Dear Parents,

Dear parents,

A few years back, as I was planning  orientation for our High School Youth group, I found myself trying to figure out how to address an issue we’d experienced the year prior, where many of our upper class students (Juniors and Seniors) has dropped out of church.

It was an unexpected departure of a large portion of the group, and it had been disruptive, as you might imagine, for a number of reasons, and it was complicated in ways that I don’t need to dig into here, but one interesting thing I had discovered as the year had played out, was that many of the parents of those youth were also dismayed at the choice their children were making. In a variety of interactions over the year, I found myself in conversations with these parents, and repeatedly, heard them say something along the lines of:

“I’m really disappointed, but I had told X that after Coming of Age ended, they could choose if they wanted to continue attending church. I wish they’d made a different choice.”

Every time I encountered a variation of this message, I found myself feeling increasingly curious as to what this meant in relation to our congregation, the RE program, and Unitarian Universalism.  I wondered if there was a lesson in what I was hearing from these parents. 

As a parent of a teenager, I understood that parenting through adolescence requires us to walk a confusing line between asserting family expectations and values while granting new autonomy and independence. We are preparing our children for the transition they will soon be making into adulthood. Parents are regularly observing the day to day of their teenaged child and determining whether or not to get involved- whether to enforce an expectation, follow up on a task to see if it’s been done, or help our teens out of a mess they’ve made. Sometimes multiple times a day, we are called to evaluate and determine a path, and often times when we make a choice to step in or speak up we are met with resistance. It is mentally exhausting work.

Essentially, we are looking for things we can cut loose, new privileges and responsibilities, and hoping that we choose the right things and the right time. Perhaps this means we stop checking their school grades and following up on missing assignments with them. Perhaps we stop helping them remember sports schedules, or suggesting strategies for managing their time. Some parents choose to let go of monitoring bed time, or ‘screen’ time. Our teens may now find themselves responsible for their own laundry, a job out of the home, even car insurance or gas money. Some of us stop requiring presence at family meals, or family vacations, and some of us tell them they can make their own choice about church.

None of those decisions are necessarily wrong. Not even the church one. This is what I found myself sharing with the parents of our high school youth group at orientation that evening a few years back. And I have had variations of this talk with many groups of parents since. It is a part of our coming of age orientation in 8th grade, and we return to it in the high school years.

As I listed off that not-at-all-exhaustive list above, of things we might renegotiate as our children move through adolescence, you might have heard things you would also have passed off to your own teen, and you may have heard other things you would never have let go. Every family is different, for a million reasons, and every family has to make their own decisions about how to navigate this beautiful, difficult, imperfect journey of raising children to be adults.

But.

Do not forget that your answers to all of those questions and so many others, are deeply tied to your values. And the choices you make around which expectations you continue to require of your teen, as well as the way that you frame those things you are passing off to them, it all communicates your values to your teenage child, and they are listening.

So, if it is important to you that your teenager is a part of their church community, then you may want to be more nuanced about how you give them autonomy in that arena. It is not all or nothing, I am not suggesting that you go to the mat and force them to come to youth group if they don’t want to do so, but be thoughtful, and don’t underestimate your influence.

Perhaps, instead of telling your child they can decide if they want to be a part of church, you might say, they can decide how they would like to be involved in church; That church is an important part of your family, but if they don’t want to participate in youth group, they can choose to come to service on Sunday mornings instead, or to volunteer in the nursery. In my family, I have given my son 3 Sundays a year (not counting the occasional school event conflict) where he can choose to opt out on youth group. This allows him to choose to prioritize a concert or other social event on occasion but he knows to choose carefully.  That works for us, but as I said before, every family is different, raising kids is a tricky, imperfect process, and if I’m doing my job right, this talk is helping you feel empowered not making you feel like you’re missing the mark.

The first time I shared these thoughts with a group of parents was an awakening for me as well, because I realized as these words came to me, and as I saw my fellow parents relax into the message I was sharing with them, that this was another way that we learn from each other. My insight grew directly from deep sharing moments with multiple parents- from a relationship of trust and respect we shared with one another- and through that bond, and those conversations, I found the thread of something that can help buoy families still rising through our faith. It isn’t about finding one path and setting everyone upon it, it is about seeing patterns, and helping others anticipate them. Parents are the primary religious educators for their children, but none of us always feel confident in that role, and so we lean on one another, encourage one another, learn from each other, and we move forward together.

Farm and Country - (my TEDx talk)

[The following is the written piece I presented at TEDxPiscataquaRiver this past September. You can watch the actual talk Here.]

In April of 2016, a woman visited my family’s farm in NY where we teach people about the 40 years we have spent homesteading on our 16 acre farm- raising much of our own meat and vegetables. During a tour my mother led, they met Minnie, our Cow and in response to a question from the group about the cow’s age and how long she would live on our farm, my mother explained that Minnie was being raised for beef. The following day, this same woman called the farm wanting to buy the cow. She spoke with my dad, and explained that she was not, herself, a vegetarian, and did not have a problem with meat consumption per se, but felt that because our farm allowed people to visit our animals, we shouldn’t then be able use them for food. She explained that she wanted to buy the cow so it could be moved to a sanctuary where it could live out it’s life, and suggested that we might instead go to whole foods to buy our meat, like everyone else.

And when she was told, NO. That the cow was not for sale, this woman became angry.

She was not interested in understanding that living on a small farm was a lifestyle choice for my family. That raising an animal for meat and knowing that the animal was treated with kindness and fed healthy food was intentional and not at all the same as buying meat at whole foods. She did not understand the precedent that would be set if we were to comply to her request, and, perhaps most importantly, she did not feel we were entitled to say no to her.

