Praying With Owen

Every night after we have finished getting Owen ready for bed I hold him and both mom and I sing a song to him and then I pray before we put him into bed. The songs are generally some old hymn. I used to think that he probably wasn’t retaining much of what we sang to him, but then one night I stopped while singing a line from “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and he finished it for me. Since then I like to pause in my singing to hear him chime in. And then we pray.

It is interesting praying with a two year old because he has no idea about who or what God is except that which we have given him through the stories we read him, the songs we sing him, and the way we pray when we tuck him at night. It is a sobering thought. And given how much he picks up on the words we use and the way we use them, it really means that I can’t just do this by rote unless I want him to think that is what prayer is. (Cute sidenote: whenever he hurts himself Clara has taught him to pray for God to heal his pain. So he will bonk his head and come up to me crying “God heal it.” God may heal it, but daddy still has to kiss it.)

We always pray and thank God for everything good he has given us and ask him to help us acknowledge all of the blessings that we routinely overlook. We ask him to bless Ellie and help us figure her out and help her to grow up big and strong; we thank him for mommy and how hard she works for us and how patient she is with Owen and Ellie and how much she loves us; we thank him for daddy’s job and ask him that he would guide daddy on what we should do in the future.

But the crux of my prayer is when I pray for him. I want him to know what my desires are for his life. What I consider to be important to his future and his happiness. I begin by thanking God profusely for the chance to be the father of this little boy, for what a joy and grace he is to me, and just how fun it is to play with him and read with him and eat popcorn and watch football with him. And then I pray that God would save him and pour out his grace upon Owen’s life and that my boy would grow up to give glory to God and treasure God in all things. When I pray for his character I pray that God would make him strong and humble (he used to laugh whenever I said the word humble and repeat it), someone who is soft-hearted but firm in his convictions, someone who lives a life of love for the people around him, and lays his life down for his friends and gives them life by his sacrifice.

I pray other things on other nights, but those are the things that are always there. That is what I want for my son. That is my vision for his life. And as I have prayed those things night after night for the past several months, it has become clear to me that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I don’t mean this in a self-centered way. I very much am praying for Owen at night. What I do mean is that in order for these prayers to come true I need to model a lot of this stuff for my son. If I want him to be strong and humble, then I need to show him what a strong and humble man looks like. If I want him to have a soft-heart but firm convictions I need to orient my life in the same way. That is what I mean when I say that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I am asking that God would make me that way so I can show it to him, not because it will save him, but that God may use my example to call Owen from darkness into light and from death to life.

Parenting is hard regardless of how you do it; praying those types of prayers for your kids only ups the ante as far as I am concerned. I am the most influential person in my son’s life and the question I confront every day is how I will use that influence. And by God’s grace it will be doing my part to help my requests to God become the reality of my son’s life.

On Spanking (Not the Type You Might Think) and Liberty

Occasionally I will run across an article that almost perfectly encapsulates our modern ethic on sex/sexuality which can be neatly summarized thus:

Sexual desire is self-validating.

When Woody Allen cheated on wife Mia Farrow with her daughter (not his, from another relationship) his mea culpa was "the heart wants what the heart wants." In other words, Allen is no more responsible for his desires than he is for the fact that he chose to act on them. Intelligent people in our culture take that statement at face value as inherently justifying, even if the result is a bit icky to consider. 

So Jason Webb, writing for Salon, does his duty to promote the interests of the spanking fetishists in this world, that long oppressed sexual minority. Here is an excerpt to paint the general picture of what is going on here:

"At times, spanking was an obsession, and one made all the more torturous for the shame I felt harboring it. For more than 20 years I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought that if, by chance, someone else felt the same way, then they’d be a dirty old man with a grubby overcoat and bulging eyes. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t choose to be kinky in this way, any more than a man or woman chooses to be straight or gay. The way I saw it, homosexuals had their closet and I had mine. Only mine was a lot smaller, and I was the only one in it."

Webb no doubt believes that by conflating his "preference" in with the darling civil rights issue of our day, he will immediately have a sympathetic audience. "Even the homosexuals have it better than me," he seems to imply. Webb is liberated by a partner who will let him pursue his sexual desires as well as a dinner party of other freaks "spankos" who show him how normal and healthy his fetish is. The article ends with a charming anecdote about Webb spanking the "naughty server" at a spanko-friendly dinner he attended with the help of his "darling wife" who raised the skirt of the girl for him. I feel dirty even writing that sentence.

While reading this I couldn't help but get the impression that most of Webb's praise of the liberation of his desire is ostentation meant to cover up that last sliver of shame which he is doing his damnedest to expunge. I imagine he believes that writing this article will exorcise those vicious Judeo-Christian demons once and for all. Hopefully it was therapeutic for him. Perhaps he will launch a new video series about how it gets better for spankos once they leave behind all of their benighted moral structure.

The odd thing about our culture is not that there are sexual deviants. Those have always been amongst us, bless their hearts. The odd thing about our culture is that the deviants must now be validated by everyone else. You can't just let the freak flag fly (much less simply be quiet about the proceedings) and let the squares gasp in horror. Now, the squares have to make fetishists feel comfortable in their fetishes because we all know it is cruel to judge someone for fulfilling the desires of their heart, whatever those desires happen to be.

Again, in a very real sense this is nothing new. I mean, Caligula existed. And I am not kept awake at night in horror that there might be some spanking going on somewhere in my neighborhood. But it is a new thing to be asked to take something that looks suspiciously like beating a woman with a cane for pleasure and give it the cultural stamp of approval because, you know, inborn desire and all. So many moderns are as fatalistic about sexual desire as the most ardent Calvinist ever was about salvation.   

I don't have a great concluding thought, just thought this captured the zeitgeist nicely. Expect more previously unacknowledged sexual practices to become very important expressions of core sexual identity in the future. Rather than a sense of public decorum requiring people to not publish the details of their desire, expect more far too detailed accounts of subversion that we are required to accept and praise as further signs of liberation.

On second thought, allow me to close with Milton: 

That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,

And still revolt when Truth would set them free.

License they mean when they cry Liberty.