Edgework

“I remember when this thought hit me, sometime in my 30s: ‘you never grow up.’ If you are legally and biologically a certified member of the state of adulthood, you continue to go through many passages…many dangers, toils and snares…many frustrations and breakthroughs…many learnings and unlearnings and relearnings…Looking back, I had confused adulthood with death, not realizing the adult life is really just an extension of junior high” (Brian McLaren, in Stories of Emergence, ed. Mike Yaconelli, p. 222).

It seems to me that many times I find myself caught in the act of trying to tidy up my adult life but then find out it is easier said than done. As Brian McLaren says, we seem to have tied the notion of adulthood to a static state at which we have arrived. We get the message from many sources that we need to grow up; the assumption being that once we are there life will take on the nature of a plateau – a steady-state of being.

Sometimes it is our parents who foist this steady-state myth of adulthood upon us. They insist that we stop being childish and “grow up already.” What they are trying to say is that we should think and act like they do. But invariably our parents’ lives are not ideal models of steady-state adulthood. We notice that they live with varying degrees of dysfunction and don’t always have satisfactory answers for the difficult problems they face in life. In my case, I noticed that especially my father had a need to convince everyone around him that he had life all figured out when it was obvious to many of us that he lived with a lot of unresolved tensions and frustrations.

I remember being the Master of Ceremonies at my sister’s wedding before I was married myself. I had the wedding guests in stitches on account of the numerous jokes and anecdotes related to marriage I shared at the reception. When it was all over, my godly Uncle George came over to me and said he wanted to share a verse with me, after which he quoted I Corinthians 13:11; “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” Wow, he even had Scripture on his side. Yet somehow, knowing the austere, rigid, and excessively pietistic man he had become, I did not wish to be like him, even though in his eyes he had grown up and entered steady-state adulthood – and that’s no joke!

Not infrequently the vision of steady-state adulthood comes directly from the church. It was quite popular in my youth to attend “testimony meetings” which mostly consisted of Christians telling how they were living on the victory side of life. It was seldom that I heard persons admit to the “dangers, toils and snares” that entrapped them. And I have listened to many sermons of preachers who apparently had attained the coveted plateau of tidy adulthood. In such cases the message I heard was always the same: if you follow my example you too will be able to tidy up your lives and learn to “…live above the world…” where the devil can’t touch you. In this lofty place we would be able sail through any difficult circumstance with ease. (I heard such a sermon on radio again yesterday!) Sometimes I wish that such preachers would lower their guard a little and admit that they still have some growing to do – a fact that is not lost on most of those persons listening to them.

Many of my friends are steady-state Christians. They are not familiar with concepts of questing, unlearning and relearning, admitting to failures or any degree of unknowing or mysteries yet unsolved. They are good people and honestly think that their best witness for Christ is to keep up the façade of a tidy adulthood that is rooted in a faith providing solid answers to life’s complexities. Back in the days when I was still speaking more regularly in church I had the habit of leaving a question at the end of my sermons for people to reflect upon and perhaps even wrestle with. More than once I was accosted in the church foyer by people who said something like this: “I didn’t come to church to hear questions that I have to wrestle with. I came to be affirmed in what I already know to be the truth!” Steady-state, tidy adults – holding all the keys to the kingdom.

If only the journey of faith and life were that simple! But it is not. At least I have not found it to be so. It seems that every phase of my life, whether it be related to family, work or church has always had a sense of untidiness about it. And I admit to seriously seeking the keys that would turn my untidy adulthood into some form of steady-state tidiness. But I have found that life is always somewhat messy. What worked with raising our children when they were small evaporated during their teen years and became mostly irrelevant when relating to them in their own untidy, adult lives. Emphases and strategies in the church of the 20th century often fall flat in the 21st century. And just when I think I have patched up relationships all around me I get boxed on the ears by someone who forcibly wants to keep me inside a tidy box.

It is really unrealistic to pound your tent pegs ever deeper at one spot in life where it feels like you have reached a plateau. As McLaren says, “…you’re not abnormal for being 35 or 55 or 75 and still feeling like you’re on a journey, in process, unfinished. Rather, you’re alive” (223)!

Untidy adulthood is par for the course, even for Christians. We thrive best if we get used to it.