Friday Takes: Don't Hand Me Your Rope Edition

I know it’s Friday because I’ve been in class four whole days and this is the fifth one. At five pm promptly, my girls and I will fling all our stuff and ourselves in the car, say an impassioned prayer begging God that he will make the bally thing get all the way from here to Binghamton muffler or no muffler, and hope, with or without parsnips, that the weekend traffic won’t impede our swift journey home. But before I worry about that, let me accumulate some quick takes.

I must say, two whole weeks concentrated solely on Catechesis is a bit of an overwhelming experience. Eight hours a day for five days thinking about babies, and then eight hours a day for five days thinking about the Bible as best communicated to nine to twelve year olds and I feel I am, how shall I put it? Replete. I am going home with heaps of material I need to make, as well as theological and biblical concepts to mull over. Yesterday we traversed all the way from the birth of Moses to the building of the tabernacle in the wilderness. That sort of study would take six to eight weeks in the atrium, but we did it in eight hours—with breaks. At the end of the day, this pretty well summed up our mood:

So far my favorite Odyssey review is by someone who didn’t see it. The writing was superb, and also the whole thing is spot on:

This is important for understanding Odysseus’s relationship to Athena and Penelope. Athena, like Penelope, loves Odysseus for who he is. She is emphatically not the voice of his conscience; she is something like the opposite of that. Neither is she interested in improving him except to occasionally make him even sneakier and sexier—qualities which, as far as his beloved Penelope are concerned, are relatively interchangeable. Odysseus has the unmistakable, expansive self-confidence of someone who has been fully supported (read: enabled) by the people (read: women) around him. When we meet Penelope in the Odyssey we retroactively understand Odysseus better in the Iliad.

We think of the Odyssey sometimes as an archetypal story and Odysseus as an archetypal man, the archetypal man. He’s just Guy Writ Large. But this is wrong. He is not just the essence of Adventurous Man or something. He’s a character, set apart from others. The Odyssey is not a story about Man coming home from war, but about Odysseus coming home from war.

Seriously, the whole thing is brilliant.

I happened upon what seems to be a clandestinely recorded Andy Stanley talking to a gathering of people about how Christopher Yuan, Rosaria Butterfield, and Becket Cook don’t care sufficiently about the agonies of the parents of people who decide to define themselves along the acronym:

Essentially, Stanley thinks parents are horribly wrong to give up their “influence” (his word) over their children by disagreeing with them in such a way that threatens to break the relationship. He held up two fathers of women who decided to marry other women to make his point. It’s a bit hard to understand, but from what I could tell, both these fathers walked their daughters down the aisle at their respective weddings. And one of the relationships didn’t work out, and the daughter ended up divorced, and ran back to her father who had always been there for her. Not going to the wedding, in other words, would be really bad because then the parent would lose said “influence” over that adult child.

I found the whole clip disturbing on a variety of levels. At one point he interrupts himself to ask if he is being recorded, so obviously he did not intend for this to see the light of day. And then, I thought he very much mischaracterized Cook and Yuan and Butterfield’s posture towards this issue. I’ve listened to hours of them, and read Rosaria’s books, and they are not flip. Stanley reacted to something—I couldn’t quite tell—but that doesn’t mean they were necessarily saying what he says they were saying.

But more importantly, the question of “influence” over an adult child is exactly the wrong way to think about it. I don’t know how many of you have read Edwin Friedman’s Friedman’s Fables, but I highly recommend it. In the first story (I think it’s the first one), he describes a man running up to someone on a bridge, handing him a rope, jumping over, and then shouting from mere inches above the water, “Remember, you’re responsible for me, if you let go, I will die.” In our family, we are quick to warn each other, “Don’t hand me your rope.” Which is to say, you can’t evade responsibility for your life by making whatever problem you’re having my problem.

Of course, that’s what we do as human people. We are bound together with tangled bonds of love, which get complicated and fraught. But that fact does not negate the reality that we each will stand before God and have to answer for our own actions. And parents, if they are going to do their job in the way that God prefers, will empower and enable their children to take responsibility for their own moral actions, to count the cost of their lives. The best way to facilitate that growth is to continually direct them back towards Jesus.

Saying to a father that he has to rejoice in the wrong doing of his child, or else the child will be sad and have a bad life, is to cripple the moral conscience of said father. In my book, that is pastoral malfeasance.

Matt sent me this picture he found from somewhere online. It is about the dating of the Gospels and it is pretty exciting:

And he also sent me this horrible horrible horrible advertisement of something I wish would go straight back into the pit of hell:

You have to watch it, but in the meantime, it’s some AI called “Orchid” who is playing intermediary between two people who are obviously not sensible enough to be in any romantic relationship. They are both using this demon bot to get what they want out of the other person. Worse, the demon bot is smug and co-dependent. Seriously, it’s time to implore Jesus to return post haste.

He also sent me this, which is ridiculous:

And for a song of the week, I found these brilliant guys on Twitter. This is so fun:

And on that note, I must wake up my girls and pack up our stuff and get out of here. Have a lovely day!