“Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen,” wrote the Biblical author of Hebrews. These days, the evidence of a thing not seen--a microscopic novel virus--is wreaking havoc with our lives the world over. As the pandemic wears on, the virus threatens not only our physical, but our mental and spiritual health. The very nature of a pandemic raises existential questions that call for spiritual responses.

Alas, many of us were taught that our connection to God goes only through religion and its institutions. We were taught to rely on the Church and its ordained leaders for legitimate rites, rituals and celebration. But rites, rituals and celebrations are not the exclusive province of the paid religious professionals. Families have been celebrating holy days and holidays at home for centuries, often in times of isolation due to war, persecution, plagues and pandemics--and we can join their number now, as Holy Week approaches.

But as anyone with a kid who is even a teensy bit prone to anxiety knows, conversations about worries (and a global pandemic is a pretty big worry) often go sideways. If you happen to have a kid who is always trying to figure things out, wondering how this connects to that, how this strange world works, you are lucky. These kids are just the most fun to spend time wondering with. They are my favorites. They are also often our worriers. Because wonder so easily tips into worry, doesn’t it? And, yet. Maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe there is a way we can wonder together that leaves room for worry and comes full circle back again to wonder. I know I’ve learned some of the most profound lessons in these kinds of conversations with my own and others’ little worrying wonderers.

I want my kids to be politically informed and active. Even more, I want them to be bridge builders. I want them to be able to listen as well as they speak, and to find points of commonality even with those who are very different from them. How do I do this when instead they are warning me in advance not to bring up politics with the people closest to us, the people with whom we know we share values...and DNA?

“It’s just a mess” isn’t meant to dismiss the complexity and horror of what is happening in our wounded world. It is not intended to excuse us from acting to alleviate suffering and change evil systems. It’s not an encouragement to hide our heads in the sand and ignore the people and things that need our attention. After all, you can drive around with a missing car window for a few days, but that broken glass is going to hurt someone eventually if you don’t clean it up.

But acknowledging that something is a mess, and it’s all right, can help us stay engaged when we feel overwhelmed and want to check out. It can help us recognize that none of us is perfect--it’s just not how we’re made. It’s an entreaty to keep our hearts soft and open, to avoid assigning blame, to see the mess for what it is: a temporary setback.

When we tell our kids that they can do all things and anything, go anywhere, be whatever or whoever they want, we risk crushing them under the weight of expectation instead of the, arguably easier to shoulder, weight of information.

We have a lot of good research telling us which parenting practices are most effective at raising happy, healthy, generally well-adjusted humans. We share a lot of them with you in Bless This Mess. But when you are practicing and practicing every day, and your kid still makes bad decisions, screws up, defies you, harms themselves: where can you turn for the strength to stick with it?

Hopefully by now putting the words “progressive” and “Christianity” into the same phrase already seems like less of an oxymoron, as we banish the messages of homophobia, racism and exclusion that have dominated the airways for decades. But in case a liberal read of the Bible and the Way of Jesus is still a mystery to you, here’s a very brief orientation. 

For starters, while much of the religious right would have us believe thoughts and prayers are enough, we respectfully disagree. Yes, we are in favor of common sense gun control. But more than that, “thoughts and prayers” as a solution is based in both bad theology and bad psychology. It’s not that we disagree with praying for the survivors or the shooters. It’s that this approach does little to help us make sense of violence, for ourselves or our kids, and tells us even less about what to do about it.