The phone call that day did not end well. The woman eventually hung up, but first she ominously declared that she would find a way to save this cow.

As I spoke to my parents on that Monday from here in NH, and listened to them retell the events of the weekend, I got out my laptop to start looking on line. My stomach sank. In a period of less than 48 hours a facebook group titled: Save Minnie the Cow had been created, the local news channel had been contacted and my parents had agreed to an interview. The avalanche of viral media was in motion.

Over the course of two weeks, an unbelievable and unpredictable viral attack unfolded. I don’t need to share all the details with you, as I’m sure you’ve watched this new reality unfold in many contexts, and the script is usually very similar: 

An issue is identified as being above dispute, and a call to arms is declared. The sides: ‘Us vs. Them’ are established.

People far and wide become engaged as the news media latches on to the story

On each side of the issue participants lose sight of the humanity in the people with whom they are now in opposition- eliminating any need to see the other’s point of view, to try to understand the other’s experience, or even to agree to disagree.

Sounds familiar, right?

In a matter of days someone had created a change.org petition to Save Minnie the Cow. Quickly to follow, another person (this one on “our” team (I never found out who it was) had created a counter petition titled ‘Save Benner’s Farm’.

No matter that we did not need saving

No matter that this was a non-issue. We had every right to make the choice that we were making.

On the farm, baby lambs were being born, school classes were visiting, seedlings were sprouting in the greenhouse. The rhythm of the life my family chose continued, almost without pause, but, the fear of what was happening online was very real. The incessant phone calls to my parent’s house, and threats. The seemingly non-negotiable anger of the people coming at us, was terrifying.

From the moment I started monitoring this frenzy, I experienced an intense mix of adrenaline and fear for my family and the farm. It was all happening so fast, and few participants on either side seemed to take pause before throwing more fuel on the fire.

There is great wisdom in ignoring a lot that happens on social media.

However, it became quickly apparent that April, that if we did not use our own voice, people who felt protective of us would speak for us, in a way that often made things worse.  So I settled in and tried to keep claim of our message. If for no other reason, than to assure those who were rising to our defense that we had things under control, and that they could get back to their own lives.

I wrote a short statement clarifying what had happened which I posted on the protest page that had been set up. In my post, I identified who I was and I tried to avoid sounding defensive. I also agreed to remain online for about half an hour should anyone have further questions, and I listened to the comments that came streaming back to me, sorting through the hateful, angry retorts, and lifting up any response that sounded half-way rational by replying with sincerity and an interest to come to a mutual understanding. My message was simple: ‘we respect alternate perspectives, but we have a right to our choice.’ I wanted the people who were still to come to this protest page to hear that message, and so I planted it there. I placed similar statements on both of the change.org sites, and pasted it in response to the nasty reviews that were popping up on Yelp, and on our business page.

My clarity during all of this came from an understanding that has been growing in me, about how the culture we live in operates. I could see in this bizarre conflict the dangerous outcome that emerges from us living lives in isolation of other kinds of experiences, which compels us to expect agreement.

In this story, there is a visible disconnect that stems from people’s lives having become so far removed from the source of their food, that they are unable to relate to the realities of farming. The fact that most of the 4 million people living on Long Island have no direct experience with animal husbandry has quite literally made my family’s lifestyle a museum of sorts- a window into something that most do not know first hand.

Our willingness to vilify that which we don’t understand seems to have become dangerously common--in part because we are not challenged to navigate diverse opinions, cultures, and experiences in our day-to-day interactions. Many of us live in bubbles surrounded by people so much like ourselves that we can hardly imagine it could be any different. Online, that is perhaps even more true, as we get to friend and unfriend voices based on our comfort with them. We read a headline and come to a conclusion about what we think in a matter of seconds, and then we pass judgement with a thumbs up or down. We take intensely complicated issues, and we let them be simplified to that value of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, according to the team we have chosen, rarely giving any more thought to the details that have been washed away in the process.

 Communities today are isolated from one another across socioeconomic lines and across political lines. We find the means to buy into the best school districts, or we are shut out. Decades of discriminatory housing policies have resulted in whole communities that are almost entirely white folks, and other neighborhoods that are almost solely communities of color.

The story of Minnie the cow gives us a way in to examine the danger that emerges from living in isolation from one another. During the two week attack, we received messages from people as far away as Australia- Farmers all over the world, sending us encouraging notes, asking us to stay strong, because they have experienced similar attacks on their businesses, on their lifestyles. At the protest that was held on the street in front of our house on our opening day, the original cow activists found themselves sparring with PETA activists who had joined in, but disagreed on the reasons for why the cow should be saved. Across the street, a counter protest was populated mostly by a group who called themselves “bikers for Trump”, these guys had determined that this protest was clearly the work of liberals and they were there to stand up for the farmers. (I chose not to mention that my whole family was a bunch of liberals ourselves- it seemed like it was best to leave that alone)

When the dust started to settle at my family’s farm last April, we emerged relatively unscathed. Our long time connections within the community, teaching children, sharing lessons about the beauty and grace of living off the land, proved to be a potent shield against a sudden emotional attack. If anything, the drama provided a massive advertising campaign, for the cost of some restless nights and some long hours in front of a computer screen.

It offered something else as well, a reminder-

to look more closely,

to withhold judgment,

and most importantly, to honor the value of different experiences and perspectives.

It is necessary if we want to begin to tackle some of the mess we’ve made on our beautiful planet. Coming across a different opinion should not signal us to draw our weapons, rather, let’s see it as an opportunity to reach out from our own bubble and into that of another.