Recently I walked the back acres of our new land with some of my sons. We have a lot to do. Some hilly fields need to be cut soon, and there are beavers trying to dam our creek. There are a couple of fallen trees, and poison ivy in more places than I’d like. Lots to do. We came to the outer edges of acreage that has been taken over by hedge — twisted trees that spread out over the ground and yield long thorns. I thought about how we might reclaim that land in time, or perhaps forge a walking path through it. I only thought these things, but I noticed my boys beginning to beat down a thorny branch in order to make a path.

It’s wired into us, perhaps, this impetus for dominion over creation. But we don’t define that word very well. A thoughtless woman who gets more air-time than she should — and worse, is taken by millions as a representative of conservatism and Christianity, once said, of mankind and creation:

“God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”

It’s a reprehensible view, yet I wonder sometimes how often we Christians — especially those with a more conservative stripe — fall prey to it, especially if our theology tells us that God will soon whisk us away to a better place. We start treating creation as this broken play-toy that needn’t concern us (so long as it will yield up oil and coal a bit longer). Or we let our political affiliations drive our thinking, such that we dismiss the possibility of global warming, for example, because Al Gore said it’s so.

Even if we don’t give in to these biases, I know I, at least, often think about God’s creation as something for me, to be managed for my well-being. I’ve found Wendell Berry a valuable corrective in that regard:

“It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools.”

That doesn’t mean I should exalt nature over myself, any more than I should exalt myself over nature. But it suggests that dominion means stewardship, which in turn implies that the master will one day return, and he will ask: “How have you treated my creation?”

I don’t know about global warming, and energy sustainability, or any of the other things that virtually none of the talking heads seem to debate honestly. But I do know about my twenty acres. Before he signed the papers, the man selling us the land said he hoped I would be as good a steward as he had tried to be. I told him I would certainly try. And my family and I will, and not just because we want to enjoy the land ourselves. We’ll do it because some day there will be a reckoning, and “Rape the earth” will be judged for the crime that it is.

The thing about handling story time at church is that you have to establish a credible threat of violence. Those five year-olds may not be able to tie their shoes, but they can spot a pacifist a mile out. Since we’re mostly not allowed to spank other people’s children any more — and often not even our own — you have to be a good bluffer to manage a roomful of unruly children.

Or you can just go ahead and do what my wife did the last time we had story time duty, and swat the behind of the first child to test you. I’ve heard it said that nothing gets the attention of adults like the sound of a pump-action shotgun being chambered. I don’t know if that’s true, but I am fairly certain that nothing gets the attention of a group of youngsters — many of whom are with you because their parents can’t make them behave in church, or anywhere else, for that matter — like the sound of a firm hand slapping a fanny. With two swats my wife adjusted one attitude quite nicely, and served notice to several other hellions that there was a whole pile more where that came from.

And suddenly, there was peace. The newly disciplined child, who doesn’t see much order elsewhere, became my wife’s shadow and new best friend. The usual slappers and toy-stealers decided to keep their hands to themselves. And the sweet children got to play without fear of thuggery. There was a new sheriff in town, and her name was Mrs. Woodlief.

I was, meanwhile, Barney Fife: big talker, comic relief, and generally harmless. But it didn’t matter, because we all knew who the quick draw in the room was.

Some people claim they can do without spanking, and seem to raise their single mild-mannered child fairly well with time-outs. Others beat their children at odd intervals, and call that spanking, and wonder why it doesn’t work. Many spank appropriately, and some have managed to get by with virtually no spankings, often because they were so consistent in the early years. Consistency and appropriateness seem to be key: when those elements are in place in whatever form of discipline a parent chooses, I’m struck by how much happier children are.

I had a guitar teacher many years ago, who was the mother of a toddler. She told me one day that she had been raised by strict parents, and that she wasn’t going to give her child a lot of rules and discipline. She wanted him to be a free spirit. I can only imagine how miserable that boy must have been, never certain of boundaries, and therefore never feeling safe, or certain that there is right and wrong. His mother at least had the consistency part right — she fashioned an artificial world for her child in which sin consistently was without consequences. I wonder how he is finding the real world these days.

It’s hard work, being consistent. I fail at it often enough, especially with four boys, each of whom has his own way of testing the edges. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves about who we’re really going easy on, when we choose to let a lie or disrespect or laziness slide. When we spoil our children in those ways (which is an apt way of phrasing the matter, when you think about it), we are choosing our immediate comfort over their long-term well-being. We are loving ourselves more than them.

