What we want to teach
is not easy answers

My daughter was 2 when she saw me being arrested, on the Huntley-Brinkley coast-to-coast television newscast. It was 1967, in an anti-war demonstration. A few months later, a police officer came to our home after my parked car had been sideswiped. She became very upset, thinking that her father was to be arrested again.

I want my children to have a deep distrust of government. But I want them to believe that the system can, and should be made to, be more just, and that they can and should have a part in that.

I want my kids to be comfortable in their bodies, to be free and open about their sexuality. But I want them to understand the risks and consequences and to be responsible in their behavior toward others. Date rape, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and sexual predators are real.

I want them to be generous and compassionate, but I don't want them to be used nor to contribute to unhealthy dependencies.

I want them to know pop culture and to know it for the distortion of the human spirit it too often is, to know it as one big marketing tool and not be taken in by it.

I want them to be knowledgeable and comfortable with modern technology but to use it as a tool, not to be used by it.

I want them to be accepting and tolerant of other religious traditions, but I want them to see through the uses of religion to coerce, manipulate and brainwash.

I want them to be open to new ideas and points of view, but I want them to be able to think critically about ideas and claims.

I want them to be ethical and responsible, but I do not want them to be bound by the opinions of others or by the too-often mindless middle-class morality.

This is not the end of my list! But I am very much aware that I want these things for my children because they are the issues I wrestle with daily. And at the end of my list -- which goes on for many more pages -- I want them to be themselves, growing out of their own roots, not copies or clones of me.

I want them to be in and of this incredible world they have been born into, and at the same time I want them to transcend it.

I want them to embrace the risk-taking of youth but always to stay safe.

I want them to profit from the wisdom of the species and my meager 66 years but not let it confine the horizons of their imagination.

These are not the issues of parenting only. Whether you have children or not, plan to have children or not, or have finished with raising children or not, these issues have more to do with our parenting of ourselves than the parenting of our children.

The core of the religious life, life lived in full consciousness and responsibility, is not finally about correct beliefs or even ethical rules. It is rather about the daily wrestling with the inevitable ambiguities of real decision-making. It is neither ideological nor moralistic and brooks no easy answers.

As we wrestle with the "both/and" messages that we try to give ourselves and our kids, we need the wisdom to find creative ways to respond to those contradictions and ambiguities. Sometimes it will be within the system. Sometimes it will be to stand against the system. Sometimes it will be to find ways around the system. But we respond in full consciousness of the realities and the ambiguities, the risks and the consequences.

And sometimes we do as that old '60s poster had it. It showed a statue of the seated Buddha, and it said, "Don't just do something, sit there!"