growing up | Michael Valliant

Doubt and Faith

Background: This past weekend (April 6-7) was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. The lectionary Gospel reading was John 20:19-31, which is popularly referred to as the “Doubting Thomas” story. I also preached on this passage last year and wanted to make sure to take it in a new direction. I am grateful especially to Debie Thomas and her book, “A Faith of Many Rooms,” which is quoted and referred to.

“Doubt and Faith“

It’s today’s reading where our friend Thomas earns the nickname that history and culture gave him: “Doubting Thomas.” And we are told not to be a Doubting Thomas.

I want to discuss whether doubt is a bad thing and whether in Thomas’s shoes, any of us might not do the same thing.

This is not the first time we meet Thomas in John’s Gospel. The first story he is a part of is the raising of Lazarus.

Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus that their brother Lazarus is sick, hoping that Jesus will come to heal him. Jesus famously waits a couple days before going to see them. And when he’s ready, he says to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”

They know there are people in Judea who already want to stone and kill Jesus. Going back to Judea is exactly what they don’t want to do. They try to hash out whether this is a good idea and Jesus says, “Lazarus is dead, let us go to him.”

This is where Thomas pipes up and says to the group, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

If Lazarus is dead, and Jesus is walking straight into the storm and facing death head on, Thomas says, alright gang, let’s go die with him.

And off they go. Thomas has no fear and no problem going to die with and for Jesus.

Fast forward through John’s Gospel: there is the raising of Lazarus, Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem, then his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. Now the disciples are caught up in uncertainty, grief, and the lost feeling of what was going to happen now.

The story of the empty tomb, of Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Jesus there that we just heard last weekend on Easter, has just happened. It is evening on that same day, the first day of the week, and the disciples are locked in a room fearing the same fate that Jesus met might be waiting for them at the hands of the Jews.

Jesus appears to the disciples. This incredible experience. But Thomas isn’t there. He gets back after the fact. And the disciples all tell him, “We’ve seen the Lord,” he was here with us.

Thomas says, unless I see it for myself, unless I see HIM for myself, I will not believe.

Author Debie Thomas was born in India. Her father was a Christian minister there and their culture has a special relationship with the apostle Thomas.
In her new book, “A Faith of Many Rooms,” which we’ll have a few small groups reading and discussing, she has this to say about Thomas and his doubt:

“Cautious. Skeptical. Stubborn. Daring.”

“A man who yearned for a living encounter with Jesus—an encounter of his own, unmediated by the claims and assumptions of others. A man who wouldn’t settle for hand-me-down religion but demanded a firsthand experience of God to anchor and enliven his faith. To me, this speaks not only to Thomas’s integrity but to his hunger. His desire. His investment. He wasn’t spiritually passive. He didn’t want the outer trappings of religion if he couldn’t know its fiery core. He was alive with his longing.”

I don’t know about you, but I have never been able to just accept something that people tell me without finding out for myself. This didn’t make for an easy job for my parents. They came home once when I was 9 or 10 years old, to find me stuck in the mud in the middle of the creek behind our house at low tide. I didn’t think I would get stuck, despite people warning me. My mom’s boots are still at the bottom of the creek there.

Another time, my mom had to come extract me from the clay they dredged out of Town Creek in Oxford, which I walked into–waist-deep to see how far I could get.

As a teenager spelunking in John Brown’s Cave in Harpers Ferry, in the pitch black with headlamps, a friend and I climbed up a wall about 20 feet to see what it was like. It took a minor miracle for us to make our way back down.

My Mom’s boots are still under the water in that creek.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church, I was baptized and confirmed at Holy Trinity Church in Oxford, I attended St. James Episcopal School in Hagerstown for a time. As I got older, I kept at the periphery of church, I appreciated the teachings, I liked what this Jesus guy was all about, but I couldn’t make the leap from interested to invested.

I think I have always been Thomas when it comes to faith. I needed my own experience.

How does that happen? How do we find that kind of experience?

Let’s look at something that happens right after Thomas says he won’t believe unless he sees for himself.

