William A. Ritter
Nardin Park United Methodist Church, Farmington Hills, MI
Ruth 1:6-18
A couple of weeks ago, when I was cross-checking calendars with my running partner, Dick Cheatham, I reminded him that I would have to miss our next scheduled workout, given the trip that Kris and I were making to take Julie to Duke. This was not unfamiliar conversational terrain between Dick and myself. As good friends do, we had discussed both the facts of the move and the feelings surrounding the move. Which is, perhaps, what led Dick to remark, as a parting word:
I hope you do better than I did when Diane and I took Chrystal to Michigan State. I kissed her goodbye, turned my back, bit my lip, and cried all the way home. But since Chrystal’s dorm was in East Lansing and our home (at that time) was in Brighton, “all the way home” only represented 30 minutes of tears. If you cry all the way home from Duke, you’ll be red-eyed for 12 hours and become something of a public menace on the highways.
I am here to report that I did nothing of the kind. Kris and I took her … unloaded her … spent a couple of days with her … oriented her … kissed her goodbye … and drove away. In the immediate aftermath there were a couple of sniffles and some long, introspective silences. Then the two of us engaged in an extensive rehash of three very tightly-scheduled and emotionally-laden days. I don’t know everything Kris may have been thinking. But I was certain that I was doing well. That was Friday morning.
Much of Friday afternoon was spent driving through the residual rain squalls of Hurricane Andrew. It was tense driving … tough driving … white-knuckled, rigid-necked, through the mountains driving. Then (somewhere around Pittsburgh) when the heavens finally decided to stop weeping, I started. Which launched Kris. And for the next 30 minutes, there was little either of us could say that made it any easier, or any better. So we just held hands or touched each other’s leg, doing anything to make a connection, and (secondarily) to make it down the highway.
All in all, Julie couldn’t be happier with her choice. And we couldn’t be happier for her. After a Thursday filled with separate orientation activities for parents and freshmen, and after her first full night in the dorm, we picked her up for one final breakfast at our hotel. She was operating on four hours of sleep, having socialized with newly made friends until 3:00 in the morning. Still, she was vibrantly awake, bubbling over about her classes, her classmates, her room, and everything from the way the place looked to the way the place felt. “This is even better that I expected,” she pronounced. “This feels exactly like where I should be.”
Which makes it easy for us to be happy for her … and easier to leave her. A tone of work went into the making of this decision, and early confirmation of its rightness, however premature, felt good. May future pulse-takings be so healthy and feel so fine. It could have been so much worse, and then our sadness would have had a real “bite” to it.
As it was, a tear or two was as predictable as it was explainable. She is our last kid. She is a “neat” kid. And 700 miles is not an easily-negotiable distance for any kid. She has not only gone away, but she has gone a very long way away. Whatever else Duke may be, it is not a “commuter college” for people who live in Michigan.
As parents go, Kris and I may be an overly sentimental pair. Although I think not. More honest about our emotions, perhaps, but not more emotional. I think that such things really are “big deals” for a lot of you. And unless I miss my bet, a number of you are going to tell me so at the close of the hour.
In the orientation session for parents, we heard from three different speakers, with each speaker (strangely enough) zeroing in on the issue of “separation anxiety.” Not class schedules. Not dormitory regulations. Not grading procedures, health services or financial aid. But separation anxiety. “This is a major transition,” we were told. “It is hard for them. It is equally hard for you.” Such was the tone of the messages. And I thought to myself: “How perceptive. Howright on.” Because this was what we all were dealing with. Not with, “Where can my kid stash their bicycle?” or “How does my kid get a lock on her closet?” But: “How am I going to leave my kid here and go home … when I am not all that certain I am ready to leave my kid here or go home?” As to what the kids may have been thinking (listening to similar presentations elsewhere) heaven only knows. But given my ability to read crowds, it was clear that the people speaking to us were touching all the right buttons and hitting all the right nerves.
