Elijah the Tishbite never had any kids. He was a child of God, a prophet from the town of Tishbe in the region of Gilead in the early part of the 8th century, BCE. He’s referred to in bible study lingo as a “minor prophet” because he takes up so little space in the narrative; his resume is buried in a stack of two sequential books in the Old Testament, neither of which is even named after him. And yet, his days were a relentless stream of singular accomplishments, rare acts of bravado and wit, miraculous moments of healing and provision, stunning seasons of prayer and silence, and divine revelations that poured out from his life in the form of living proof so profound no willing heart could remain untouched by his presence. His story is shared by Jews and Christians and Muslims alike, who recount how, throughout biblical history, every generation that followed would approach potential messiahs to ask breathlessly, “Are you Elijah?” Prophets came and went, saints and kings, rabbis and scholars, judges and warriors, wise and faithful men and women who fleshed out the story of God, but it would be none other than Elijah who would reappear on the mountain top at the Transfiguration, taking his rightful place beside the two greatest figures in the Judeo-Christian tradition: Moses and Jesus Christ.
Why him? Elijah was not a worldly man. He was not charming or gracious or multi-talented. We have no indication that he was especially attractive or athletic or intelligent. He did not play well with others or mix with the right crowd—in fact, if he’d needed a letter of recommendation to get a meeting with a king, he wouldn’t have known a single person to ask. Yet, so great was his impact on the world that today, 3000 years later, the Jewish faithful still hold an empty seat for him at the table in the hopes that he will return.
What did his parents do to raise a son like that? What special secrets did they know about nurturing kids who’d go on to be living legends? The evidence is scant. On the day he was born his mother and father named him Elijah—“my God is the LORD.” At first glance, this may seem perfectly ordinary—a nice Jewish name for a nice Jewish boy—but it was a fist-pumping act of pure and defiant faith. Israel was no longer a nation devoted solely to the God who had given them life. Seduced by Jezebel and her blinged-out pantheon, the children of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob had started to forget about the God who had brought them out of slavery, blessed them with fertile land and all the commandments they’d ever need to ensure they’d live long in it and prosper. They’d become dabblers. They wanted their big old-fashioned sea-parting God and their sexy, new palm-reading gods, too. In the house of Elijah there was only one God: Yahweh, the covenant name God spoke to Moses. Yahweh comes from the Hebrew word to be, and is translated as “I AM WHO I AM” or “I am the One who is” (Exodus 3:14). In Hebrew scripture it is written as YHWH—in English, LORD. Yahweh. Not one of many. Yahweh. Not interchangeable with whatever bright, shiny new gods come along. Yahweh. The ONE who IS. “This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.” (Exodus 3:15). This is what Elijah’s parents taught their son—not with flashcards, but with their very lives: Yahweh is the LORD. Pray. Listen. Obey.
In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn’t do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the feeble and the young—well, not even the young anymore—need to obey. Funny, because the root of the word obey is from the French verb meaning “to listen, or to give ear to.” It was never intended as a militant word, but one of hearing, of understanding. Of getting it. For a world obsessed with staying in constant communication, we aren’t really very good listeners. I don’t think a year goes by when I’m not faced with some perturbed adult shouting, “You’re not listening to me!!!” After I’ve checked myself carefully to make sure that this is not the case, that I am in fact listening, that I could repeat back both the spirit and the truth of what was conveyed, I realize I am looking at a prime example of what we have come to view as listening. Listening means I told you what I thought was the right thing to do and it is so obviously the superior solution that the very fact that you have not reversed your position and implemented mine would indicate that there is only one other explanation.
Come to think of it, we don’t have a problem with the concept of obeying at all, just as long as we get to play God. And let’s face it: we’re pretty sure we could do a better job.
In His absence, we have raised up a new “G” word: Gifts. We parents use it a lot to describe our extraordinary children. Athletic trainers and drama coaches and others who make their living off enriching the lives of short people have learned to toss the word around like confetti at parades in our young prodigies’ honor. In reverent hushes they inform us, “your child has a gift,” and we nod, buttons bursting in the silence.
“Hermione has a gift,” we share with our friends, humbly, incessantly. “They say she could go on to clog dance internationally.”
Although we’re usually overestimating the size and the scope and the magnitude of the ability, we’re not wrong. Our children do have gifts. Us, too. Mine include, in no particular order, writing, teaching, leadership, administration, shepherding, and prophecy. When I consider these gifts, I thank God for them. When I say that my children, Graham and Remy, have gifts, I know where they came from and I know who knows best what they’re for. I can’t hear God’s voice for my kids, but I can watch and listen and pray and adjust and try not to screw up whatever He has planned for their lives. And although I can’t make them listen to God, or even want to, I can plant enough seeds to swing the world in their favor. That said, as I navigate my day surrounded by the parents of gifted children (did you notice there aren’t any average kids anymore—only Gifted and Disposable), here’s where I get confused: if a person believes in gifts but not in God, then where—as they stand in daily admiration of their child’s emergent uniqueness, their heart swelling with pride and joy and, yes, gratitude —where, then, do they send the thank-you note?
Available on Amazon, Feb. 1 2014, Stewart Press
I’m not what you’d call a Harry Potter fanatic. It’s not a religious issue for me— I read the first book and loved it; I just didn’t feel a need to keep going. My husband Lon, on the other hand, was one of those who couldn’t get enough, pre-ordering each new release. Graham stopped after three or four of them. His sister, Remy, listened to one or two. But Lon, he read them all and even bought the entire series on audiotape for family road trips, a fact that I shared with a Benedictine monk friend of mine at lunch one day.