And it shows. He who spares the rod, after all, hates his child. So I say, to parents of unruly children: love your children more often. Or bring them to story time, and we’ll love them for you.

Lately I’ve grown ashamed of how often I discipline my children out of anger, or annoyance, rather than a genuine desire to train them up. If three year-old Isaac’s repeated thumping of a table leg penetrates my consciousness at dinner, I’ll tell him to stop it out of irritation, not because I want him to have good table manners. If eight year-old Caleb tells me I said A and not B, I’ll glower and tell him not to correct me, as if it’s a principle I’m standing on, rather than my expansive pride. If six year-old Eli mumbles, I’ll snap at him to speak up, not because I am, in that moment, concerned with the development of his elocution, but because it’s consuming mental bandwidth to discern what he’s saying.

My disciplinary actions too often have me at the center — my wants, my ego, my sense of how things ought to be in my domain. I suspect we all fall prey to that impulse from time to time, or perhaps a lot of the time, or perhaps it’s mostly just me. But maybe I’m not the only one who tells himself some subconscious story about the righteous anger of God, to justify my own anger. Maybe other parents repeat to themselves how they’ve tried and tried, in order to justify their barks when the whippersnappers forget yet again to close the back door. Maybe too many of us we pretend that, because our children have become outwardly inured to our browbeating, that our glares and raised voices don’t wound them — worse, that it’s only our anger that gets through their thick little skulls.

So I’ve been practicing patience. Emphasis on “practicing.” When Isaac launches into one of his interminable monologues, right in the middle of a discussion between me and the wife, instead of shushing him, I’m trying get down to his level, put a hand on his small shoulder, and explain that mommy’s talking, and that the polite thing to do is wait his turn. I’m also trying to listen more, to really look him in the eye and stop whatever I’m doing and just listen, so he feels less inclined to interrupt just to be heard. I’m trying to patiently, lovingly guide my children, rather than gripe at them so much.

But there’s so much work to do, isn’t there? There’s bills and laundry and the daily grind of jobs, and meals to be made and dishes to be washed, lawns to mow, and — in our case — fallen trees to cut up and rooms to paint and essays and books to write. There’s much to be done, and it’s so much easier just to shush them or glare at them or talk over them to make my point and get my way.

Yet if you were to ask me what is the most important thing I have to do here on earth, I would say it’s training up my sons. So I’m going to start trying harder to act like it. I’m praying the Lord will have mercy — on me, on them — every time I fail.

Saturday evening I went with friends to an Orthodox Christian Easter service. It started at 11 p.m., which suited the strangeness of things. I had never been inside their cathedral before, nor any like it, with its domed roof, iconography covering the walls and ceilings, the carved wood screen in front, the bishop’s throne to the right. My friend explained the meaning of all these things, the deliberateness of them. For the first time since childhood, I experienced a Christian service as an almost complete outsider.

I often make the things of God comfortable. I skim my Bible, having heard this story before, or not wanting to dwell on exactly how the calf gets carved up to suit God’s strictures. Like most Protestant churches, mine doesn’t place many demands on worshippers; we sing a bit, and sometimes there is a responsive reading, but mostly we sit and listen. Occasionally there is toddler duty, which I’ve found gets inflicted less when one asks if one is allowed to spank them. It’s easy to get comfortable. I suspect comfort may be the greatest danger to active faith.

So it was enlightening to view an entirely different kind of worship. The unfamiliarity of their worship made me consider how we Protestants have our own rituals, though in radically truncated form, and how maybe ritual can be a good thing. The Orthodox use, for example, voices in their service — the choir singing or chanting, actual chanters, the priests themselves, all of them blending tones to outdo even the most elaborate multi-piped organs. Hearing the bishop chant John Chrysostom seemed somehow more right than an entire congregation warbling the latest Chris Tomlin song.

There were other things, like the way they all crossed themselves at the drop of a hat. And the way they knew when to respond with a phrase like “Lord have mercy,” or even exclamations in other languages. The fact that they stood for almost the entire service. How they kept their arms crossed as they went up for communion, and almost knelt for the bishop to drop it into their mouths, many of them carrying sleepy children who also received communion. All of it — even the rituals I didn’t understand or care for — felt holy, if one is allowed to feel one’s way to holiness.