After Thomas says he’s not on board, John writes: “A week later… his disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them.”

A week has gone by, and Thomas is still there.

What does that tell us about Thomas? Even though he wasn’t ready to believe, even though he didn’t have the experience that the others had, he didn’t quit. He didn’t hang it up. He kept showing up. He was willing to give it time when he himself wasn’t feeling it.

What does it say about the disciples? They didn’t shun him. They didn’t ostracize him. They stood by their experience, they trusted Jesus, and they loved Thomas. They were willing to let things work themselves out.

Life goes on. The disciples stay together. Thomas keeps working through things. And a week later, Jesus comes back and gives Thomas the exact thing he asked for.

What do we learn about Jesus? He gives Thomas the experience that he needs to believe. He meets Thomas where he was and gives him his hands and shows him his side and says, “Do not doubt, but believe.” Thomas, man of his word, says, “My Lord and my God.” He believes.

What does that mean for Thomas? What does it mean for us to believe?

Here’s the thing about belief when it comes to faith. It sounds nice, it sounds reassuring: if you believe, you’re all set. If you believe, you’ll have eternal life. So how do we as Christians today show our belief? We go to church, meaning worship services. We take Communion. Maybe we wear a cross around our necks. If we’re on social media and someone says, “bet you won’t post the Lord’s Prayer,” we say, oh yeah, watch this… and post it… Hhhmm… that’ll show them.

I subscribe to the idea that if you want to know what someone believes, watch their actions. I think that’s what Jesus was and is banking on as well. If you want to know what the disciples did after their encounters with the risen Christ, go take a look in the Book of Acts. They risked their lives, they met in houses and walked and sailed hundreds of miles to win new followers of Christ. If that was a part of belonging to a church today, I think we’d all be in a bit of trouble.

One person whose journey isn’t outlined specifically in Acts is Thomas’s. Scholarship points to the idea that Thomas is who took Christianity to India. They have statues of him and monasteries and they hold that their Christian roots go all the way back to one of Jesus’s first disciples. A lot further than our roots in the United States go.

Debie Thomas outlines different stories that are associated with the apostle Thomas in India: the pared down version goes like this.

Thomas sailed to Kerala in 52 CE, so about 20 years after Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension–20 years after Thomas’s encounter with the risen Christ. He wanted to preach to the Jewish colonies that were settled near Cochin.

He was very successful, converting both Jews and Brahmins and he followed the coastline south, winning hundreds of new followers and believers of Jesus and establishing seven churches along the waterways of Kerala. He crossed over the land to the east coast near Madras.

He was so successful as a preacher and a community builder that he made the devout Brahmins in the region jealous and angry and they speared him to death in 72 CE.

For 20 years, Thomas worked with the other disciples around Jerusalem and the Middle East spreading the good news of Jesus. And for the next 20 years after that, he went to strange lands where he didn’t speak the language, where he was an outsider, where it was Thomas and the Holy Spirit and the communities of believers he helped build. Right up until the religious authorities killed him for it.

The apostle Thomas’s actions show how deeply he believed.

Debie Thomas asks this question: “What if doubt itself can be a testimony?”

She says, “If nothing else, Thomas assures me that the business of the good news–of accepting it, of living it out, and of sharing it with the world–is tough. It’s okay to waver. It’s okay to take our time. It’s okay to probe, prod, and insist on more… I need Thomas–doubter and disciple, agnostic and apostle–to show me what faith truly is.”

His doubt is honest. It is heartfelt. It is a part of who he was and part of the process of who he was becoming. Maybe you can see yourself in Thomas. Maybe doubt and questions are a part of your faith journey. They are still a part of mine. God can use our doubt as a starting point or to lead us further down the path he has laid out for us. As long as we don’t give up.

I wonder about Thomas and what his style of evangelism would have been. I picture him having a meal with a group of people who are eagerly listening to what he has to say. Except for one person sitting at the end of the table who has a raised eyebrow, shaking his or her head. Slow to accept, skeptical to believe.

