Leslie Leyland Fields

Dear Calvin Conference writer! Here are the main quotes from my presentation:  You might be interested as well in "Sentencing Ourselves to Pieces," just below, a brief essay on the necessity of teaching and reading whole books (rather an excerpts--as some are now insisting).

(Apologies to other subscribers! But I hope you'll take a look at these as well. They're fabulous quotes---and I promise to make a real blog entry with these words soon!)

" . .. the job of art IS to generate beauty out of suffering, but in such a way that doesn't prettify or falsify the suffering. What would offend me was if someone looked at a car wreck and called it lovely . . ."

----Alan Shapiro, Interview in The Writer's Chronicle

Sentencing Ourselves to Pieces

I wrote an essay in my sleep last night---about books. Everyone in my dream was holding a book open, tilting their heads, reading  thoughtfully.  Books were not dead, the printed page would live on as a vital and treasured source of knowledge  and experience.

It was a good world. It was a good essay. It was a good dream.  I kept pondering whether I should wake myself up to write it down.  I did not, concluding that my slumbering self would surely remember an essay of this import. Upon waking, however, its particulars and its message of hope eluded me.

I know what happened. I made the mistake of watching  PBS's Frontline "Digital World"  just before bed, and paid particular attention to one interviewee's prognostications about the book:  Marc Prensky, the author of Digital Game-Based Learning,  who describes himself on his website as an "internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant and designer in the critical areas of education and learning. " He says this about books and kids:

You don't have to read them (books) to take in what's in a book. .  . .  If I said to kids, "You  know, you don't have to read all that much. But what I'd really like you to read are these few things and these excerpts, and these parts, and then I'll tell you why you should read them. . . . And no, you don't have to pore through Silas Marner as I did in high school. There are very few books you have to have read."

(I confess I would have been more willing to grant his pain in high school had he named The Brothers Karamazov or Gibbon's 8-volume The Fall of the Roman Empire. Silas Marner clocks in at a mere 200 pages.)

Let me understand this. If a writer's work is truly important and excellent---it earns the exalted status of being pieced and excerpted. And then I wonder, the writers whose work rises to this esteem, how did they arrive at their insights, brilliance, and genius?Through an education built on carefully selected snippets?

We have forgotten why we read, I fear.  We need information, yes. We need knowledge and discernment more.  We need imagination far more.  We need beauty and possibility even more.  Without these, we are sentenced to a single spirit, a single mind, a single life.  This is what I used to say when books lay on every shelf and people at least aspired to read.

We need to read whole books for far more important reasons now. College students can no longer attend  to an entire lecture without facebooking and IM-ing.  We text through our meals, we interrupt our visits for every vibration in our shirt pocket. We finish very little single-minded or single-handed.  We are sentencing ourselves to pieces, dividing our language, our hours, our very selves among multiple media, shrinking our thoughts into bits and tweets, excerpts and texts.  We cannot attend.  We no longer seek silence.  We have lost our ground of being, and cannot remember what holds us together.

Last week I walked into my first graders classroom.  The kids were sprawled on the floor, cross-legged on the carpet, leaning over their desks, all with a book in hand, faces inches from the page, intent.  SSR time, Silent Sustained Reading. For twenty minutes every day. Were these the faces in my dream?

Maybe college classes can do the same. Maybe we can as well. Silent. Sustained. Reading.  Maybe we will remember back to first and second grade, why we read books then, from beginning to end. That slow immersion, that aching marinating in a world of such light, drama and color, whose ending would bring delight, even wonder, and always an appetite for more.  We always longed for more of the book, never less.

"Why are we reading if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?" asks Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. Which can be called as well, "The Reading Life."  Why indeed?  But don't stop with this quote.  Read the whole book. Read as many whole books as you can. Sentence yourself again to beauty and whole-hearted delight.

Training is Not Enough!!

We all want our children to obey us implicitly, to do everything we want them to do. But there's a catch. When the focus of our "training" is primarily about getting our kids to do what we want them to do, we're in for trouble. The lesson is obvious, so I won't beat it to pieces. You can train a killer whale to do flips and tricks on command with yummy bits of fish as rewards, but treats and tricks don't change his heart. Tillie the orca is still an orca. He is still a creature with a wild, whale heart, just what he was created to be.

Our children are too wondrously and fearfully made to be reduced to animal training. They wear the fingerprints of a God who delights in His own creativity, poured out in a nearly infinite variety of faces and personalities, giftings, temperaments, minds, spirits. Don't we know this, how incredibly unique and complex each one of our children is? "Glory be to God for dappled things" Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote exultantly in his famous poem.

Glory be to God for dappled children, I add,

Pass the Peace, Not the Judgment

Three  emails these last 3 days have pierced me.  Emails that echo a message I am hearing over and over. Stay a moment and listen.

A woman writes me from a coffee shop where she goes to find anonymity and quiet to grieve. Her young adult daughter died of a drug overdose last week.  She bears not only this, but the judgment of church members who conclude she must bear fault in this tragedy.  If she were a truly godly mother, this wouldn' t have happened.

A mother of many children wrote.  She and her husband adopted and rescued more than ten children from instability and abuse. They were stretched beyond their limits every day for more than twenty years, but knew God had called them to this ministry of love.  When the kids became teens and began acting out their prior hurts and abuses , her husband, in full-time ministry, was fired.  Her husband's  pastor believed if  this couple had truly "trained up their child in the way they should go," their children  would all be obedient, God-loving people.