Not that they did it without humor. Separation anxiety can be pretty heavy stuff, unbroken by levity. One speaker told us that she knew why God created adolescence: “So that when our kids are ready to go to college, we are ready to have them go.” Other speakers listed some of the immediate “pluses” we would experience, especially if we were saying goodbye to the last one. Such pluses included no more MTV … fewer wet towels one the bathroom floor … the possibility of refrigerated leftovers actually being left over … and the sheer delight of hearing the phone ring and knowing that possibly, just possibly, it might be for you.
We were reminded that, as parents, we were still very much needed. We would get urgent phone calls of three distinct types.
• requests for sustenance: “I have overspent my Duke account and have less than $20 in my checkbook.”
• requests for encouragement: “I have never had less than a “B” in my life, and now I haven’t gotten above a “C” on my last three papers.”
• requests for advice: “I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about washing underwear. Tell me again, where is it you’re supposed to insert the quarter?”
Therefore, Kris and I have little doubt we will be needed, valued, and that our parenting chores are far from finished. Yet, there was also a little doubt in either of our minds that the single most important parenting chore we could do at that particular moment was to go home … without trying to fix, correct, amend, or teach one more thing. “Just go home,” making as small a deal out of the whole matter as possible. Not because going home is really a “small deal.” But because going home is such an incredibly “big deal” that it is (for many) almost too hot to handle and too close to touch.
Julie is one of those rare kids who talks about everything and anything with us. Yet even she said: “We’ll be okay, as long as nobody tries to make any speeches.” So none of us did. Kris spent the final pre-departure days helping Julie assemble her stuff. And at Julie’s request, I took her to the Whitney for a final daddy-daughter lunch. (Seven years earlier, Bill’s choice had been the London Chop House. Whatever else my kids may lack, you can’t say they don’t have class.) But there were no speeches. Had she asked me, I simply would have said: “Julie, whether by planning, providence or accident, you seem to have stumbled on an amazingly successful formula for living your life. Don’t abandon it now.” And I believe she’s heard that … and that she knows that … without my needing to put it in a final speech at all.
“There is a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.” So said a wise old biblical sage writing under the pen name “Ecclesiastes.” If you stretch that a bit, I suppose it also means that for every time of holding close, there is also a time of letting go. Among the many things love does, love releases. Virtually every Sunday morning, given the location of my office, I see a parent struggling with what it means to walk away from a screaming, clinging toddler in the nursery. And while I know how hard that is, I also know how necessary that is. I also know that the same scene sometimes repeats itself at the other end of life’s spectrum. I see love occasionally expressed in the words of one family member saying to another: “I am going to miss you terribly, but it’s ok for you to go.” Lots of people simply are unable to die until they’ve been given permission. Love releases.
Earlier, I read to you a portion of Ruth’s story. It’s one part of the Old Testament that most people can manage, which is probably why it’s one part of the Old Testament that most people love. But when you look at it, it is just as much Naomi’s story as it is Ruth’s. Naomi is a Jew, married to Elimelech, another Jew. They have a pair of sons. The sons grow up. A famine hits the land. Naomi, her husband, and her two sons move to Moab … a foreign country. Moab has food. Moab has jobs. Moab also has women. Each of Naomi’s sons marry Moabite women. One marries Orpah (that’s Orpha, not Oprah). The other marries Ruth. Then things take a turn for the worse. Naomi’s husband dies, followed by the death of each of her sons. Just like that. All the men are gone. Naomi is left with a pair of foreign women for daughter-in-laws. Naomi decides to go back to Israel. But realizing that Israel is no place for a pair of young, attractive, non-Jewish widows, Naomi tells them: “Split. Make your home here. Stay with your own people. I’m going home. To be with my people. Your chances of finding husbands in Israel are two … slim and none. You’ll do better here. People know you here. People worship like you do, here. Even if I get married … get pregnant … and get two more sons … by the time they’ll be grown up, you’ll have callouses on your hope chests.”