There were a thousand things for a dutiful Calvinist to get irate about, I suppose, but what struck me was the earnestness of this gathering, all shouting “Indeed He is risen!” at the top of their voices at 2 a.m., when the service ended. Afterwards, almost nobody went home, because there was a feast in their fellowship hall. People brought baskets of the things they’d forsaken for Lent, and the party began.

I ate too, because the bishop made clear that all faithful are welcome at Christ’s banquet table. And even though I had already celebrated Easter, I left feeling full, not just with food, but with the sense that, though their rituals are not mine, I have 300 million brothers and sisters (the estimated size of the worldwide Orthodox Christian congregation) stumbling and grasping their way to God as I do, as I suspect many of you do.

He is risen.

A friend from church hosts a women’s Bible study in her home every week, and makes an effort to invite women from outside her immediate circle of friends. One of these women, after attending a few meetings, came to her, troubled. “Are you saying,” she asked, “that Jesus is the only way to get into Heaven?” The poor woman felt that in this stricture the Lord was being a bit exclusionary. What about well-meaning Buddhists and kind-hearted Muslims?

This woman is a member of a large and well-known Christian denomination, which in recent years has taken to marketing itself as the church with open doors and minds. Thinking it still adhered to the Nicene Creed, however, my friend urged the woman to ask her pastor if she wanted confirmation of this basic tenet.

The woman met with her pastor, and came away with the impression that yes, Heaven’s doors are wide and accommodating. This Jesus thing is all well and good, but what really matters is the love in your heart/how much you give back/[insert inoffensive pop psychological aphorism here].

So the woman stopped attending the Bible study. Apparently her open mind can handle anything but closed mindedness. There’s no telling what her pastor actually said to her. At the very least, we can surmise that his teaching ability is less than adequate. I’m sure it has a pleasant tickle, though.

I find, when I think about some muddle-headedness like this long enough, that I am frequently just as guilty of it. So I began to sum up all the ways I put conditions on God, just as this woman did. Don’t ask me to do that, Lord. Please don’t expect me to believe this. Let’s be reasonable.

But the shaper of the earth, the whisperer amidst the storm, the redeemer of fools and bull-headed sinners is anything but reasonable, it seems, at least by my standards. If it were all just a hoax, it would seem that the fashioners of this religion would have done a bit to smooth down its rough edges. But it seems the early church fathers did precisely the opposite, with all this talk of bodily resurrection and a divine trinity and other such unreasonable notions.

I suppose we’ve left it to their weak-willed and marketing-minded inheritors to make it all more palatable, lest we run anyone off, as if their belief were up to us in the first place.

Last time I wrote about how my pastor referenced in a sermon the subtitle to Gary Thomas’s book, Sacred Marriage: What if God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? My pastor saw a connection to Christianity in general, and I think he’s on to something.

It does seem that many people view religions as ice cream flavors, and we the grubby children clutching our dollars and trying to decide which best suits our tastes. Many of us have an expectation that religion exists, like antibiotics and air conditioning, to make our lives more comfortable. This is certainly how social scientists write about it, with their analytical and precisely wrong-headed treatises on man’s religious impulses. Even neuroscientists get in on the act, trying to identify the part of the brain that is pleasantly stimulated when a person “practices spirituality.”

In that worldview, it is only the logic-wedded atheist who refuses the tonic, choosing to see the universe for what it is, an indifferent mass of elements in which by chance we have been situated. That’s a self-serving explanation of non-belief, of course, because if the atheist really does have only the here and now, the rational thing to do would be to take the tonic, and allow himself to be persuaded of a pleasant afterlife. Eating, drinking, and being merry, in other words, would logically include a self-delusion about the coming paradise.

The reason the atheist doesn’t allow this notion, however, is because even the most watered-down stories of God dethrone the Self. We are prone to fancy ourselves princes and princesses, after all. So the atheist does not bow down to God because his knees won’t bend — yet. For some this leads to a great sadness and searching, but for others it leads to self-adulation for their clarity of thought, as if the razor-sharp scientists, philosophers, and theologians of centuries past, who shaped the ideas on which even the atheist depends, were all muddle-headed fools.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to consider God as John F. Kennedy admonished us to consider our country. That’s a scary thought, to ask what we can do for God, rather than what he can do for us, because it suggests perilous paths. All this business about tending to the sheep and spreading the word tends to get one crucified, in one way or another. Isn’t there a sweeter flavor of ice cream in the freezer?

