Looking at our introductions, I first noticed a generational span from Amanda who is a little younger than my son with Wendy and Dean in the middle (I suppose 30’s) to me approaching retirement.  At Luther I feel more akin to the “older” women in the distributed learning M DIV program who put off the call to ministry.  During J-term last year in the CYF core class, there was only one woman who I suppose is a bit younger than I so we felt odd when the other students remarked on our ages as if we were too old for the program.   CYF program seems mostly geared to youth rather than children’s ministry with children being more tolerant of old people.  Wendy was in that class so perhaps she can tell if I am being too sensitive to ageism.   I have started reading Joan Chittister’s book “The Gift of Years” so perhaps that is why I am thinking of the age issue.  To quote the book “What am I when I am not what I used to do? And does anybody really care? And what does that have to do with growing into God?”

      I appreciate Amanda’s honesty about being an atheist because there are a lot of people who act like there is no God but won’t call themselves atheists.  As a young person, she has struggled with her faith and emerged stronger for it.  I wonder if RCIA helped for being an investment of a year in faith formation as a lot of other Christians switch denominations easily without understanding the doctrinal differences and certainly without the time commitment or intensity.

     For all of us, our families played a major role in faith formation especially our mothers.  Perhaps, it is different for males but I recall reading that if the father attends church that is a great incentive for the children, especially boys to continue attending.  From Dean and Wendy, I get the idea that faith has to be lived to have a continuing impact.  For me it was more a tradition to maintain until my mother’s death and the aging process made me turn from concentrating on my career working long hours or taking work home in the expectation of winning my boss’ approval.  I made my work an idol without even realizing what I was doing.  I still attended church but didn’t spend much time with God.  Looking back over my career, I don’t think it was worth all the time I put in to gain a slight advantage over others only to feel dissatisfied now that I wasn’t a better mother to my son now grown or more involved at church.  Now I am working on my prayer life and spiritual formation and going beyond intellectual knowledge to experiencing a devotional life in prayer and lectio divina.  Reading Parker Palmer’s “To Know as We are Known” really resonated with me because I am largely an objectivist due to my training in science without realizing that is at the heart of my dissatisfaction with work until I read his book.  I also realize how my introduction contains a lot of “doing” things with children rather than “being” so I still have a lot of work to do on my objectivism.   I have always liked studying history to understand myself and others better and now understand how science could be better taught through the history of science and as the process that scientists go through to discover new knowledge by working with peers (though when I was a research technician, I saw a lot of cutthroat competition to publish results).  I had a wonderful biology teacher in high school whose passion inspired me to earn a degree in biology.  Palmer’s book has inspired me to share these thoughts with this group.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 9:04 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through this RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.