I see Thomas smile, laugh a little, and say, “You’ve got doubts, huh? Me, too. Let me tell you a story about doubts and how they can be a part of faith.”

The longest job description

My girls aren’t growing up the way I did. Very few kids do these days. In our house, my dad worked (and still does), he was the provider; my mom stayed home and raised my sister and me. My girls know two working parents. And parents now generally play both provider and nurturer, the luxury of someone staying home to raise kids is largely gone.

I think my father might concede that he had the easier lot. He has always worked as hard as anyone I know, during tax season he was out of the house before we woke up and we were in bed before he got home. But he could generally see his troubles coming. I don’t think my mom had a clue what she was in for.

Maybe sons try to emulate their fathers more. I struggle to fill his shoes and ultimately I never will, but I’ve realized I wear my own shoes–his docksiders are my Sanuks, his cross-trainers are my trail-running shoes. Mothers and sons are a different matter.

Everything in this photo, besides the cat, dog, and carpet, may still be in my parents’ house 🙂

My mother saved me from drowning after I fell in the river before I could swim. I yelled at her for cheating me out of my chance to ride in the ambulance. At elementary school field days, she had a line backed up across the lawn for face painting (she is a Maryland Institute College of Art graduate). I never had a store-bought Halloween costume–from a Star Wars Jawa, to a Sand Person, to Boba Fett, to KISS’s Ace Frehley, my mom hand-made and assembled every costume and I won first prize in the fire department’s costume contest every year (during this same stretch my sister exhausted the Strawberry Shortcake character catalog and cleaned up equally well).

When it came to youth soccer, Little League Baseball, and youth lacrosse, my mom drove teammates and I to every away game. When I got into skateboarding, she endured Powell Peralta and Alva stickers all over her car, and carted us from Atlantic Skates and the Ocean Bowl in Ocean City to Island Dreams Surf and Skate shop in Towson where her parents lived. Thanks and praise is not often forthcoming from kids, I have come to realize, and it wasn’t for her then.

My mom was not a church-goer, but she and my dad decided that we should grow up going to church while we were young. So my mom took us and taught Sunday School. She has stacked up more than her share of good deeds and showing forgiveness. Some kids go through a rebellious phase. Some kids go through a complete-idiot-with-their-head-up-their-butt phase. I fell into the latter category. My oldest daughter just turned 17, and I am living through a bit of what my parents did; I have no idea why they didn’t leave me in a pit in the back yard for days or weeks at a time. My mom’s battles with my sister were of a different nature, but they were equally emotional. There is just no easy way to parent through adolescence.

My mom has had patience where most would falter. She made her kids’ passions and hobbies her own for many years–she can probably still rattle off the names of toys, dolls, or skateboarders from 30+ years ago. Our successes were hers, and our failures stung her worse than us. Talking to her on numerous occasions, she told me that her hope was that my sister and I “grow up to be good people.” That’s all any parent can ask for.

Now in her 70’s, she is active now in my daughters’ lives and my sister’s kids’, known now as “Grammy.” She everything from school and after school help, goes on field trips, attends awards assemblies, and on non-dog show weekends, can be found at field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, or baseball games for her grandchildren.

Trying to make a living, I think it has always been easier to appreciate what my father and grandfather did for their families, as providers. But once I became a parent, and as the girls have gotten older, it has become all the more clear what my mom gave us, as nurturer, cheerleader, nurse, chauffeur, homework helper, chef, household runner. You know, all the things that come into my mind when I say, “Mom.”

* This post was originally written on Mother’s Day of 2015, though has been updated and edited a bit.

I’ll Never Be on Oprah

Being a father and a son, gratitude and all the feels well up on Father’s Day. About four and a half years ago, my father turned 70. We had a surprise shindig for him at the Oxford Community Center, which was the Oxford school where he went for kindergarten through 8th grade. He got roasted by a number of folks, and I spruced up my remarks and published them on Eastern Shore Savvy, a cool online magazine that has since gone away. And along with it, all the articles that were once online.