One more. A woman with two adult children who are making some poor choices. She agonizes over their lifestyles and cannot understand how this has happened.  Didn't she devote her life to them, homeschooling, doing everything possible to raise them "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord"?  How can this happen?  She feels betrayed and confused.

How many of these stories can I recite?  More than anyone wants to hear-so I give you only these. I am grieved and burdened to hear them. But I am the blessed one who gets to hear these women on the other side, when they are bathed in the truth of the Scriptures, in the relief of their tears, rather than in myths and judgment.   They are writing in the beginning steps of freedom. They weep at realizing that though others judge them, God does not.  That their teen and adult children have made their own choices, have acted out of their own will, their own prior damage. They weep to remember God does not ask them to take His place in their family. God does not expect them to wield sovereign control over their children. They weep to realize they have indeed done what God has asked of them:  to sacrifice for their children, to live out their faith faithfully before them, to  teach them the love and laws of God.  They are beginning now to leave  the rest in God's hands not out of helplessness, but out of faith. They know, who else shall we deliver our children to? Who else loves them with an undying love? Who else rescues and redeems lives and souls?  And even if one should lose the life of her child, even then, she writes, she is not without hope.

This is what you, all of us, must do. The next time you see a family in church with a kid who's struggling,

or with children who no longer come, or a family with an adult child making other choices--- Pass the peace, not the judgment.  Come close to them, pass out a hug, open your ears to listen, give them your hand. Our sisters and brothers are wounded enough.  Let's quite being cop, judge and jury and leave the judgments to God. His judgments will be righteous and merciful. Ours will be harsh---and wrong.

Beyond Happiness: The Life-Saving Truth about Children

Sanctity of Life week. Why is it so important that we don’t “sell” children as instruments for our happiness and fulfillment? Please read on.

I recently returned from a speaking tour, where I met with many parents, mostly mothers. Of all the conversations I got to be part of, one in particular I cannot forget. I had just spoken on the value of children, noting that we often “sell” the value of children to our culture at large by promising buckets of fun and happiness and fulfillment for the parents. This is often our apologia and defensive shot in the Mommy Wars. (“I’m fulfilled as a mother, therefore mothering is of great value !” vs. “I’m NOT fulfilled as a mother, therefore it’s of little value!”) It’s not that there isn’t happiness and fulfillment to be had. I do experience amazing moments with my daughter and five sons (ages 21 – 7), events and funny sayings and sweet cuddle times that I want to bottle or can or stick in the freezer, tender moments to feast on later, when my plate is bare and I hunger for sustenance. But there are LOTS of problems with this approach, of course. Here is one, in the words of a woman who approached me after one of my presentations.

Her child had been born with a significant birth defect, she told me. While pregnant, the doctors painted the worst possible scenario and encouraged her to abort. She refused, and months later welcomed a daughter into her family, a daughter whose health and abilities have far exceeded the doctor’s warnings. Many friends, however, have chosen otherwise, she said.

“When they find out that their in utero child has Downs or Spina Bifida or some other problem, they end the pregnancy, using pious language like, ‘I’m returning this little blessing to God.’ But what they really mean is, they don’t want to be troubled. They think having children should be about happiness, not sacrifice.”

When we lose sight of God’s greater purposes for children---and for parents---clearly, the consequences are serious. A number of studies have revealed that parents are more depressed than non-parents. Child abuse and neglect is at pandemic levels, to start the list.

And abortion is still obscenely common. Most distressing, is how many women of faith are ending the lives of their child. The Guttmacher Institute reports that each year, of the nearly 1.5 million women who obtain abortions , the majority are women who claim some measure of faith. Eight out of ten women who will end the life of their child self-identify as Catholic, Protestant or “born-again.”

What can we do about this? Here’s one thing we can start doing right now: begin speaking the truth to young people and couples contemplating marriage and family, and those in the midst of that work now. We need to help deconstruct the scales of happiness and stop holding out empty promises, that we stop quoting the only verse in the Bible that equates children with happiness (“Children are a blessing and a reward .. . . happy is the man whose quiver is full of them,” Ps. 127) . That we replace all this with fuller truths: that God does not bring a child into the world to feed our pride, to swell our dreams of success, to be channels for our own joy. He brings every child into the world because he loves life, he is the creator of all life, and each child comes to fulfill His plans and purposes (not mine!). And His plans will be accomplished, despite our own sins and failures as a parent, and despite the sins and failures of our children.

This is such great good news, for all of us!! When we really grasp this, we can release ourselves us from the tyranny of the scales of happiness.

( Good Day: “Oh, my kids are so smart and loving and kind!! Parenting is SOOOO worth it!! Bad Day: “A failing grade, broken curfews, messy rooms, disrespect---ARRGGGHHH! Parenting is SOOO not worth it!!) We don’t have to measure the worth of the whole parenting enterprise, the worth of our own parenting, even the worth of our children by our mercurial levels of fulfillment. We’re released from weighing the benefits against the costs. The questions, “Am I happy and fulfilled as a parent?” and “Is parenting really worth it?” are, finally, irrelevant!

There’s good news here for our children as well.

Our children are released a from these unforgiving scales, too, and a weight they were never meant to bear: our hunger for happiness and fulfillment through them. In place of the scale comes an immeasurable deep-down joy, the kind that comes from knowing we are part of something immense, exciting and eternal: the shaping of lives for the holy purposes of God. This is the feast I can pull out when I’m hungry and my plate is bare. I know I will be filled again and again.