Should we have children?

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

I have a friend who wants to have children. She is in the midst of deep conversation over this. Her husband says he does not want children - he says it will be like a death sentence to have a child. How do they decide? What factors go into the decision to have a child?

Peter Singer, chair of the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University, recently stirred up quite a bit of emotion with his blog “Should This Be the Last Generation?” (See http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/). He presents the arguments of another philosopher who basically says, we should stop reproducing because it is better to have never existed than to have lived this life which has so much pain and suffering.

Let me repeat that: It is better to have never existed than to have lived because there is so much pain and suffering. The fleeting happiness we do experience is not worth the living of a life.

Singer is a utilitarian philosopher. He claims not to be a classic utilitarian philosopher because it’s not just about how much happiness he accrues. Rather his utilitarianism is one that asks what action creates the greatest good for all sentient beings, with the least harm. However, at bottom, “because it makes me happy” is basically why he says ‘yes’ - his children and grandchildren make him happy. They lead relatively happy lives.

Chuck Colson, member of the board of trustees of GCTS, wrote a column in the August edition of Christianity Today, “The Lost Art of Commitment.” Colson is commenting on the radical individualism of our culture that defines meaning in terms of personal happiness. Since the 1960s and 70s, a new generation has arisen that does not make commitments. That generation includes many who have no sense of community or social obligation, who live in a world perceived as lacking meaning. Colson cites Robert Bella as calling this “‘ontological individualism,’ the belief that the individual is the only source of meaning.” But Colson notes, instead, that life’s meaning is really found in relationship - with God and with each other, and this requires commitment. He writes, in exact opposition to what Peter Singer asserts, that “by abandoning commitment, our narcissistic culture has lost the one thing it desperately seeks: happiness. Without commitment, our individual lives will be barren and sterile. Without commitment, our lives with lack meaning and purpose. After all, if nothing is worth dying for . . . then nothing is worth living for” (emphasis added).

“Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (I Cor 10:31). If God is our source of meaning, then this is the reason for our choices. To have children is an act of faith that God is still on his throne and sovereign over all creation. To have children is an act of hope that God is still watching and caring, and redeeming the world. To have children is an act of love that God has made the two one flesh and blessed that union.

This does not make our lives easier or simpler, or give us any guarantees. I don’t know what my friends will decide about children. I pray for them as they wrestle through their decision. It is painful to watch them struggle with this decision. I myself do not have children, not by choice. But since my life is about glorifying God, not my personal happiness, then I believe my childlessness is a part of his plan for me. Sometimes, this means I hold on to “God is sovereign and God is good” and look for his meaning in this. I cling to the Scripture that says all things work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to his purpose, even if I can’t understand how right now. Jesus showed us that we are worth dying for, and that makes our lives worth living. Period. So, should we have children? That decision, as all decisions for us as children of God, should flow out of this truth, rather than some individualistic computation of personal happiness. “You are worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power. For you created all things, and they exist because you created what you pleased.” (Rev 4:11, NLT).

Misty Water-Colored and Other Types of Memories

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

When I was an infant I swallowed an open safety pin. It slid down my throat and made its way into my stomach. Through surgery the doctor cut into my stomach and removed it. The size of the scar on my stomach when I was an infant was quite small. But over the years that scar has grown larger, so that it is now about six inches long. Emotional scars can grow larger over time as well.

Only recently have I discovered Miroslav Volf’s book, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006). I highly recommend this book for anyone involved in pastoral or other kinds of counseling. In the book he explores the intersection between memory and identity – the extent to which our identities are formed by our memories and the extent to which we shape our memories so that they do not consist of raw objective experiential data:

[W]hat exactly is the relationship between memory and identity? Let’s accept for the moment that we are to a significant degree what we and others remember about us. Don’t we remember about ourselves many intensely discordant actions, feelings, and experiences – betrayals and fidelity, pain and delight, hatred and love, cowardice and heroism – as well as thousands of bland moments unworthy of note? The memory that helps make us up is a veritable patchwork quilt stitched together from the ever-growing mountain of discrete, multicolored memories. What will be stitched into the quilt and what will be discarded, or what will feature prominently on that quilt and what will form a background, will depend greatly on how we sew our memories together and how others – from those who are closest to us all the way to our culture as a whole – sew them together for us. We are not just shaped by memories; we ourselves shape the memories that shape us.

And since we do so, the consequences are significant; for because we shape our memories, our identities cannot consist simply in what we remember. The question of how we remember also comes into play. Because we can react to our memories and shape them, we are larger than our memories. If our reactions to our memories were determined simply by the memories themselves, then we would be slaves of the past. But unless we have been severely damaged and are in desperate need of healing, we have a measure of freedom with regard to our memories. To the extent that we are psychologically healthy, our identities will consist largely in our free responses to our memories, not just in the memories themselves. (page 25).

