this post is about my grandma

My grandma is my hero. Only in the last few years have I realized that my grandparents are really people who have struggled and hurt and experienced life, and not just innocent, simple jollier versions of my mom who make cookies and play golf all day. For my nursing class we have to do a "Well Elder" project where we interview an elderly person and comment about the aging process and how our client has responded to it. So I'm interviewing Grandma Bunny (I don't really know why we call her that--but maybe you understand my disillusionment a little better now). Anyway, she has an amazing story.

My grandma and grandpa got engaged after a grand total of three weeks of knowing each other. My grandma was 18 and my grandpa was 30. At the time, my grandma was just starting to explore her faith in a Presbyterian church youth group. She was attending college at, Michigan State, and was very successful and diligent in her studies. After she got married though, her whole life changed and she began, in a way, to lose herself. She stopped going to school, and within two months of marriage became pregnant. My grandfather was Catholic and demanded that his children would be raised Catholic, so in order to keep the family unified and be respectful to her husband, she became Catholic and cut all ties with other parts of the church. She said she can still remember the priest explaining that she was expected to be submissive, and what that meant for her marriage. She needed to keep the house in order, be a supportive wife, and adhere by certain Catholic ways of doing things, including a kosher means of "birth control" resulting in the births of seven children over the years. Now, its not as if my grandma did not enjoy motherhood. In fact being able to hold and care for babies became a sense of emotional release for her. As she told me of her life though, she explained this sense of loss of identity that she lived without for 30 years. When she finally started to regain a sense of herself she started participating in Bible studies in a protestant church, taking classes at a community college, and thinking of herself as an individual.

I don't exactly know how to explain my admiration for my grandma without creating some sort of paradox, but I feel like life in general is better characterized paradox than logic (or maybe just mine). I think that her sacrifice was a noble thing. She was able to maintain a personal faith in God over the years, despite being forced into a Catholic manner of doing things*. She is a very strong person, I think, for being able to raise seven children (one of which has extensive mental and social disabilities). I think that if I ever get married and have a family and all that I would desire to have a similar selflessness. However, the fact that she had a loss of identity makes me question what it means to sacrifice and serve people; I don't think I want to live like that. There is a sense of dignity that my grandma was robbed of for 30 years and I think that is wrong. So my struggle is how do you balance your sense of identity and purpose while living out Jesus, in the language of Philippians 2, considering others and better than yourself and emptying yourself for them.

I think I actually have an answer to this one. My grandma may have been living it right. She was being Jesus for her family. Its not my grandma or her service who is at fault, but people's response to it. It was her society that was to blame, it was her family, it was the church that was in the wrong. The problem was not that my grandma was acting as Jesus would act, but that people treated her as they treated Jesus. I hope that we as Christians and disciples have at least learned how Jesus should have been treated. That when people lower themselves, they are to be raised in praise. When people sacrifice themselves to us, we in turn sacrifice ourselves to them. We submit to each other out of reverence for Christ. Too often we step on those who lower themselves, and we demand every last drop of those who empty themselves. Maybe more of our problems with the church and the brokenness that often characterizes it can be resolved not simply by people trying to act more like Jesus, but with people trying to treat people more like Jesus when they see him in others.

So, Jeff I think I'm beginning to understand the importance of giving each other identities.


*I get that the Catholic church is a dynamic thing sometimes influenced by cultural and societal forces apart from spiritual ones. I don't mean to attack Catholics or condemn them as if they are the only ones guilty of screwing with the word of God. I do think though that in general Catholic and Protestant faith is very different. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but either way, in my experience, its reality and even more so in the past.