I missed having that article around in particular, so I found my draft of it, and bring it back here, for Father’s Day, four years later.

I’ll Never Be on Oprah
From Eastern Shore Savvy, January 2014

My father just turned 70 and I think I can beat him in a foot race. We used to race in front of our house in Oxford, maybe 50 yards to the end of the street. I was in high school the first time I managed to beat him.

My father grew up in Oxford when you could have horses and chickens there. He shares his name, Robert, with his father. He went to school in the building that now houses the Oxford Community Center. He met my mom, who is from Towson, Md., through a mutual friend in Ocean City when they were teenagers. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1966, the first in his family to do so. The Vietnam War was in full swing and the draft was happening. So he enlisted in the Army. The classes that completed basic training before and after him went to Vietnam. My dad was sent to Germany.

After the Army, my father returned to the Eastern Shore. A friend convinced him to think about public accounting as a career. In 1974, when I was two, he joined Beatty, Satchell and Company, a CPA firm, became a partner and has worked there ever since.

I have a lot of classic memories of growing up, father and son stuff. We’ve always had baseball—from learning to play catch in the back yard, to going to Orioles games at Memorial Stadium. To this day I’ve seen more professional sporting events at Baltimore’s now leveled ball park than anywhere else. I remember Dad playing first base on his office softball team, and when I got old enough, and good enough in little league, that’s the position I wanted to play.

During my last year of little league, my dad had taken to filming our games on his Betamax camcorder—he was convinced that Beta would surely outlast VHS—he created priceless audio while filming the last play of my season. Playing in Cordova, I slid safely into home plate on a wild pitch, stood up and raised a badly broken wrist up in the air. You hear a few gasps in the bleachers and then dad saying, “Oh sh**!” right before the tape cuts off. I haven’t watched that tape very often.

As an accountant, my father planned our family trips around CPA conventions—to Disney World, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., and to Boston. We drove like the Griswolds in the movie “Vacation,” as I wasn’t big on flying, and we stopped to in Charlottesville, Va., to dad’s alma mater, the Natural Bridge and the American icon, South of the Border, where Pedro straddles the line between the Carolinas.

Growing up in our house, Halloween quickly became our favorite holiday, because it meant helping build and being behind the scenes of the Kiwanis Club haunted houses, which were well known and epic to almost anyone that lived in Talbot County between the late 1970s to mid 1980s. I’ve seen my dad as Frankenstein, as a mad scientist, and a swamp creature, among other things.

There are some things a son picks up from his father. When I started drinking beer, I always went for Miller Lite. When watching the Baltimore Ravens, we yell the same words (in the same pitch) at the television when they throw an interception. I learned that real Christmas shopping is done on Christmas Eve, and not a day before.

There are some traits or inclinations that aren’t necessarily passed down. I’ve got more hair than my father does. I don’t eat as many Snyder’s Pretzels. And numbers don’t speak to me the way they do to him. With any father and son I guess there are going to be striking similarities and head-scratching differences and I think as I’ve gotten older I have learned to marvel at both.

A lot of writers get noticed for having troubled upbringings or non-existent parents, and they have become great despite what they’ve had to overcome. Dad has given me the creative disadvantage of raising my sister and me well. He taught us, by the way he lives, the difference between right and wrong. He’s been the consummate provider, working so that my mother didn’t have to, and making sure we could go to college. He has provided the example for me, of how to be a father, and set the bar immeasurably high. I’ll never be on Oprah.

When we get together for holidays or family dinners or kids’ sports games, my father has accepted the mantel of “Granddaddy,” which is what my sister and I called his father. As a father now, I think I feel maybe what he must have felt then, surrounded by your parents and your children. I’m not sure it gets any better than that.

Sixteen

You are the ringleader. When I look up, you have cousins, kids, your sister, watching and following you around. You always make me laugh with what goofiness you come up with to run them through. From costumes to choreography, I don’t have a clue where you come up with it.

