{"id":1002,"date":"2024-09-04T19:42:23","date_gmt":"2024-09-04T23:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2024-09-04T19:42:23","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T23:42:23","slug":"as-a-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/as-a-child\/","title":{"rendered":"As a Child"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways\u201d \u2013 1 Corinthians 13:11.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I was a child, my parents taught me two moral maxims: \u201cTry your best,\u201d and \u201cTreat others the way you wish to be treated.\u201d I suppose most children learn some variant of the Golden Rule, and for a good reason\u2014it teaches you to share your toys and hopefully later in life to do something altruistic out of your abundance. The other maxim runs deep in the American culture and canon, that the hard work and effort of individuals ought to be rewarded, and it is an invitation that my parents inherited from their parents.<\/span><\/p>\n

On my mother\u2019s side, my grandfather was once a self-described \u201crote Catholic,\u201d and he put my mom and uncle through 13 years of Catholic school for its solid formation. My father\u2019s family grew up non-religious. My mother threw off Catholicism like a restrictive garment after high school; my father had never worn religion aside from a few Baptist services. They raised us non-religious until I was about 8 or 9 and they realized we did not know who Jesus was, as a figure in history. <\/span>So<\/span> we started attending a Unitarian Universalist Congregation, a quasi-humanist religion that believes in a higher power and that all the other major world religions are equally valid approximations of one God, although it has a historical connection to Judeo-Christian values. While such an inclusive sentiment is politically correct, and some Toronto-area professionals drew inspiration from this religious potpourri for meaningful work and commendable service, it seemed hard to establish a belief system on such shifting or relativist ground. When the only thing you can say about a higher power is that it is everywhere and infinite, you end up worshiping some derivation of my parents\u2019 moral maxims, what C.S. Lewis calls \u201cethical platitudes\u201d in <\/span>The Allegory of Love<\/em><\/span>. \u00b9<\/span><\/p>\n

To my dad, \u201ctry your best\u201d meant continuous self-improvement in the form of to-do lists and <\/span>Getting Things Done<\/span><\/em> and 10-point plans. My mom gave us sound proverbs when my brother and I left homeschooling and ventured into public high school: put in the work at the start of the semester and your teachers will be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt <\/span>later on<\/span>, and don\u2019t cut corners now lest you deny yourself the opportunity to build skills for the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a family, we left the Unitarian Universalist Congregation when my mom felt that our learning there was stagnating, and some of us relocated to a Christian Reformed Church. My mom had a friend who worked there with a feisty heart for God, and she was open to giving a church that could form someone like that a chance. I found myself, a 7<\/span>th<\/span> grader, in the company of people older (sometimes) and wiser about God. I began reading the Bible, overcoming my social anxiety to participate in the youth group, and having weekly conversations with the youth pastor. I would ask her questions like, \u201cWhat does it mean that Jesus descended into the earth after He died?\u201d She showed me the bedrocks of her faith, the creeds and the meaning of grace and baptism, and how she had walked with God through her husband\u2019s early passing. Most of my questions were innocent, intimate, but if I had asked anything <\/span>profane<\/span> she would have unraveled and answered those questions, too. <\/span><\/p>\n

I felt loved in these conversations, and I felt enough, resting in God\u2019s love. My initial acceptance of Christianity, then, was on an emotional level, feeling that the presence of God abolished my fear and my inadequacies. I cared a lot about what other people thought, and I thought a lot about <\/span>my \u201clooking glass self,\u201d introspecting my life\u2019s feelings and purpose. The verse from the Gospel of John about Christ offering the Samaritan woman \u201cliving water\u201d brought me release from my inner monologues. I was baptized at the end of the 7<\/span>th<\/span> grade, shortly before we moved back to the U.S. from a work permit in Canada. My parents were accepting of my choice; my mother felt the religious potpourri from the Unitarian Church had been the training wheels from which my siblings and I could decide the beliefs and principles to guide our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

We moved churches again, this time out of necessity. The Christian Reformed Church is known as the Dutch Reformed Church in the U.S., a nationality that (despite the many other European countries in my ancestry), my family doesn\u2019t share, and a denomination that doesn\u2019t have much of a presence in southern Connecticut. By this time, my mother believed that church was a body of people working together to become better people and was looking for something with \u201ca little more of Jesus than the Unitarians.\u201d She opted for the United Church of Christ, a denomination that has as its tagline, \u201cdon\u2019t put a period where God has put a comma.\u201d I went to church on Sundays with the family, then to a youth group on Tuesdays at an evangelical megachurch with contemporary rock worship music. I was caught between two churches, with different creeds and different politics and at bottom different dispositions: \u201ccome as you are\u201d versus \u201ccome to Jesus.\u201d I wondered if these could be different sides of God\u2019s love, the radical inclusion <\/span>and also<\/span> the right formation, but my mom seemed to think they were two different incompatible \u201cversions of Christianity,\u201d and the evangelical megachurch was not her version of Christianity, so our conversations in the van ride home from youth groups never got much of anywhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

