So, I had a baby about six months ago and it suddenly made this whole Interfaith Thing my husband and I have been working on very real. Suddenly, blogging about weaving our traditions together felt overwhelmingly intimidating and a formidable task. It was all so easy to think about and talk about in theory. It was easy to combine the traditions of two compassionate and rational adults. But now, we have this little person, a real, live, breathing, feeling person to care for. This is high stakes child rearing.
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| The rosebud on the alter in honor of our son's birth at BUMC |
This morning, my mother confessed to me that while my husband and I were still dating, she would sit in church and pray imploringly, "please make this work, please make this work!" She wondered how in the world we were going to find a path between our two disparate cultures and faiths. Would we have to choose one over the other? Would one of us have to sacrifice our traditions and beliefs for the sake of unity? I'm so glad we live in a community that has supported us in saying "no." I'm so glad we live in a time when more and more couples are saying "no," too.
We really won't know if this is going to work. We'll have to keep checking in with my son to see. But, for now, we are taking a leap of faith by honoring the two traditions that made him. We are going to celebrate his bothness and believe that God is in that. I know that God is at work in our family as we wrestle with how best to raise our child.
This morning, my mom also told me another story. Last night, in the church youth meeting, a student of hers, a 13 year old boy, told his peers where he saw God that day. Looking down from the balcony where he was playing hand bells during morning worship, he saw God in the look on her face, his teacher's face, on the face of a grandmother reveling in loving her Jewish-Christian grandson in the church pew that morning.
As we enter into this season of lights, may our little one be our light - fresh from God refreshing our spirits and beaming God's love out into the world.
