Don Follis 2/8/2002 religion column:
"Young people make their own choices"
Ever since John Walker Lindh's
face showed up in Mazar-e-Sharif last
December, I have been thinking about the Proverb that states:
"Train
children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray."
For good reason, the young
man has been the object of endless speculation
for weeks. It's not every day that a child raised in affluent
Marin
County, Calif. -- the wealthy enclave north of San Francisco
-- gets
caught fighting someone else's war half way around the world.
Lots of ink
is being spilled over the question: "What drove the privileged 20-year-old
Walker to side with the Taliban?"
Back in early December when
Lindh first was discovered looking like Tom
Hanks' character in "Cast Away," Hoover Institute Fellow Shelby Steele
attempted to answer the question in a Dec. 10 Wall Street Journal op-ed
piece. He said the fault is less Walker's and more Marin
County's.
Indeed, Steele said a "certain
kind of cultural liberalism" in Marin
County teaches children the twin ideals of cultural relativism (all
cultures have an equal claim on truth and value and no culture has
special
access these things) and self-realization.
Steele's assertions, naturally,
raised the eyebrows of liberal, editorial
journalists who responded by saying that whatever caused John Walker
Lindh
to go astray, it is silly to saddle him with the baggage of postmodern
thinking.
Writer David Orland, in
a January 31st piece in the Webzine "Boundless",
took a different approach. He suggests we point the finger at
the young
man's parents.
The boy was named after John Lennon, and he attended a private alternative
high school, where his parents encouraged him to "choose his own spiritual
path."
He read Malcolm X's autobiography
and in 1997 converted to Islam. But
Orland says something else happened in 1997. His father, Frank
Lindh,
separated from his mother -- she a recent convert to Buddhism -- and
moved
in with another man. When the parents split, John dropped his
father's
name for his mother's and became John Walker.
After his graduation, he
persuaded his parents to send him to Yemen so
that he could learn Arabic. From Yemen, it was off to an Islamic
school in
Pakistan. Last spring, he went off into the mountains, where
his parents
lost touch with him until his picture emerged in the international
press.
Frankly, some of that sounds
pretty weird to me. But does the fault for
the young man's choices rest with his parents? Anyone who has
reared
children, especially through the volatile teen years, realizes they
are
their own people. God has no grandchildren. Each person
has a free will.
Ultimately, people make their own choices.
The Amish understand this:
Their concept of rumschpringes allows
teen-agers the chance to sow their wild oats with the hope that they'll
return to the fold, join the church and fully embrace the Amish way
of life.
When I was touring an Amish
home near Arthur, I noticed a BMW racing
motorcycle parked behind a black buggy. "I hate that thing,"
the mother
said. "It belongs to my 19-year-old son. He is trying to
decide if he'll
stay with the Amish community and join the church."
Training children does not
mean making all the choices for them. That
hurts children in the long run. You cannot compartmentalize children.
There are no easy answers and no quick fixes. Each situation
involves a
wonderfully complicated child of God and his or her strangely complex
parents. Believe me, I've second-guessed my responses to
my children many
times.
Now that I'm in the midst
of the rearing-teens project, one of the great
mysteries of this grand enterprise is how some children who seem to
have no
chance of making it somehow make terrific choices, while others who
apparently have all the right opportunities make bad choices.
Fortunately, most young
people do safely negotiate through the teenage
years, leaving their parents with plenty of gray hair but breathing
easier.
John Walker Lindh's parents now say they are praying for him.
I certainly
can join them in that. I'll even suggest a simple little prayer
for all
parents of faith: "Help."
Indeed I do pray for the people my children choose for their friends.
And
I pray for the person my children will marry. I even have prayed
that my
children will get caught if they make bad choices.
If children come to know
God and love Him, parents will not have to watch
every step they take. Their children will remain on the right
path because
they have made the choice themselves.
Don Follis is an Urbana minister. Reprinted with permission from
the
Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, copyright 2002.