Turning the hearts

"And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Luke 1:17

While reading the book of Malachi a few weeks ago, I left with the last verse of the short last chapter of the short last book of the Old Testament stuck in my memory: “Look, I am sending you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord arrives. His preaching will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers. Otherwise I will come and strike the land with a curse.” Luke 1 refers to this prophecy as it prepares Zechariah for the coming of his own son.

I picked out an old dusty book from a family member's library a few years ago, and have read it several times . . The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. It is one of those little books that becomes a special friend to me, because it puts so well into words a situation that is at the source of so much interpersonal grief: the inability of adults to fully remember what it was like to be a little child. So many of the intense emotional encounters that happen in a house between a child and a parent are labeled without question as the child being bad or naughty, when often the reality is that a parent is blind to the truth that the child is being a normal child with limited skill and practice of self-control. The parent can't see it and stay calm because the parent is being overwhelmed by an unremembered time when they were the same age as their child, doing the same childish things, and they did not have a parent who had a heart turned toward them to give comfort and affection. They are reacting in the present to a time twenty or thirty years past that they did not hear consistent, gentle, discipling words that patiently teach and model about expressing behavior and feelings with self-control (an art that takes humans a lifetime to master), or that they did not receive a reassurance that words of love with a hug is available no matter how immaturely a child behaves. Miller says that the only way we can keep from collapsing under the rage and grief of these unremembered memories that invade us as we parent our own children is to maintain the belief that what happened to us was good for us, and what we are currently doing to our children is good for them too.

I have the gift (or curse) of having a memory of what it is like to be a child. I kept a diary for several different years, and I still have those writings. As an adult, I have written out a lot of the stories and events I remember, and I have been able to put into words what I was learning and noticing and believing and feeling at the time that different things happened. It is a mystery to me how long term memory works, because of course only certain experiences get stored in there and I have no idea what makes a person's particular brain choose some things and not another for long term memory storage. In my own life it seems to me I stored many things to do with "danger." So maybe our long term memories save things that will help us survive if something "dangerous" comes our way again.

I think one of the reasons God became a human person Jesus, starting from embryo, fetus, and newborn, is to fulfill the prophecy of Malachi 4. God can know everything, but he did not feel what it feels like to be a dependent and needy and vulnerable child until he became one. Before he knew what it was like, his heart was not fully ready to turn towards his children. Hebrews talks of Jesus needing to learn obedience, so it is ok, I think, to imagine that God knew he had some living and learning to do in order to carry out his intent to redeem humanity from the curse of death on their behalf. A father's (or mother's) heart turned toward a child is a pre-requisite to a child's heart turning toward a parent, or even to God. God did not skip the pre-requisite and neither can we, if we are committed to seeing children grow into whole-hearted lovers of siblings, friends, spouses and God. I also think that the words of ultimate suffering that were said by Jesus on the cross: "My God, My God, Why have you abandoned me?" tell us that the worst most hellish place for the human heart to go is into the fully aware experience of the reality that we are rejected unwanted hated and ignored by the father or mother that we depend on for life, safety, identity, but who has turned a back to us and our plight. I am confident that because Christ lived and suffered as a human infant, and child, and adult, and because of his own alienating experience of death (and because his heart was never ignorant or calloused or hardened or cauterized to the pain of it), that he totally understands and empathizes with the misery, fear, alienation, brokenness and terror of being a vulnerable human. His heart is now forever softened and turned to us in our condition and he is intending to soften our own hearts to our condition, so that we realize that we have broken wounded hearts, so we come to him as needy miserable children who are crying for comfort and healing.

This is an article that I really like because it talks a lot about how to practice parenting that cares primarily about hearts being turned to one another, and only secondarily about visible behavior and acting right. LLLI Gentle Discipline In general, this is what Jeff and I have been working really hard to practice, and after four to six years of trying it out with Steve some years and Douwe other years, I have to say it is fruitful and worth trying out. It makes me cry a lot, because this style requires me take a minute to feel during a hard moment how much I would rather yell or hit or insult my child with a withering label, and then stop myself as I remembered how it felt to be standing there as a child when that was happening to me. There is great wrong that happens between humans, and things to be angry and sad about, but not all caused by our children that we should be punishing them for it, or even ourselves, or even our own parents. The hearts of the fathers have been hardened towards children (and vice versa) for many many many generations, but God has made a radical change to the pattern by becoming a human child himself, and so our parental hearts can be softened as we think of Jesus being a baby, a toddler, a 6 year old. Our hearts can identify with Mary as she struggled to reconcile two seemingly opposite approaches to relating to someone: what she was familiar with when it came to handling a child, and what she believed about the honor and respect that a person gives to God. Maybe God was teaching her and us that the approach would be the same whether we are in a room navigating our relationship with Jesus or with our two year old.