I laid in bed, this morning, trying to find the courage to get up. Listening as Linnea hits snooze again. I take some of my new TURBO-VITE vitamins. I hope this helps. I had tossed and turned with back pain all night, waking up every time Linnea headed to the bathroom, regretting the poison hamburger she ate as our team celebrated my birthday.
I laughed as I thought about the discussion on manicures and pedicures and spas that we had as we ate. The discussion of bubble baths and candles and music. I have no idea how to have these discussions, and realize I can’t expect a table full of girls to talk about things I would actually be interested in. We laughed because I shared how I don’t even like baths, that I couldn’t really remember my last bath. I laughed as I thought of this, because this morning I was filling the bathtub with water and some bath essence made from Amarula, which is a fruit the elephants eat and get drunk off of, a liquor I have heard of but never tried. What the heck is a bath essence?
I laid in the hot water, and thought how nice it was, how maybe I might start taking some more baths. I thought maybe not with a candle and music, but a good beer and a cigar should make a bath a little more manly. Maybe I would still need to read the sports pages.
As I sunk under the water, and wished I had a snorkel for full immersion therapy, I thought of another bath I took a long time ago.
We (my brother, Jason, and my buddy Paul, the Mover I worked for and with for years) were moving a family out of Connecticut. This was not the nicest house we had ever moved, but it was nice. We had been left the keys to the house, and the family had gone ahead, trusting us to finish the job with out them. We decided after a couple days without a shower, in the middle of the summer, we should take advantage of the facilities there. I went into the master bathroom, which had two sinks, two toilets (a his and hers) and a bidet. There was a fancy shower with a few shower heads, and a huge jacuzzie style bathtub.
I hopped in the tub and turned on the jacuzzie. I thought about how nice it would be to have a house like this. I thought that maybe I should take college more seriously. I thought about a poster on a professor’s door at Liberty, which showed a mansion with a six car garage, each spot holding cars that every 16 year old dreams of. The American Dream, as dreamed by an artist, stuck in the mind of a pimply faced boy.
I am reading a book by Richard Rohr, a catholic-christian, who calls himself a quasi-hermit, and has chosen a Franciscan lifestyle (I don’t really know what that means or if I said it right). This book is “Adam’s Return, The Five Promises of Male Initiation”. He seems to repeat an idea I have heard over and over lately. Erwin MacManus and J. Oswald Sanders also write of this, the issue of people not fulfilling their potential. McManus even says that this is what real sin is, not the stuff so many christians think of, like saying damn (when a christian says dang or darn or dagnabbit), or any other thing a christian does in the pursuit of holiness, but real sin is: missing out on who God made us to be.
Sanders, in his book, “Spiritual Leadership”, speaks of issues of ambition (which we christians are often taught, in a false humility, is wrong. And this is huge in my life, that ambition is somehow prideful) and motivation, he says that pure ambition is finding God’s potential for our lives. Rohr speaks of initiation in various cultures and that so many men never find who they are supposed to be.
One idea I had never heard described as Rohr does, is “neural pruning”. This is the idea of ‘use it or lose it’. He says that there are five stages in a person’s brain development, at ages 1, 4, 7, 11, and 14-17, where nerves are actually myelinated. Each stage needs direction to fully develop. We get stuck in a stage when there is no one to help us through these stages. The people we spend time with have a huge impact on the development in these ages. We need people to help us, people who can lead us to the next stage. We can not reach these stages on our own, and can only be led to where a person has been. We need to be wise in who we spend time with. I remember reading a statement which said “the difference between who you are and who you will be in 5 years is the books you read.” I have also heard (I might be making this up, but I don’t think I am) that an even more powerful influence in our lives is the people we spend time with. Choose your friends wisely, I am just beginning to understand this, after 32 years. To evaluate the lives of the people we allow to influence us, to affect our world views. We need mentors or teachers or coaches. Our youth in this strange group called The Church need help in their growth.
If there is no one to help us reach the next stage in our lives, we get stuck, and we begin to lose the development that we gained in our youth. This is a massive dying off of millions and millions of nerve cells, a natural tragedy called “neural pruning”. The effects of neural pruning are deep disappointment, cynicism, and rage in a young person. This process causes less alert and less alive people. This makes me think of so many people sitting in our pews. Afraid of life, afraid of what we don’t know. Not realizing we have missed mentorship as the old die or waste their final years alone in their houses, or nursing homes, tucked away and ignored because they look funny or smell funny and they make us realize we are mortal.
People with fancy educations and amazing gifts plan programs and study procedures for church growth, while another generation of youth are put on the shelf, taught not to hope, another generation of teenagers learns to be rebellious because no one teaches them how to live. Young kids full of hope, full of dreams, a natural inclination to greatness is wasted because people who have suffered 35 years of neural pruning don’t even realize what is going on.
Could it be that the youthful hope and idealism are an affront to our egos? We are reminded of our broken dreams? That these youth might see through our facades? Could it be that these minds perceive life as it could be, a life that we have quit on? Minds that still function the way God designed them, pre programmed to dream, reminding us that we have sold our souls to the catologs? Our brain can’t think like this anymore because we have lost so much function?
The wise sages, people who have been walking for 50 years with God are ignored, because their ideas are not ‘cutting edge’. Gifts and talents and education are more important in our churches than character and wisdom and experience. Power is held by the man with the fanciest car or the woman with the loudest emotions and nicest figure; the bean counters like to see the church with a healthy savings account; while teenagers get pregnant or try drugs because no one in ‘the faith’ has anything better to offer them.
Another generation suffers neural pruning, slowly and ignorantly following the path of those depressed minds who sit in the pews Sunday after Sunday, wishing for hope, hoping for faith…and swallowing what the religion has to offer, hungry for life but complaining when someone turns on the light while we slumber. Those with money want comfort, while their own children waste their minds; children prepare to waste their lives. Children hungry for touch, for love, for leadership and direction. Youth hungry for something to believe in, while we buy them pizzas and hope they like us. Children who don’t buy into our budgets and business plans. We agree, tacitly, by our actions, that it is OK TO WASTE OUR LIVES. Just as we have done, children hungry to be all that God has made them to be. We teach them not to swear, not to bug us.
We wait until their hearts have been broken, just like ours. We wait until their minds have dumbed down. We hope that our children will lose hope, we hope the church will provide free baby sitting (but I tithe!), get us through this difficult time of development. We wonder what is wrong with the youth, hungry for something, but ignorant of what that is.
