. Not to fight them, although sometimes that is inevitable. But fundamentally, primarily, to love them. And that cuts against so much of our traditional and instinctive approach to parenting.

The idea that we have to always be on our children's case, always be pushing them, always be nudging them towards the right thing. If that doesn't come out of a fundamental relationship of self-sacrificial love, then we are not truly living in faith.

In faith that God loves us.

In faith that God loving us is the right thing.

In faith that we ourselves are not deserving of any love, yet have received such an immense love from a father.

And if we have been loved and forgiven in this way, how much more should we love our children in that same way?

❏

"And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild." (GK Chesterton)

The most exalted ideals are held in the modest structures of our lives: patterns that invite us to see, understand, replicate, and make new buildings that nurture life. (Pattern Recognition)

"Only by redefining leisure as no more than the absence of alienated labor has it been possible to so alienate us from our leisure that even our free time now becomes one more form of alienation, refined within an inch of its life, sliced and diced and parceled out into profit-generating chunks of captured attention. And now, it is with some horror that we realize—if we can—that even if we are quick to nod our heads in agreement, we are less and less capable of viscerally feeling the attraction of Marx's quaint vision of leisure as hunting and fishing and cattle-rearing and criticizing, not only because all of those activities strike us as far too much work, but because all of them require the sort of slow and luxurious attention that is itself no longer for us a simple pleasure but an offputting slog." (Alienated Leisure)

Fit check for my napalm era.

Burning tokens for the feeling of being in a sci-fi movie.

Trying to move this blog onto Github so that I can work on it remotely more easily, and, perhaps... agents? Who knows. Scaffolding, hooks, context: these are essentials of the agentic lifestyle.

Faced with the power to try almost anything, I struggle to think of anything worth trying.

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