When I was a kid, we loved visits with Granny above just about everything else. Leaving “Camp Granny” was hard, but always came with one of Granny’s all-engulfing hugs, which was a pretty good consolation. Then, as we headed out the door, she’d say, “Be sweet to yourself,” and some version of “Stay safe and have fun!” If Dad was with us, he would chirp back in response to this last line, “Well, make up your mind!” And we’d laugh our way out the door.
I later learned that Granny’s ritual “Stay safe and have fun!" had begun in Dad’s own childhood. Predictably, his response came shortly after. From generation to generation, the exchange, “Stay safe and have fun!” and “Well, make up your mind!” has marked our leave-taking of one another.
On the most basic level, this exchange conveys our family’s love for each other. We want each other’s joy, which is not a small thing. Of course, fun and joy are not everywhere synonymous, but I believe my Granny’s desire that we have fun stemmed from the love that longs for another’s joy. There are plenty of places in this world where wanting the joy of the other person is not a given of being in relationship. In such places, we need to be ready to demonstrate what longing for another’s joy looks like. Likewise, with safety. Parents, for example, pray that our children will have friends who value the dignity of each person, along with the safety that attends that respect and dignity, exactly because we know that that respect is not a given in all relationships.
My dad’s objection - “Well, make up your mind!” - takes this familial expression of love and exposes the tension between the twin desires for fun and safety, especially as read through the lens of an immortal adolescent.
When it comes to fun and safety, I am decidedly in the pro camp. I think fun and safety are mostly good things, with the caveat that Christians are called to lives of which self-sacrifice is a part, so safety cannot mean the absence of risks or loss inspired by love. (Such lives would not be “safe” but devoid of trust.) But, then again, God’s love can so ground and secure us that we become willing to risk and lose in love for God and the world God also loves. Score one for true safety.
It’s an interesting thing to think about the things you hope for people who are about to leave you and, equally, the hopes we have for the journeys on which we ourselves are about to embark. Fun and safety are good and right. Are they exhaustive? Probably not. Exhaustive is a pretty extreme word. Putting aside exhaustive, then, are fun and safety at the normative center of our hopes for our journeys? Maybe, depending on the context. What other hopes would be in the mix?
St. Paul’s list would want to add, if not lead with, “that God would be glorified,” and “that the others would be built up.”
I’ll be honest, when I imagine my family holding hands in the car and praying before a family vacation, if I imagine us praying for a) safety in our travels, b) fun along the way, then adding c) that God would be glorified and d) that we would build up in everyone we encounter and especially our sisters and brothers in Christ, it starts to feel in my mind like a prayer from outside of the Episcopal tradition.
When I keep thinking about it, though, the truly strange thing is that an Episcopal prayer tradition that contains as many as 15 opportunities to recite some version of “give glory to God” in one day of prayer (Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline) might produce Episcopalians who are not more instinctively shaped (myself first among us) to pray that God would be glorified in the activity we are about to undertake.
But here I am at camp. What does it mean to glorify God in a game of crazy kickball? What does it look like to glorify God in the Gaga pit? And after this week, what does it look to glorify God in all manner of meetings and appointments at which God won’t be mentioned? What does it look like to glorify God in my grocery shopping? In my relationship with my wife? My kids? What will it look like to glorify God and build up others on a summer’s vacation? Where will I speak up and give voice to the claims of the Gospel in the place where God would not otherwise come up? Alternatively, where will I ask God to quietly shape my presence in such a way that nonetheless conveys the conviction that the love of God matters for and peculiarly informs how I go about the work?
I want to stay safe and have fun. I want you to stay safe and have fun. But, my sisters and brothers, I want so much more for us than that.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
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