You are the curious one. Watching, listening atop the stairs, paying attention when no one realizes it. You leash the dog and set out on foot. You are the sea glass explorer and the finder of odd things.

I rarely ever cried before you were born. Now I can’t watch movies with fathers and daughters in them; I am pretty well worthless in church if a sermon, song, or prayer hits the right note. That comes from being a father, which started with you. I guess the yelling comes from that too 🙂

I’m not sure how a father is supposed to feel about his oldest child turning 16. And I’m not sure how I feel about it, so I guess that’s about right. I feel like I remember turning 16 too well for you to be there already. My teenage years were full of bad decisions, adventures, opportunities, and dumb luck. You’ve avoided a lot of the bad decisions so far, for which I thank you.

My father knew a lot more about being a dad to a 16 year old than I do, or he didn’t let on otherwise. It’s a privileged place to look at my parents and how they did it and at my daughter and how she does it. I have a lot to learn.

I want to strangle you a fair amount of the time, but I recently learned it’s your amygdala I have to take it up with. I realize you are part of God’s way of teaching me patience at the same time you are teaching me about love and gratitude.

You care about people in ways that make me both humble and proud and make me worry, which is part of what parents do, especially with 16 year olds.

When you forget yourself, you do amazing things. I’ve seen it on the field hockey field, or stepping up to play goalie in lacrosse, or in a hospital with your sister. I hope you learn to trust that more.

Paddleboarding this past summer, just the two of us, brought out the kind of conversations, questions, laughter, that no one could have told me existed before I knew you.

You and others know this story, but it’s on my mind now: we were on our way into the Annapolis Mall, you were three and sitting backwards on Ava’s stroller looking at us, and out of nowhere, unprompted, you asked, “Why did God make us?” I didn’t know what to say. You caught me off guard. And then you answered, “Know why I think? I think because He was lonely.”

There is no amount of theology or learning that has ever said it better. And if we can know the love God felt and feels and how His loneliness disappeared, maybe you show me that.

Until it’s time to get ready for school in the morning 😉

When I look at you, turning 16, I see a lot of myself. But I see so much more, and someone totally different.

For your sixteenth birthday, I want things for you that I can’t possibly give you: happiness, love, friendship, wisdom, health, success, grace, hope, and laughter, to name a very few. I hope we can point you in the right direction to help you find those things and what they mean to you.

I have no idea where you will go in life or how you will decide to get there. That’s one of the coolest, most frightening, and beautiful things I have ever seen. You are growing up. And we get to be a part of it.

Last Child on the River

We floated homemade skimboards across a chest-high channel into Boone Creek. That was the entrance to our after school and weekend reality. Park on the side of the lane and rescue the stashed boards from the brush, then spend the hours through sunset cruising atop what seemed an endless perfect sheet of water–water being the upside to growing up on the Eastern Shore.

The thing that takes me back there most quickly is watching the girls experience all the same things I loved.

Seeing them on the water, exploring beaches, hunting for minnows, crabs, shells, sea glass, and found treasure. There is a simplicity that seems universal.

The built world fades away.

We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children’s memories, the adventures we’ve had together in nature will always exist. – Richard Louv, “Last Child in the Woods.”

These are the experiences I never want to stop having with the girls–when they are outside with friends, family, other kids, adults, lost in time and fun on a beach, on a river, or in the woods.

The pictures here speak louder and more clearly than my words, which is as it should be. It’s a visual and tactile world. It’s a world we found as kids, discovered as if we were the first to come across it.

Prize the natural spaces and shorelines most of all. because once they’re gone, with rare exceptions, they’re gone forever. In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chapparal, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness. We require these patches of nature for our mental health and our spiritual resilience. – Richard Louv

There is something to being outside on the water. There is something to watching the girls discover it with their friends, and seeing it become a part of who they are.

But in the end, and to the girls’ laughter, those experiences just as easily beg the question of who is the child on the river?