When you treat others the way you want to be treated, sometimes you miss the mark; I missed the point of Christianity for most of my childhood and adolescence. Theory of mind is an early developmental <\/span>milestone<\/span> but we carry emotional immaturity and the heuristic that the love we need is the longing of the world into adulthood. When we ask the question, \u201cWhat would Jesus do?\u201d we commit to treating others not the way we want to be treated, or even the way they want to be treated, but in the way that God regards them. The great commandment of my childhood was not wrong, but it got at a secondary perspective to Christianity, like a book jacket that doesn\u2019t do justice to the contents within. When asked, \u201c\u2018Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?\u2019\u201d Jesus responded, \u201cYou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself\u201d (Matthew 22:36-39). As Christians, if all we do is look around the world and mirror the love we can give, we miss the primary perspective: seeking God\u2019s face. Perhaps, like the oft-mentioned reconciliation of faith and works in salvation, the relationship is not so much quantitative as it is qualitative. Jesus calls us not to love God more than we love others, since in its highest expression it is the same love, particle and wave, but simply to love God first.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like our family\u2019s past moves between churches, coming to college jolted me into reassessing some of the things I had taken for granted. I wrestled with my persistent confusion about the kingdom of God and the promise for a \u201cnew heaven and a new earth,\u201d that God wants to transform not just the spiritual but also the physical. I wrestled with the vagueness of my idea of God, that I had always seen Him as infinitely perfect, eternal, and the ideal of all virtues, but not always as relational and near. I had to remind myself that I was a child of God, through a <\/span>debilitating season of depression in junior year of high school, before I could put the ways, the beliefs, of childhood behind me.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had started, like some of the rationalist philosophers, with myself as the measuring line and the center. Descartes\u2019 asymptotic view of human perfection in <\/span>Meditations<\/span> charts the course I tried to <\/span>take,<\/span> on my own terms, a quest of continuous self-improvement to which faith was prefixed. But I could not, and neither could Descartes, see God face to face in the mere negation of my inadequacies, finitude, and imperfection. C.S. Lewis cautions against such an approach to God: \u201cThus at each step in the process of refinement our idea of God contains less and <\/span>less<\/span> and the fatal pictures come in (an endless, silent sea, an empty sky beyond all stars, a dome of white radiance) and we reach at least mere zero and worship a nonentity.\u201d\u00b2 Living water could only be a generative \u201cmental image\u201d if I focused not on the experience of being thirsty but on the one who wants to give me rest. <\/span><\/p>\n

C.S. Lewis summarizes this shift in attention as seeking happiness as a by-product instead of chasing it, seeking God and not our own self-referential states or even our idea of Him as the object of our thoughts. Lewis writes, \u201cMy idea of God is not a divine idea. It <\/span>has to<\/span> be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast.\u201d\u00b3 Help me to see you, God, as who you are, not who I think that you are.<\/em> I needed to unravel the thesis that I was ultimately working toward my own redemption (whether on earth or in heaven) and to come back to the cross; it was not my imperfections but my very desire for perfection that I needed to cast down. I found an interlocutor, another first-year student willing to unpack his own faith history and the reason we both ended up here\u2014at the credo, at Williams. He got baptized last spring and I started observing the Sabbath. What would it mean for our relationship with God to more deeply pervade our lives?<\/span><\/p>\n

On a recent drive home, my mother wept, saying that in religion you don\u2019t have to worry about and control things so much. The maxims \u201cTry your best<\/span>\u201d <\/span>and \u201cTreat others the way you want to be treated<\/span>\u201d<\/span> wove our family together in my childhood, but as my siblings and I grow up, and my parents get older, we have pulled on them at the edges. My grandfather, for one, has become more than a \u201crote Catholic,\u201d and shared with me a worship song that brought him closer to God than he\u2019s ever felt before. I hold those two postures in my mind: my grandfather standing up with his hands outstretched and my mother weeping with her hand on her chin. [Re]formation and unraveling.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c…but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.<\/span>\u201d 1 Corinthians 13:10-12<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FOOTNOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00b9 The Allegory of Love<\/span><\/i>, p. 324<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00b2 Miracles: A Preliminary Study<\/span><\/i>, p. 73<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00b3 A Grief Observed<\/span><\/i>, p. 92<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Harper Treschuk \u201826 is a Philosophy and Psychology double major. She enjoys writing longhand in composition books and going on afternoon walks with a voice recorder. On campus, she is a representative in the Honor and Discipline Committee and co-leads a first-year Bible study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways\u201d \u2013 1 Corinthians 13:11. When I was a child, my parents taught me two moral maxims: \u201cTry your best,\u201d and \u201cTreat others the way you … Continue reading “As a Child”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2890,"featured_media":1003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49347],"tags":[49363,49361],"class_list":["post-1002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issues","tag-essay","tag-threads"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2890"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1004,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/1004"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/telos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}