COMMUNITY SENSE

A MOMENT OF GRACE

Mark R. Wenger

You don’t turn fifty without feeling the preciousness of time. That’s about how old I was when we moved back to the community where I attended high school and where my parents still live independent, active lives. Mom is eighty-four; since January 2007 she has started hanging out regularly at Curves. Dad is eighty-eight, running a bountiful vineyard and orchard. He finished the winter pruning ahead of schedule.

What makes me think I have any business talking about time, now that I’m around them more regularly? Not too much, I suppose, except for the fact that time is more than the accumulation of seconds, weeks, and years. Time is more than birthdays, calendars, and counting. "How do you measure a year?" asks the song in the Broadway musical "Rent." 525,600 minutes? In sunsets, midnights, cups of coffee, laughter, and strife. How do you measure a year in the life? How about love? Ah, yes, that’s the answer. Measured in love. Seasons of love.

I remember my Greek teacher many moons ago pointing out the distinction between "chronos" and "kairos." Chronos is clock time that never stops counting. "Ninety years without slumbering, tick-tock, tick-tock. His life seconds numbering, tick-tock, tick-tock." But kairos is time-concentrated. Kairos is time as opportunity; it’s the marriage proposal, the time of risk, the weighty moment when the universe stands still and quiet. You can hear a whisper.

Kairos. That’s the time with Mom and Dad that is precious to me now that I’m on the backside of fifty.

For example, Friday lunches with the two of them. I don’t remember exactly how the routine began. With an invitation or suggestion probably. Anyway, for the past year, one of us will phone the other on Thursday evening or Friday morning and check whether it suits. More often than not it does, and around 12:30 p.m. I drive over to their home about three miles away. We sit down over food to talk about family news, church politics, health, and whatnot.

Last week, however, was unusual. Mom phoned on Tuesday morning saying that it didn’t suit Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. Might it work for me drop in on short notice? "Sure," I said, "that’ll be terrific." I knew she’d rustle up some food a whole lot better than the brown bag lunch I’d stashed in the office refrigerator. I wasn’t disappointed.

But it wasn’t the food that turned this lunch into a kairos occasion. Somewhere in the course of the meandering conversation, Mom pulled out a book she’d just finished: Chameleon Days—An American Boyhood in Ethiopia (Mariner Books, 2006) by Tim Bascom. My sister had loaned the book to Mom. In a moving narrative Bascom writes about his memories of traveling to Ethiopia with missionary parents when he was just five years old. Within a week or two of landing in country, his older brother was dropped off at boarding school.

The following September Tim himself was delivered to boarding school for first grade. Stoic and strained, his parents drove away, the metal gate clanging behind. It would be Christmas before they’d see each other again.

"I began to cry," writes Tim. "I sobbed so hard my shoulders ached. I felt like something big and monstrous was bursting out of me, like I might explode into a thousand wet pieces."

Alarmed, his older brother Jonathan put his arm on Tim’s shoulder and told him it was going to be okay. "Really," he said. "It only lasts for a while."

My mother had finished the book the night before our Tuesday lunch. Bascom’s story had touched some deep memory, pain, and regret within: that of leaving her own young offspring—my brothers and sisters and me—at boarding school and driving away to the mission station many miles distant. Mom’s eyes filled with tears as she recounted closing the book and weeping about how this early separation may have scarred her progeny. Dad had sat down beside her. One by one they had named their eight children and narrated the trajectory of each life—as a measure of reassurance.

I sat across the table while Mom talked. I carry my own searing memories of boarding school, particularly third grade. My parents know that; I have a hunch that’s why Mom invited me over for lunch and told me about the book.

Time was slowing down, concentrating, the usual banter was gone. I revisited the trauma of third grade, the witch of a teacher who tore into me, the actual physical longing I bore to be at home with Mom and Dad rather than at boarding school.

I recalled the confusion I felt as a boy. My younger brother was being schooled at home at the time as a special arrangement; why, oh why, I pleaded and sobbed, couldn’t they do the same for me? Life had shut down for me that year. Nothing would ever be the same again. I looked at the world through dark sunglasses—all the contours of friendships, school, and play were tinted in gray. Looking back now, with the eyes of experience, I recognize all the symptoms of childhood clinical depression. I had no idea at the time what to call what I was feeling.

Over lunch I played back to Mom and Dad some of that wretched year. They had heard the story before, but memory was refreshed and feelings brought to the surface. I paused.

Dad spoke up quietly. "Mark," he said, "we would do it differently now. We would keep you at home and teach you there. We hope you can forgive us." Kairos.

I’ve not blamed my parents for sending me to boarding school as a youngster. It’s what virtually every missionary family with children did. Parents who home-schooled were considered eccentric, risking both their missions assignment and the well-being of their children. So, forgiveness didn’t seem right. There had been no malice or intentional mistreatment. And truth be told, my parents expended more effort and money than most to get us children home as often as possible.

Forgiveness didn’t quite seem to fit, but Dad’s words of acknowledgement—and wishing something had been different—were nonetheless balm for my soul. I thanked him. "That means a lot to hear you say that," I said. Then before too long I got up to go, needing to get some tasks off my desk at the office. But it had been quite a lunch, unexpectedly grace-filled. And I carried the book Chameleon Days with me to the car.

In less than forty-eight hours I’d read the book from cover to cover; time and again I was carried back to scenes of my childhood. Donkeys bouncing along under mountains of straw; boarding school adventures under the woodpile; climbing trees for escape; the spicy food of injera and wat; wild animals as pets; the sounds and smells of long ago. But somehow, as I devoured the book, I read it with more freedom and joy for having shared lunch with Mom and Dad on Tuesday. You don’t turn fifty without feeling the preciousness of time.

—Mark R. Wenger, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is Director of Pastoral Studies for Eastern Mennonite Seminary at Lancaster.