And there certainly is, there always is, because man specializes in sweet nothings. But what if Christianity really isn’t about making us happy? What if it really is about holiness? Not the self-righteous holiness practiced by those who think their Sunday suits disguise their stench, but the holiness that is separateness in spirit, combined with closeness in flesh, the famous in but not of the world that we Christians so often get completely backwards?

It’s a frightening notion, and an exhilarating one at the same time.

Last Sunday our pastor referred to a book’s title to make a larger point about Christianity. The book is by Gary Thomas, titled: Sacred Marriage. It’s the subtitle that grabs you, however: What if God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?

That subtitle flies in the face of what the world teaches about love and marriage, which is that it is a matter of finding that special someone who was fashioned by non-judgmental cherubs to be your lifelong friend, supporter, and satisfying lover, all without requiring you to change anything about the wonder that is You. This is what prompts single people in their forties to announce at cocktail parties that they just haven’t found the right person, and which requires the rest of us to refrain from laughing out loud.

The truth is, of course, that so long as your own happiness is paramount, and so long as you remain in the temple of the Self, there will never be anyone who qualifies to be your soulmate but, well, you. And so we see the spectacle of aging adults who have gone through a string of relationships with partners who didn’t abuse or betray them, but who in the end “just weren’t a good fit.” This is frequently code, in my experience, for: “the neuro-chemicals began to fade, he/she stopped putting me on a pedestal, and I began to wonder if my fairy tale prince/princess wasn’t just around the next corner.”

The reality is that there is no prince or princess for any of us, because no royalty in his right mind would have anything to do with us. This prince/princess fantasy, in other words, is predicated on the assumption that we ourselves are princes and princesses. None of us are, we aren’t even close, which is one reason the Gospels ought to make us weep and laugh all at once, at the mercy and outrageousness of Christ.

And as far as marriage is concerned, Rick Warren’s admonition probably ought to be the first words uttered at every wedding ceremony — and marriage counseling session — in America. It’s not about you. It really isn’t, you know.

Which brings me back to the interesting angle my pastor was working, about how Thomas’s subtitle has something to say about Christianity in general. But I’ll leave that for next time.

The approach of summer brings with it appeals to support short-term mission trips, often to third-world countries. These trips frequently involve youths. Before their journey they troop to the front of the church, and we pray for them. Sometime later they return, and dutifully recount lives transformed, their own as well as those they went to help.

It’s something I want my own children to do when they are older, but on the immediate economics alone, youth-oriented mission trips are indefensible. People in need of churches, housing, and the Word could use the dollars and a couple of Christian men with carpentry skills far more than a passel of unskilled kids who are rounding out their spiritual resumes. But is there more here than the immediate economics?

One can argue, for example, that a spiritual resume is precisely what today’s kids need — to be exposed to the grit of poverty and the plight of the unchurched in forgotten reaches of the world. What Christian parent wouldn’t want his children to see first-hand, albeit in a relatively safe way, the world we have been protecting them from, and presumably preparing them to enter? The difficulty is that in calling these journeys mission trips, we divert resources from more effective missions. Given the reality that most families have limited budgets, forking over $25 for Jimmy’s mission trip to Brazil, and $75 for Susie’s mission trip to Kenya, means a more effective program gets $100 less.

But what if Jimmy and Susie are transformed by their experiences, such that they are more likely to give of their time and resources in the future? Then that $100 may reap dividends beyond what appears at first glance. I don’t deny that possibility, and hope, each time a young person from my own church goes to a distant country, that it proves so.

Still, it seems we ought to relabel these endeavors, perhaps calling them “Christian study abroad programs.” This is likely to wound someone’s sensibility about these things, perhaps especially those involved in the dozens of organizations specializing in Christian youth mission trips.

We all want these trips to be meaningful and valuable, but unfortunately, research by Calvin College’s Kurt Ver Beek indicates that short-term mission trips don’t lead to greater subsequent involvement in the lives of those they are intended to help. Nor do short-term missions result in significantly greater giving by mission-trip participants or their host churches. (For links to Ver Beek’s research, and articles discussing it, click here.)

