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More from Fidelia:
Today Fidelia’s Sisters celebrates spring with some flower photography by Katherine Willis Pershey.
Katherine writes:
I am a beginning photographer. After inheriting a good camera from my sister a few years ago, I now have, in my infant daughter, a pressing inspiration to learn how to use it. In addition to taking hundreds of photos of Juliette, I’m practicing learning the alchemy of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO at the South Coast Botanic Gardens. Having grown up in the Midwest, the cactus gardens and butterfly amaryllis of Southern California have yet to lose their exotic, unfamiliar beauty.
I am not yet a mother, but my neighbors are. Through immersion in their worlds, I have come to learn of the vital importance of the binkie, the swing, the vibrating chair, the Miracle Blanket, Blabla knit dolls, and of course the Boppy. I already loved the decorating and lifestyle website Apartment Therapy, but because of all the babies surrounding me, I found myself trolling on their nursery pages, www.ohdeedoh.com, more and more.
I did not realize how far my immersion had gone, though, until one day we were on a walk and ran into another neighbor with a baby in a stroller. This stroller was gorgeous: red and black, lean and swift. The stroller also looked familiar to me. I found myself asking this neighbor, “Is that a Phil and Ted stroller ?!?” It was. My trolling on www.ohdeedoh.com had led to met to Phil and Ted’s website, where I had schooled myself on the wide variety of strollers and other infant products they sell. My friends, if I, newly married and childless, can be so affected by infant marketing that I can identify the new hip stroller on sight, how is such marketing affecting us as a country?
I ordered Pamela Paul’s Parenting, Inc. to find out.
Ms. Paul, author of Pornified and The Starter Marriage, examines every level of marketing. She describes how companies such as Bugaboo realized they could get away with charging $800 for a stroller, when the previous threshold had been $300. She examines how parents have been fleeced into believing their babies need to take classes, anything from sign language to music, so that they will be “smart enough.” We learn that there are zero studies showing that videos marketed to babies are educational-in fact, pediatricians recommend that babies watch no television until they are two years old. We also learn that toys with lots of bells and whistles, again marketed as making your baby smarter, actually inhibit the capacity of children to learn how to interact with their environment and be creative. Read more
Again this year, I am writing a liturgy for confirmation with confusion, questioning, and consternation. I love the kids who are being confirmed. I love the community and camaraderie they have developed in a year of meeting, retreating, questioning, wondering, discovering, and constructing. I love how they articulate their faith…not always complete, not always theologically “correct”, but genuinely, from a deep place in their hearts, a place where God lives and the Spirit moves.
And yet when I gather with other young clergy, the confirmation issue always seems to come up. It’s always been “done,” say our congregations, our head pastors, and our older colleagues. Most of us seem to feel like the way it’s done doesn’t really fit anymore. We don’t know what to do with it.
I have quibbles with this whole process. There are so many pitfalls: the mistaken (to my theological thinking) idea that these young people are “joining” the church. Weren’t they already here? Isn’t that an odd thing to say when we baptized them in infancy? The way it turns into religious graduation is equally dangerous/treacherous. Does that really encourage the idea of constant growth in the Christian faith? What about the emphasis on parents, rather than on the whole congregation? Doesn’t that let everyone off the hook in the church’s responsibility to take on the Christian nurture of all its members? What about the idea that only the clergy can run the confirmation program? Confirmation isn’t about joining the clergy. It’s about joining the church.
Maybe my own confirmation is too close for comfort. I think back to my own class, and I know that the faith we all confirmed we had has been firmer and more solid for some than for others. Many of us disappeared after this church “graduation,” opted out, and never came back. Some hit roadblocks and bumps that derailed the journey. I know some of them will come back some day. I know that God’s grace is big enough for us all. But were we really ready? Read more