“Really?” Father Luke said, betraying a boyish enthusiasm. “Could I borrow them?” This is a man who is an MD, an M. Div., an ordained priest, and an Oxford-educated Ph.D. He spends his days driving back and forth between a monastery and a seminary where he teaches mystical theology, medical ethics, the wisdom of the early Desert Fathers, and lectio divina, the ancient prayer practice of listening for God’s word in daily scripture readings. “I could listen to them in the car while I’m driving,” he said, an image which gave me as much delight as a Christmas stocking.
There are three things from Harry Potter I’ll never forget. One was little closet that Harry was forced to live in under the stairs, and how his seclusion and rejection and utter lack of extra-curricular anything could somehow only lead to greatness. The second was the train that whisked them all off to Hogwarts. I love any story with a train. Secretly I’m hoping there’s a plan to let me make my final exit on some celestial version of the Orient Express. For all my talk of the joys of solitude and prayer closets, I’m still a sucker for a man in uniform saying, “Will there be anything else, Madame?”
But the idea that I loved most profoundly from Harry Potter is the concept of the Sorting Hat. What could be cooler than a supernatural body of wisdom far greater than our own—a force that knows who we are and what we can do and which House we need to be in for all of that to unfold—and just like that, it speaks the Word aloud and our one, true life begins? The moment we hear it we know that any other House would have been folly because there can be no greater life for us than stepping moment to moment along our own wholly-customized path. I think we love the Sorting Hat because each one of us is, to varying degrees, afraid that we’ll get it wrong, this thing; life. But most of all, I think we long for a Sorting Hat because despite all our bluster about charting our own course and seizing the day and being the masters of our own destiny, deep down we suspect that, much like our One True Love, there is actually such a thing as a Life we were Meant to Lead and, wish from the bottom of our drifting souls, that someone would tell us what it is.
Available on Amazon, Feb. 1, 2014, Stewart Press.
The story never changes. As it was in 885 BCE so it is today. So it was in 1873, when a bright, eager 16-year old Massachusetts girl set out to conquer the demands of her junior year. Her parents, both staunch advocates of higher education, expected their daughter to go to college—an important college—but that dream came to an abrupt end when Fannie Merrit Farmer had a severe and inexplicable stroke. Her prime young adult years were spent instead confined to a bed where she could do little more than reflect on her daily readings and prayers. Her physical healing was incomplete, but her strength and her spirit and her will to move on with her life returned in full measure and, as it did, she began to cook. Before long, the Farmer family boarding house had earned a reputation throughout New England for its delicious fare. At the age of 30, Fannie enrolled in the Boston Cooking School where she developed her gifts even further. She became the dean of the Boston Cooking School and later opened an institute of her own, Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, where she not only taught and created recipes, but wrote papers on nutrition, sanitation, diet, cooking techniques, household management, and the specific dietary and nutritional needs of convalescents, subjects she was invited to lecture about at the Harvard Medical School. Her greatest legacy, however—one that still impacts every person who picks up a recipe today—is in the area of measurement. It was Fannie Farmer who first recognized that the use of haphazard measuring tools—a teacup or a soup spoon or a few fat fingers—led to less than optimal and sometimes disastrous results. If we wanted to control the outcome of a fine fig pudding, we needed to know the difference between a heaping and level teaspoon, and what constituted a teaspoon in the first place.
For as long as we have recorded history, men and women have sought to bring order and control to the materials of their day through measurement. Ivory yardsticks have been found among the 5000-year old ruins of the Indus Valley civilization. The Ark and the Tabernacle were built to God’s specifications in cubits and cords. The Ancient Greeks and Egyptians joined best practices to form a reliable method of weights and measures. Time was contained by Julius Caesar, who helped create the first solar calendar, and then by a string of Europeans who developed, 1100 years later, the hourglass and the town clock. But that’s ancient history. We now live in era where we have total control of our physical realm (well, except for the occasional “Act of God”). We’ve moved on to measuring the realm of the mind and behavior and the technology that serve them. We have sexy, codified assessments for everything: intelligence, aptitude, risk, odds, and the ever-critical return on investment—or, as it’s more commonly referred to, ROI. Still, when it comes to understanding the measure of a life—a life well lived, a life of value, a wonderful life, even—statistics are about as useful as a good footnote.
According to the beloved holiday movie of the same name, a wonderful life is one in which you don’t get your heart’s desire, your dreams are thwarted, you are repeatedly on the brink of financial ruin, and none of it adds up to the life you envisioned. But step back from that ledge my friend and you’ll see that the role you’ve played has been a blessing to many people and that the universe is infinitely better for you being—well, you. In the season of love and forgiveness, when even rational souls are inclined to light a candle or look longingly at the night sky, we are granted a momentary reprieve from our fact-loving selves; we put down our armor and unclench our fists. No, our lives are not perfect, but we have a warm room to watch a movie in and leftover pie in the fridge and children who probably won’t make valedictorian but who nonetheless make us smile and give us hope and sometimes even rub our feet if we ask them nicely. Despite all our shortcomings, life is good and we can almost imagine, as the credits role, having the courage to believe in an angel who can point out how misguided we get with our grandiose ideas sometimes. But then vacation ends and—faster than you can say weighted GPA—we pack up our DVDs and our wishful thinking and get back to the business of earning and striving and pushing and forging exceptional kids out of the chaos of our overscheduled days. This is 21st century America, after all. Not even our children have time for fairy tales.
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Available on Amazon, Feb. 1, 2014, Stewart Press.
Available on Amazon, Feb. 1, 2014, Stewart Press.
Heather Choate Davis