When I Grow Up

In the movie Matilda, the character Bruce is only known for his Augustus Gloop-esque gift of devouring chocolate cake.

But in the musical Matilda (which I must say moved me so deeply that I am still pondering it over a month after seeing it in London), Bruce Bogtrotter does much more than pound back pastry.

The first half closes with him escorted to “chokey,” which is not so much a funny closet of bent nails but rather a place where children are abused psychologically to be governed by fear.  

When the second half opens, it is Bruce who takes the stage alone. Exhibiting PTSD symptoms, he sings in a faint voice of the dreams he has about growing up. Lyrics that would sound silly anywhere else instead hit with intense pain. “When I grow up,” Bruce sings, he will be tall enough to climb trees, and smart enough to answer life’s questions, and strong enough to carry all the things “grown-ups” carry.

More children join him. Boldly they promise together, “when I grow up, I will be brave enough to fight the creatures that you have to fight beneath the bed each night to be a grown-up.”

The song grows in strength, swelling into this cry for courage among youth.

Then the sound quiets; the stage lights dim.

Miss Honey walks on, fully grown-up, and fully lacking the courage the children have named as their goal for adulthood. She meekly repeats the same line as the children, convincing herself that she can be brave…she can be brave enough to fight the monsters of life—an abusive Trunchbull and the selfish parents of a neglected child.

What becomes clear in Matilda is that a gap exists between the dreams of children and the reality of the grown-up life. It is the children who are the heroes of this story, and it is the adults who look like young humans needing development. The children dream of strength and brave; the adults act as immature bullies or timid cowards.

“Mind the gap,” the British say everywhere, concerning themselves with spaces between trains and platforms. Two years ago, I watched my wife write “mind the gap” when she was asked to describe her vocation. I never asked but always wondered what she meant by playing with that word choice—mind the gap between economic classes? Mind the gap between God’s dreams for the world and our own intentions?

Since seeing Matilda in July, I’ve been thinking about a new gap to mind: the gap between what we dream for our futures as children and the actual life we lead as adults.

I write this at age 24. To the outside world I have cleared some of the normative hurdles that signify I am now in the class of “adulthood”—I am married…I have a full-time job…I have a home with a yard to care for and trash to roll to the street.

But I watched Bruce dream boldly of always becoming, and I find my own youth roaring to life within me. I want to hold on to my childish ability to imagine the impossible. I want to be in constant evolution, to continue to molt even when my body stops growing taller.

I want to recognize that the bravery it takes to fight the monsters of life—fear, or bullies, or loneliness, or selfishness—this bravery never just happens but is a daily decision to do something that scares you, to take the leap of faith, and then watch the magic unfold.

This is true magic of Matilda—not her ability to make newts move or chalk write, but her ability to convince her community to yearn toward bravery.

In seminary and especially now as an intern pastor, I am often standing in places where I feel too young and not grown-up enough. I am 43 years younger than the median age of the members of the congregation where I serve. I am the called person standing in hospital rooms, or helping to lead marriage ceremonies, or proclaiming God’s unconditional grace and love for the world….and I feel so young sometimes.

But I look to Bruce and Matilda and the other brave children who are everywhere, and the anxiety about my age turns into a joy. As I navigate the gap between the fictional, created worlds of child and adulthood, I am no longer seeing the world as split between young and old.

Instead, I am thinking about the Mary Oliver question: what is it I want to do with this one wild and precious life, and how can I always be becoming toward that? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0tRDhEmdO4 

The Great Toaster Race

Gloria Dei Vivens Homo. The glory of God is the human being fully alive. So spoke my college English professor; so spoke St. Irenaeus, long ago (4^th century!) bishop in southern France.  

Last week in my “Care of Souls” class, we were asked what it meant to be a human fully alive. The responses unfortunately did what often happens in seminary classrooms. Voices slipped into attempting to respond to the question with more philosophical questions; others looked to negate or avoid the question through some language loophole. But my heart yearned for someone to speak truth to a question that felt so real and vital to me. What does it mean to be fully alive?