To which Orpah says: “Makes sense to me. Here, let me kiss you good-bye, mommy-in-law dearest.” And to which Ruth says (while clinging fervently to Naomi):
Entreat me not to leave thee,
For whether thou goest, I will go.
Whither thou lodgest, I will lodge,
They people will be my people,
And thy God, my God.
Now everybody loves those lines, especially when they read them (as I just did) from the stilted prose of the King James Version of the Bible. And everybody, upon reading them, looks at Ruth and says: “What devotion. What love. What fidelity to Naomi. And she’s not even her daughter, save by marriage.”
But Naomi, however grateful she may be for Ruth’s companionship, realizes that this is not as it should be. Ruth should have a life of her own … lived on her own … in response to commitments made on her own. So, in the part of the story nobody ever quotes, Naomi orchestrates a scenario wherein Ruth meets a rich, eligible, Jewish bachelor, whereupon she marries him and bears his children (one of whom becomes the grandfather of King David). In an even less quoted part of the story, Naomi teaches Ruth some tactics in the gentle art of flirtation (in reality, the gentle art of seduction) so as to insure that Ruth will get her man.
It appears that the Jews have preserved this story for a whole host of reasons, including whatever light is may have shed on the changing practice of interfaith marriage. After all, if King David’s great-grandmother was a foreigner … and a seducer of David’s great-grandfather (who, incidentally, was half in the bag when Ruth first came to lie at his feet) … it shoots a pretty big hole in the notion of ethnic superiority and racial purity on the part of the Jewish people. Right?
But not to be lost is this elemental understanding of Naomi, who (in effect) says to Ruth: “As much as I love you … and as much as I need you … you need to be on with your life. And if you will not take that step on your own (however admirable your devotion may be), I will have to take it for you.” Which is what Naomi did (perhaps to her own short-term detriment, but to the long-term betterment of Ruth).
Love lets go. And it sometimes falls to those of us who are older to instigate the release. Not to be overlooked (in life) is the subtle ministry of the gentle nudge.
I am sure this was painful for Naomi, not solely because of what she may have feared for Ruth, but because of what she may have feared for herself. Separation anxiety is always harder on the one doing the releasing than it is on the one being released. Which is another new truth I discovered over the course of the last five days. When Naomi said to Ruth, “Don’t look to my womb to produce you a new husband,” what she was really saying was:
Time marches on.
Human beings get older.
I’m getting older.
And some things will never be the same again.
I know the feeling. During the last few of my child-raising years, people have said to me: “Treasure these days with your kids. They go by so incredibly quickly.” I always listened and nodded, figuring that what they meant was that kids get old before you know it. It never occurred to me that what they meant was that I would get old before I knew it. A few minutes before we left home last Tuesday (practical parent that I am), I decided to walk through the entire house in search of potentially forgotten items. In the basement, I found a portable electric fan. Necessity! In the basement, I also found a child’s table and chairs along with several Barbies. No longer necessities! I remembered buying every last one of them and felt suddenly sad. It also took me a few minutes to come up from the basement.
I am going to be all right. We are going to be all right. I say “we” because that’s where it rests now … with the two of us. Which may be why Kris and I felt a need to touch each other a lot on the way home (especially during that period where we couldn’t say anything without breaking into tears). A line from an old Sonny Bono song kept creeping into consciousness … “Just you and me, babe.”
And Julie will be all right, too … although I can’t ensure, determine or guarantee that. Would that I could. Would that I could have done it for Bill. But I can’t now. And couldn’t then.
So all I can do is trust. Trust who she is … what Kris has done … what I have done … what others have done … and what God will do. But even trust has its risks.
I prayed to God and said: “Don’t let her fall, God. Don’t let her fail. Don’t let her meet up with anyone who’ll abuse her, hurt her, or disappoint her. She is my little girl. Do you know what it feels like to be a father?”
And God, who still occasionally speaks with a hint of a Jewish accent, said: “Do I know vat it means to be a father? You got a minute? Sit down … let me tell you about my
boy …”