Growing Up Goonies

A 20-pound Siamese cat slept in the crib with me when I was a baby. I didn’t seem to mind, and neither did my parents. I don’t think it sucked the life out of me, as wives’ tales go.

I spent a good part of the summer days of my first 10 years in a several-acre marsh behind our across-the-street neighbors’ house. We built trails, forts, bridges, found rusty muskrat traps, played war, and brought home mud, sticks, cuts, and ticks.

When my world expanded beyond the marsh and our dead-end street, it was into Oxford by bike. And once I got the okay to ride uptown, I don’t think my mom saw me from morning to dinner. There were no cell phones or text messages. It wasn’t a far bike ride home, and if I needed anything I could call from a friend’s house. I don’t think she was particularly worried.

I watch my girls growing up now, in Oxford half of their time, and 14-year-old Anna riding her bike uptown to find friends, to go swimming at the Strand or hang out at the park, or go to the creamery for ice cream. It’s a newer found freedom for her, one I had already known for a few years at her age. It makes me feel good to see her coming into her own.

This spring, The Washington Post ran an article that got me thinking a lot about how many of us grew up in the 1970s and 80s. The author’s reminiscences come after a question by his eight-year-old son while watching the movie, “The Goonies.”

“Where are their parents?” the kid wondered.

It sends him into a reflection on the differences between what it was like to grow up then versus now. How now all play time is scheduled, whereas our group of friends in Oxford would just ride our bikes and see who we could find. Our days were mostly unstructured and largely up to us.

When I hear, “I’m bored,” from one of the girls, my preferred response to give is, “So what are you going to do about that?” At 14 and 11, they can unseat their own boredom. They can use their brains and bodies to come up with adventures. At their ages, we were largely put outside and told to go play.

Having said that, I have always been and am still quick to play–ride bikes up town, play bocce in the yard, pass the lacrosse or field hockey ball, put the paddleboard in the river. I love sharing that time with them.

There are about as many different parenting styles as there are parents. I don’t think one is better or worse than another, just different. I am far from father of the year (though I have seen winners of that distinction based on their t-shirt or coffee mug), I struggle, second guess, worry, question, and frequently don’t get it right. But I see the people the girls are becoming, how they treat people, the grades they get in school, how they laugh and have fun, and I am grateful that sometimes things sink in for them.

One of the goals of being a parent, at least for me, is to raise girls who grow up to be good, thoughtful, caring, compassionate, passionate, independent, creative people. Among the most valuable things my parents gave to me, was/is being able to fall down, get bruised or scratched, get the wind knocked out of me (figuratively, but sometimes literally), and to be able to get up, dust myself off, put myself back together as best I can, and keep going or get back at it. Unfortunately, I still seem to fall down plenty.

Some of that resilience comes from having to figure things out for yourself/themselves. Learning that their own creativity is the key to getting rid of boredom. And learning that sometimes boredom is okay, resting, and not having every day over-scheduled with ten sports teams, music lessons, scouts, and whatever else can be fit into waking hours.

Maybe a lesser examined idea of parenting is the notion that parents should also show their kids that there is more to being a father or mother than simply parenting; that grown-ups (and parents) have jobs, hobbies, passions, adventures, many of which involve kids, but some of which don’t. We are unscrewing a whole new can of worms with that notion, so let’s leave that be for now.

As a father, there is no greater pleasure than watching, and being a part of, Anna and Ava succeeding at something–whether making Principal’s Honor Roll, or scoring a goal, or being there for a friend, or creating art, or making a good choice, or being all smiles and laughs and making new friends on the dance floor at a wedding.

Growing up is different for the girls than it was for my grandfather (the dude sitting amongst the oyster shells above, circa 1905). Oxford is a different town, parenting is different, and being a kid is different. There are worries now that hadn’t taken shape 100 or 50 or 25 years ago.

But I’d like to think that there is still some magic and adventure that the girls can find for themselves. And while I hope that doesn’t entail running from criminals, getting stuck in underground caves, or involving the police; maybe there are figurative treasure maps and One-Eyed Willy still smiles and winks at kids today.