Harvest

Have I become a farmer? For the last three days I have actually eaten the fruit of my labour.Whilst not actually managing to get a tomato (yet...still green)...tonight we will have a tomato (from the shop...quite cricket ball like) and rocket and basil salad (from the garden). The rocket was delicious tasty and sweet (even though parishioner J and I did have a conversation last Sunday which implied that rocket probably grew (as a weed) in our gardens long before we planted it !!)
I long for the first red tomato...there are plenty of green ones and lots of flowers. My dad would be proud. Laus tibi Domine!

Life with father

I had a curious conversation with L yesterday about our father. She said "You know I had a conversation with our father..." I could not help but quip "You mean, our father who is not in heaven."
She looked at me quizzically as though I was implying that our earthly father had, for some reason known to me alone, been damned for all eternity! I should learn to keep my mouth shut. Had I known what she was then going to say perhaps I would have.
Any way she went on. "He said to me one day...I don't know if I believe in God."
Self-obsessed that I am I merely observed. "Well you are lucky you actually had an adult conversation with him, because I never did."
"After he died, " she went on, " I was really disturbed by this, and I had to talk to someone about it."
Thick as I am, this didn't seem outrageous to me since I think that doubting faith in God is a really healthy, and indeed inevitable. But this is not necessarily the case (I failed to realise) with someone whose faith is not so precocious as mine.
As I was driving home I realised she was actually telling me something that for her was pretty important for me to know.
Good to have such a conversation with your sister!!

And NO! I was not suggesting that I knew somethign about my father's eternal destiny that God had personally revealed to me.

Converse conversation

I have spent a bit of time with my youngest daughter (13) in the last few weeks. There is a great charge for parents in seeing your children grow and become independent. It is not the physical independence that matters so much at the early teen stage, but the ability to think independently. This is different from the ability to act impulsively.

Anyone can do that! It is not too hard to see a course of action and then hurtle towards it. It would be easy to mistake this for ‘independence’. Indeed we even validate it with sayings like “They’ve got to learn from their mistakes.”

I never tire of saying that that is not entirely true. We don’t –necessarily- learn from our mistakes. We learn from reflecting on them, and then repeating the action in a modified way as a result of our reflection. We don’t always get this.

So it was good to have a bit of reflection with S.

“Have you made any New Year’s Resolutions?” was the topic of our conversation.

She told me that she had not made any as such, and then went on to tell me that she had been thinking about some goals. These included things like acting more independently, being more organized, more exercise….and so on. Indeed she had been thinking about quite a lot.

I have a couple of reflections myself on this conversation. One, of which I am well aware, is that it was good to have a conversation that didn’t particularly have any greater purpose than just having a chat. I wasn’t trying to make a point, as I so often do when I am talking to my children (to little or no avail…so why bother). It was good to let her speak discursively and decide how much to say and when she had said enough etc….

There should be more of it.

Then she asked me if I had made any resolutions. She wrested control of the conversation from her controlling father, not malevolently but on a mutual and firm basis…so indeed wrested is the wrong word….there should be more of it.

I am conscious that in a couple of weeks we will all (five of us) be on holiday together and it takes a while to get to this mutually accepting conversation. But it is a powerfully transforming dynamic when each day you can sit down with your family and just have an engaging conversation, in which you seek to be present with each other and not controlling (very hard in this family…maybe in all families, but really worth it)