When questioned why I am involved in the church, my answer is often that it is where I find intergenerational community that I could not find elsewhere. And this is true. The intergenerational nature of my child’s interactions at church are one important reason why I bring her. Another reason is more personal. When I left home I began to realize that the things I admired about my parents, the life choice they made, were/are motivated by their faith. I value this and I would also like to make my life choices based on a vision healing and justice for Creation.

But, this isn’t the whole picture, not by any means. The truth is that both the choice to remain in the Church and a faith-based approach to social/ecological justice go hand-in-hand with another kind of isolation. When I think about raising our daughter in the church, I seriously question if I want her to experience the loneliness of being a Lutheran child.

I’ll explain a little more. The turning of the church year, the stories, the songs, and ways of thinking that accompany our tradition are deeply embedded in who I am – because of how I was raised and also because I have chosen to continue in the church. There are things about this I deeply value mostly because I work hard to reinterpret them for my own life and context.  But, I have felt alone in this path almost always.

My friends haven’t been churched since I was in kindergarten. As a teenager, I had fleeting moments of connection at Camp Edgewood or youth events. As an adult, I have attempted to resign myself to the fact that when I say church is intergenerational I really mean that it is just my family and folks over 60. It is lonely and it is lonely for my daughter too.

The hard question I face is that I don’t actually believe that to live out the social/ecological values I would like to instil in my daughter she has to be churched. In fact, it can be hard to wade through two thousand years of sexist-racist-homophobic-anthropocentric-conversion oriented thinking to get to the message I want my daughter to inherit. It might be easier to start from a secular standpoint.

Furthermore, when working with others my age outside the church I have often felt the need to hide the faith motivations behind my activism for fear it will be misunderstood or merely take too much explaining. This leaves a big part of me behind and it is lonely too.

This for me is the hardest and deepest question as a parent in the church. It hurts to feel alone. Do I want to pass this onto my daughter?

​“Mommy today at school Paul was mad about something and he hit Sam and I didn’t know what to do …” My friend calls these the door knob questions- the ones that happen when you are just about to make your exit after the tuck – in or bedtime story.  They are also often the life changing, deep questions that are the stuff of love and hope and doubt. The ones that you ought not to ignore but think ‘Really, right now- as you are to be going to bed???? ‘I have to check myself and put things in a little perspective at these moments. Yes,  your son or daughter MAY be trying to stay up late but really it’s ok- they want to know what you think about God, or creation , or love , or anger or fear.
Have the conversation. Live out the holy moment.

​When I contemplate what it means to be bringing up my family in the church, one of the things I struggle with is Christianity's long standing ideological obsession with "dominating" the rest of creation; the fundamental denial of humanity as part of creation. While I think it is very possible to trace a Christian genealogy that thinks otherwise, it is such hard work to counter a history of the use and abuse of Creation -- sometimes I wonder if it would be easier for my children to live out a faithfulness to the sacred balance of Creation outside of a Christian framework .. where we don't have to work to reshape the old stories and can merely start new ones. But -- I suppose I am attached to the possibilities within the old stories, so we are still here. The question remains: if I have to contend with a history of dangerous ecological theology, what am I going to do about my children's relationship with the rest of creation? In order to answer this question, let me digress for a moment ...
 
In his discussion of the medicinal use of herbs and plants Wendell Berry states: "Herbalism is based on relationship -- relationship between plant and human, plant and planet, human and planet ... [Using and knowing] herbs can link us into the broader context of planetary wholeness, so that whilst [the herbs] are doing their physiological/medical job, we can do ours and build awareness of our links and mutual relationships." Here Berry is drawing a connection between the 'knowing' of the plants we interact with and rebuilding our relationship with creation as a whole. The knowing and the naming of plants and animals is itself a place of contention. Often, in academic circles, we talk about the power of naming – Adam naming of the animals in the garden is tied to his dominion over the rest of Creation. Within colonial history we see the attempted erasure of Indigenous populations, independence, and knowledge through the re-naming of places, plants, and practices by Settler authorities. So, when I want to think about how my daughter interacts with the world, I think it is vital that we start with experience. Nature trivia can't make up for real interaction -- and perhaps this is something my daughter has taught me over the winter.
 
We have a series of bird feeders in our backyard and this winter one of my greatest joys was watching my daughter go "Look at that!" "Look at that!" and watch the birds. She spent SO much time looking at the birds, and over the course of the winter we learned their names. It even came to be that we could recognize the chickadee with the bent tail or the same pair nuthatches that come each day. We got to notice the times of day and weather that means the birds come more often. This relationship with the birds meant we did the winter together. I think it might be a beginning of a good way of knowing... one that might help with the healing of the greater problems we have as a culture.