The real test, where youth missions are concerned, is what these young people do when they are grown. I have no doubt that some of them are profoundly changed by a mission trip, making its cost a bargain. I also have no doubt that others get a good tan from their trip, and little more, beyond reinforcing the view of foreigners that Americans are vain and silly. But that’s the lot of any church, isn’t it, that the movers are mingled with the talkers, the saints with the sinners? And if we ever start separating these groups, I for one will be in big trouble.

So I’m wondering, what should our response be to the onslaught of youth missions this summer? What questions ought we to ask? Should we simply be thankful that young people are showing any interest in missions at all? Should we politely suggest that they can have experiences that are just as meaningful in our own inner cities, children’s hospitals, and poverty-racked rural areas? Should we pony up and keep our mouths shut? Am I a bad Christian for asking?

My friend has been involved in Rwanda, both with mission work and in trying to help people develop trades and small businesses. This was the country that in 1994 saw nearly 1,000,000 slaughtered in tribal violence, though it got less media attention in the U.S. than the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding saga, Lorena Bobbitt’s sharp-edged revenge, or Kurt Cobain’s suicide. As Stalin not only quipped, but could testify to first-hand: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

My friend passed along to me some news items about large-scale efforts by churches and government agencies to promote reconciliation and education. This got me to thinking about the dyadic nature of reconciliation — the reality that while large organizations can sponsor educational lectures and conferences and committees, there is only violence when one man strikes down another, and hence only reconciliation when a man can look at someone who was once his enemy and not want to spill his blood.

That isn’t to belittle the efforts by people like Rick Warren, whose Saddleback Church has a major initiative in Rwanda. It’s to underscore, instead, the hopelessness of man’s efforts to change the nature of himself. Men butcher one another by the millions with ease, but how much effort must it take not to kill those who have killed ones you love? Violence is a conflagration, but peace, it seems, is the slow mending of a single heart at a time. We should thank God that He is the surgeon, and not we.

My friend also directed me to this video of a trip he and some others took with Christian artist Sara Groves to Rwanda. I’m struck by his simple, faithful, seemingly hopeless act of love: one man giving another his shirt, as if a single shirt can erase the terror and suffering, as if a single shirt can heal the heart of man.

It can’t, but by the grace of God, maybe it can become more than just one shirt on one scarred back. We don’t know, do we? But we give our shirts nonetheless, those among us faithful enough to believe in lost causes. It’s certainly not enough, in a place where one million souls cry out from the dirt. But maybe that’s how God works, and has always worked, by taking the futile gestures of faithful men and fashioning them into great, grace-filled things.

I had occasion to think about ego as I watched my alma mater get decisively, thoroughly, unforgettably demolished by a superior team this weekend in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. “They’re not even trying,” I grumbled as the players were repeatedly beaten at both ends of the floor. They had become other people. Had they won, I would have felt as if I were part of something wonderful. It would have been, in a way, my victory too. But when it became clear that they are not as good as I thought, I distanced myself from them.

A reasonable person would note that I have no claim on this team’s victories or defeats. A fair person would note that if I am going to exult in their triumphs, I ought to eat crow when they lose. But sinful machine that it is, my heart is with them when they win, and separate from them when they fail.

I saw a study a few years back that examined the annual reports of top U.S. companies. The researchers found that when a company did well, the top executives tended to use language that signaled their responsibility for its success: Our investments are yielding a substantial return; We are capturing this emerging market; Our superior performance has placed us first in class…

When a company did poorly, however, executives were much more likely to blame the outcome on other factors: Market conditions were unpredictable; The economy entered a slowdown. Sometimes I wonder if the biggest threat to capitalism isn’t that Capitalists are so prone to running their mouths.

But it’s not just corporate titans; we’ve all seen the same thing in our jobs, our various associations, even our churches. As John F. Kennedy quipped, “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” It’s our nature, it seems, to claim credit for success, and avoid blame for failure, which is a human feature that Adam modeled from the beginning (”The woman you gave me, Lord…”).

I wonder what the world would look like if more of us gave credit for success to others — and really meant it. And what would it be like if more of us accepted responsibility for our actions, without excuse, and then set about trying to make amends?

We’ll get no guidance from the bulk of our political and entertainment celebrities (and really, is there much difference?). This is because we’ve gone from “The buck stops here” to “Drugs/alcohol/stress made me do this and now I’m going to an exclusive rehabilitation/resort setting until my pollsters and publicist tell me it’s safe to emerge.”

But then I like to think we can do better than these people, don’t you?