On one recent excursion, a book on the sale pile caught my attention: The Parent's Tao Te Ching: A New Interpretation, by William Martin. I glanced through a few pages and knew it was a book I wanted to read. Martin takes the eighty-one chapters of the Dao and gives insightful and lyrical interpretations about the parent child relationship, from the parents point of view. But it is more than a book on child-rearing. It contains amazing insights for living a decent life (as of course do all versions of the Dao.) You will find in this book insight for your relationships of every kind: life-partners, colleagues at work, next door neighbors, even your enemies.
Here's a snippet from chapter 17 "No Need for Threats."
You can control your children
through threats and punishments
and they will learn to fear.
You can control their behavior
by praise and reward
and they will learn to look outside themselves
for approval and worth.
You can watch over every movement,
every action, every decision,
making sure they do it "right,"
and they will learn to always
doubt themselves.
Or you can love and guide
without controlling or interfering
and they will learn to trust themselves.
I wish I had known that when our first child was born in 1977! Thirty-five years and around ninety children later and I think I have internalized the lesson. At least, I hope I have.
We long ago abandoned rewards and punishments as controls for children. Instead, we try to model loving relationship, compassion and self-control. Blaming, shaming, and berating are ineffective. It's probably more true to say they are very effective, but in the wrong ways.
In the book Jane and I are writing presently on Loving Nonviolent (Re)parenting, we talk about the kinds of people we need to be to model loving nonviolence—and all that means—for children. We want to help foster carers and adopters internalize and work through habits of care, kindness and compassion. William Martin expresses much dear to our hearts.
It was, then, with heavy heart that I read the lectionary passages for the third Sunday in Lent.
The metaphor of God as parent is mostly helpful—helpful if the metaphor is of the kind of parent that Martin speaks of in his book. The metaphor is less than helpful when it speaks of the kind of parent who is domineering, abusive and unkind. Over the years we have talked with many folk who have found "God as Father" language difficult. If "father" to you was an abusive man who hurt rather than helped, who cursed rather than cared, the to see God as father is a frightful image.
One of the difficulties is that some of the writers in the Bible suggest a less than helpful metaphor for God. In 1 Corinthians 10, St. Paul, trying to encourage early Christians to be good, tells of people of old who disobeyed God and were destroyed as a result. "Watch out!" he says in effect. "the same might happen to you." The message is a clear one. St. Paul projects onto God a character who gets angry if you don't do as he says, and who will punish you—destroy you—if you disobey.
I was hoping to find something to counteract this in the gospel reading. No such luck! In Luke 13 the redactor puts similar words in the mouth of Jesus. At Siloam a tower had fallen on eighteen people and killed them. "Unless you repent, you will perish just as they did," says the Jesus of Luke 13. Of course, the punishment is from God because God is like that. Father God demands obedience, and if he does not get it, then prepare to perish.
After I had read the lectionary passages my first thought was to ignore them—pass over them in silence as if they were not there. But my first thought bothered me. This image of God as spiteful, vengeful, punisher, who demands obedience "or else" is simply not a god worth worshipping.
When I say my prayers I do not pray to such a god. I pray to one like a loving parent who reflects the kind of parent I found in William Martin's book. I give the last word to him (from Chapter 34):
In many ways the good parent
must be like the Tao.
But not in ways that you might think.
The Tao loves all creation,
but does not seek to control.
The Tao nourishes all life everywhere,
but does not judge that life.
The Tao cherishes every person,
but does not grasp or cling.
Well worth a read,
+Ab. Andy
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