I didn’t speak in class that day. But if I would have, this was my answer:

When I worked for YouthWorks! in Red Lake, MN, every Tuesday morning was my turn at breakfast duty. This meant that at 6am, a random assortment of high schoolers would shuffle into the kitchen to prepare breakfast (at my instruction) for eighty people. Tuesday, however, was not your typical “just throw out those giant store brand cereal bags and some milk” mornings. Tuesday was magic. Tuesday was messy. Tuesday was marvelous. Tuesday was…..waffle day. 

On a time and money budget, however, we could not afford a fleet of Belgium waffle irons. Instead, our Tuesday morning mission was to take knockoff Eggo frozen discs and toast hundreds of them. At my first Tuesday, I was ready with every toaster of that pre-school kitchen ready to go. One hour and many blown circuits later, we served generic cereal, milk, and frowns to our diners. 

Yet out of the circuit ashes that morning rose an idea: the great toaster race.

One week later, to prep for my fresh recruits of sleepy-eyed adolescents, I leaped off the half-filled air mattress. Dashing through the pre-school halls, I placed toasters throughout the whole building. Youth were split into teams; some monitored the toasters, while others were carrier pigeons equipped with tin foil to keep freshly toasted waffles insulated for their journey to the warm kitchen ovens. 

The great toaster race, a wild human invention, is the best image I can offer for a human community that lived into joy and spontaneity and shared meals and service and wildly fun worship and storytelling. That is my picture of a summer where my humanity was fully alive.

At school, I am enrolled in five classes. So often I voice or hear about the feeling of tiredness from these days of occasional lecture and evening reading. How strange that I claim “tiredness” here, while at Red Lake we worked crazy long days and I loved every second of it. Every morning started with a leap off the deflated mattress, as I was hungry for that day’s toaster race creative adventures. I am convinced that the human being fully alive only happens in communities of love, in places where purpose and mission are clear, in homes where playfulness and care for the self and other come first. 

The great toaster race was psychotic. Imagine telling a high school sophomore at 6am after the night was just spent sleeping on a tile classroom floor that she or he is going to run the halls with toasted waffles wrapped in tin foil. Madness. Maybe this is the idea behind the statement that the only people to change the world are the ones crazy enough to think they can. We need a little loco in our normal. We needed the great toaster race.  

Places like camp or YouthWorks trips are not an escape from the “real world”—they are perhaps the most real world, the most fully alive world, where humans can be their best selves and live courageously together. They are places where even frozen waffles become banquet feasts.

Farewell, B

When I woke up on the floor of the laundry room after my cardiac arrest, there were lots of things to feel. I felt a slight burn from the strange tube in my right arm. I felt the straps holding my legs to the stretcher on the floor. I felt confusion about the obnoxious mask over my face.

But I also felt something else—cold, wet, irregular—on my feet. I raised my head a bit to see our dog, Bailey, who was perched at the base of the stretcher, happily licking my toes.

That room was a frenzy of emotion—an aunt crying, paramedics organizing a plan, my dad negotiating with them and also talking to me. I had no idea what was happening, only that something major had developed in my health and that it was life-flight serious.

In the chaos, one creature treated me like he always did. One creature was incredibly, hilariously calm in that charged space. Bailey, with the nub of his tail wagging, licked away at my bare feet. He must have been so thrilled that, for the first time, a human did not pull away from his desire to bathe them.

Our family said goodbye to Bailey this week, a beloved husky dog who only moved fast to chase UPS trucks and who greeted every visitor’s car with a happy pee on the tires.

Dogs and cats so quickly transform from young children to adult size. They become constants in the ever-evolving life of a human child. Through adolescence and young adulthood, Bailey’s affection and friendship was a rock through high school breakups and strikeout-heavy baseball games and graduation parties and cardiac arrests.

In pastoral care classes, we are taught that when called into situations of major grief, it is best to simply sit in silent presence with another. Maybe we learn this from our dogs. Maybe that can be the hardest part of losing a canine family member—the one who always would be present with you through whatever is the one missing.

I will always remember Bailey’s bare feet kisses that morning. I hope heaven is a place where all living things can communicate. I’ll tell him thank you. And then I’ll wash his feet, too.