(Originally posted on Facebook on 1 December 2016)
Last night my dearest 9-year old daughter left the house at 5:20. It was already dark, and freezing to boot. She walked the 200-or-so meters to the bus stop, rode the bus two stops, got off, and went to her music lesson. In the meantime, I cooked dinner and had a bunch of different feelings. I’m proud of her for doing this. I’m proud of me that I'm letting her. I’m relieved that my son and I don’t have to bundle up and accompany her, and wonder if some of this pride just serves to justify laziness. I’m grateful that we live in a place where “bad things” don’t happen very often. And that in Swiss society we tacitly agree that it is more important for kids to be independent than for them to be protected from every conceivable danger. I wonder how much of this is a social contract, and how much is simply privilege. And of course I wonder, what if something happened??
Living in Switzerland is in some ways like going back in time 40 years. Kids are expected to walk themselves to school starting in kindergarten, and since there are two years of kindergarten this means some of them are doing this at 4 years old. There is a lot of general freaking out about this on the expat Facebook groups. But it isn’t entirely Darwinian – kindergartens here are generally not in elementary schools, but strategically sprinkled through the neighbourhood so that the little kids don’t have far to walk. And housing is dense, with a significant number of nosy old people who keep an eye on what's going on. And the police come to school twice a year, every year, explicitly to teach kids life skills like crossing the street alone (for the younger kids) and rules of the road (for older ones). But interestingly, not to talk to them about stranger danger…
This is changing, though. This week we got a note from the school about reports of a strange man trying to talk to kids in the neighbourhood – nothing bad had happened, but parents should be aware, talk to their kids about what to do if they find themselves in an uncomfortable situation, and tell them that they should walk in pairs or groups to and from school if possible. Which is only logical, right? We should be aware, take precautions. But I wonder if this is a slippery slope – the more we think about the possibilities, the scarier the world seems. I predict that it won’t take 40 more years, even given absolutely no change in the crime rate, before the kids here aren’t allowed to walk to school alone any more.
What does this have to do with theology class? Well. The next chapter of the class notes deals with resurrection but yesterday we had an interim lesson that stopped short of that and just considered death. We spent the most of the class doing a group exercise about Luke 17:33: “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will save it.”
This message of Jesus appears in some form in all four gospels, sometimes twice (also Luke 9:24, Mark 8:35, Matthew 10:39 and 16:25, and John 12:25). In the German translation we had, the verse had four separate verbs—it didn’t repeat “lose” but used a different verb the second time, more like “give up” or “lay down.” We were supposed to write down associations about these four verbs individually – preserve, lose, give up, save – and then put them back together and talk about what the whole verse means. The most obvious interpretation is the Christian message of resurrection and redemption after death – we should not be afraid to sacrifice in this life because there will be something better in the next one. But the instructor also asked us to consider whether this verse still has meaning if we ignore the question of the afterlife. We as a group started to write a sentence, “this verse encourages us not to hold tight to the lives we are given, but to…” and then got lost in a discussion of what could come next, which was super frustrating because my teammates assumed I was having trouble expressing myself in German when in fact I was just having trouble expressing myself, period (ugh). They wanted to say something like “…but to give our lives in love and service to others and God.” Which is, of course, great and true. But I think there’s possibly an additional sense, something like “…to give up control, because paradoxically, clinging to safety is no way to live.”
To take the leap. To feel the fear and do it anyway. To move to Switzerland even though you don’t speak a word of German. To let your daughter walk off into the dark night, alone. Brave, or stupid? Right this moment, crawling under the covers and staying there for a month sounds like a really good plan, so I guess I need all the encouragement I can get.
No comments:
Post a Comment