God's, Mine, and Ours

On Sunday AM radio, a young Baptist pastor said that retired people finally have time to do God’s work full-time, and should not be distracted by the idea that it’s time to kick back and do whatever they want.    Meanwhile, on FM radio, an old commentator names Steinmorten or something said we old people should not feel guilty about not being constantly involved in our kids’ lives, that we have our own lives to live.  I was in my workshop, blissfully working on
a project for an upcoming art fair.  Kathy and I had gone to early Mass and had breakfast together.  I had gotten e-mails off to the people I hoped would join me at the homeless shelter for a project there on Tuesday evening.  And now, having rendered to God and society what were God’s and society’s, I was enjoying time in my workshop.  I was rendering to myself what I thought was mine.

When I heard the old guy telling me we old people should stop feeling guilty, I was unconvinced.  After 40 years of raising kids, working in a dedicated academic community, living among urban activists in a city where needs are even more awesome than the talents and engagement of its people, I was unconvinced.  I felt in myself the undertones of the very guilt that he said was unnecessary.  I disagreed with him.  When, conversely, I heard the young Baptist pastor telling his retired congregants that golfing five days a week was the elder equivalent of kids playing video games, I wondered whether he had taken the collection yet.  I admired him for his courage, even as I felt revulsion for the high-pitched, insistent, whining kind of tone that made me feel shoved, bullied.  The old guy’s voice had been calm, even droll.  Take it or leave it.  This young guy’s attitude seemed to suggest “take it or leave.”

I smiled there at the machine I was working on, a mortise that was drilling four perfectly precise square holes in the four sides of precisely formed walnut cubes – 54 of them.  I smiled because after all those years of doing head-work, I was doing piece-work, the careful, repetitive manual work that my dad had done in the factory that made those red coaster wagons, Radio Flyers.  And I was loving it.  216 repetitions of a simple operation allowed me to reflect on life, and on those two conflicting messages.  And just as the walnut cubes fell precisely into place in the jig on the mortising machine, the young pastor’s message clicked into place in my conscience.  I needed to look at this time in my life, this time of freedom from a job, as rendering to God what is God’s.

What is God’s?  Everything.  In William P. Young’s novel The Shack, Papa – the person of God the Father who appears as a jovial, always cooking and feeding large Black woman – tells Mack that the big mistake we make is thinking that freedom is being separated from God, where we can do our own thing.  Papa says that it is our nature to be in relationship, not to be alone, and that when we finally give up that foolish inclination to flee, we can discover our happiness.  This resonated in me.  It clicked in place like the cubes in the jig.  The Jesuits have had 40 years to convince me that ”Finding God in all Things” is the way to joy, that balance is not a matter of weighing each of the things that we do, but finding our Keel.

When Kathy and I got married 41 years ago, there was a saying regarding marriage: “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.”  So God of Relationship spins the coin of opposites – what’s God’s and what’s “mine” – until it becomes a blur.  Everything that is God’s is mine and everything that’s mine is God’s.  The key is not balance, its relationship.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.