Kate Bowler’s Lenten meditation for today triggered a memory for me from nearly 70 years ago. In her book, “Have a Beautiful Terrible Day,” Kate’s meditation for Monday of Lent Week Four is titled “letting yourself be known.” She paints a wonderful contrast between fearing a God who judges our faults and one who knows all about us and loves us as we are.
She closes with this reflection prompt: “We can have a very Elf on the Shelf view of God at times. THERE IS GOD WATCHING YOU. Shudder. What image of God seeing you and caring about you could you find comforting?”
A long-forgotten memory immediately popped into my head as soon as I read those words. When I was young my maternal grandparents lived on a farm that had no indoor plumbing. When I visited them I thought nothing of using their two-holer outhouse. It was just the way they lived.
I especially enjoyed visiting there because the 7th of my grandparents’ children, Gary, aka Butch, was only 4 years older than I. He was more like a cousin than an uncle to me and just enough older that I admired his greater knowledge of worldly things. Farm kids have a much earlier and healthier grasp of how life and death work than we city slickers did.
So here’s my memory. One day uncle Butch and I were using the outhouse. I’m guessing I was 9 or 10 and he was 13 or 14 at the time. We were at that curious age where sex was often a topic of conversation. I don’t remember any details of our conversation, much of which I later learned was misinformed. But I have a vivid memory that for some reason we decided to take off all our clothes and run around the back yard naked.
Had we done that at my house I think my parents would have had a heart attack. But my dear grandmother who had raised five boys and two girls simply watched us from the kitchen window and laughed.
Isn’t that a great image of a God from whom nothing is hidden, who sees us in all our human frailty and fallibility and laughs
Peacefully Harsh 