He goes on to explore ways in which our memories become distorted and we may unconsciously shape our memories in ways that tend to vindicate our roles in certain situations and remember the “villains” in our interpreted experiences as worse than they actually are or were. I have since learned that there is a whole interdisciplinary field called “Memory Studies” which brings together historians, ethnographers, sociologists, social psychologists, experts in comparative literature, and others to study the way that personal, social and institutional memories are formed, shaped and distorted and how they impact the ways people act and interact. The University of Warwick has even established a Centre for Memory Studies, which brings together people from various academic fields to study and talk about how memory shapes individuals and communities both for good and for ill. Even more recently l was discussing the subject with someone who has studied and practiced “magic” for many years, and he told me that magicians are fully aware of the inaccuracies of our memories and plant certain interpretations of what they do in their audience’s mind to leave distorted versions of their audience’s memories of their performances. This leads people to tell their friends and neighbors things about the performance that aren’t quite true (“He never touched the deck of cards!”; “We shuffled the deck ourselves!”).

The intentional and unintentional grooming of our memories shapes our understanding of and relationship with God and with others and the world around us. And it helps explain how spiritual and emotional scars can grow larger with time just as the physical scar over my stomach has done the same. It can also help us understand how some of our memories become, as Barbara Streisand has sung, “misty water-colored memories”: like water colored paintings they may have a close relationship with reality but they inevitably reflect interpretation in which some details are left out and others are highlighted. Barbara is right to ask: “Can it be that it was all so simple [or unfair, or perfect, or unjust, or innocent] then? Or has time rewritten every line?”

The Bible has a lot to say about what and how we should remember, as a simple search for various forms of the words for remembering would demonstrate. In his book Volf discusses his own memories of being interrogated and tormented for his personal views while a member of the Yugoslavian army and he later comes back to the subject to apply what he might learn from Israel’s own way of remembering:

To return to my own experience in the Yugoslavian army, I can view myself primarily as a person who was terrorized by powerful people against whom I was helpless and whose intensions I could not discern. Or I can see myself primarily as a person who, after some suffering, has been delivered by God and given a new life, somewhat like the ancient Israelites, who in their sacred writings saw themselves not primarily as those who suffered in Egypt but as those who were delivered by Yahweh. I can be angry about suffering. I can be thankful for deliverance. I can be both. I can also let that year of suffering recede somewhere into a distant background and stretch myself toward the future….” (page 26)

There is much more to be gained from Volf’s book. My prayer is that we may learn to remember rightly – to remember correctly – as we learn to watch for our natural tendency to distort our memories in ways that exonerate (or possibly pile excessive amounts of guilt on) ourselves and that portray our perceived oppressors as greater villains than they actually were, and that God may be glorified as his grace, goodness and mercy loom ever larger in our minds as we fully recognize his role as the one who redeems our lives through our gracious Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Friendship of a Pastor

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

It is quite amazing the things you realize at a funeral. There we all were, almost three hundred friends and family members, all of us there to honor my father who had just passed away a couple of days earlier. They came from all over the Midwest. The older folks, representing his five full-time and several interim pastorates sitting in the front rows to hear better, were the most conspicuous.

We laid my father to rest, and in doing so, we were really laying to rest sixty years of faithful ministry. It was my task to eulogize him for the family. As I looked out over the mourners that day, and particularly those tired souls in the front rows, I couldn’t help but think of the kinds of relationships that were being represented there before me.

How had they perceived my father? There my father was before us, first, seen through the eyes of a wife, certainly the most intimate of the relationships being represented. And, then, there were the four grown boys, less intimate but equally loving. There were four daughters-in-law. How did daughters tethered to this man all these years out of marital pledge rather than blood kinship view this man and his life? There were plenty of nephews and nieces who largely saw him past his prime. There were only a few of his peers left who observed him in his prime—no siblings, but a few brother and sister-in-laws. And finally, with the exception of the church custodian and the ladies who served lunch that day, all of the rest sitting there saw this man through the lens of his ministry amongst them as their one time pastor.

Of this latter group, I couldn’t help thinking of one of dad’s most memorable sayings while I was growing up: “My best friends are ex-parishioners.” Certainly he never made this little adage public, but there was something in dad’s past that always made him wary of getting too close to those he served. Perhaps it was a piece of pastoral wisdom that he learned in his seminary days from the forties.

Whatever it was, in hindsight I think this self-imposed ministerial convention left my dad privately lonely. Publicly, no one would have guessed it. Dad was a big, gregarious man. Our home was a big, hospitable place. Our family life was cluttered with people from all walks of life. Dad’s life was filled with relationships, but at the end of the day, few of those relationships could easily fall under the category of friendship, narrowly defined. Most of his friends sat outside the church door, at least of the church he was currently serving. Only when he left a church would he express friendship openly to certain special people.

The wisdom of this little saying of dad’s can easily be disputed? Is it wise for pastors to nurture friendships within their own congregations? If not, are pastors, then, doomed to a life of solitude? Aside for his or her family, where else is the source of community for those who are to oversee community to come from? What was dad so fearful of? And, what advice should young pastors be given as they enter into a profession that is enormously challenging, potentially filled with conflict, and often lonely?