VII. Seven Mini Meditations For Your Lenten Reflection: What Should Christians Be Up To Today?
Welcome to this series of seven short meditations for the seven weeks of Lent – these Mini Meditations. This represents a departure from my practice of several years now: issuing occasional blogs. I plan, the Lord willing, to return to that practice after Easter.
Here, in a Lenten mode, I’m attempting to do something orderly – and something that anyone can handle, however busy you may perceive yourself to be this Lenten season. A once-a-week reading!
Thank you for tuning in – and I look forward to hearing from you in response, should the Spirit so move you. If things work out as I hope they will, you will be receiving one of these Mini Meditations each week in Lent.
—Paul Santmire, Ash Wednesday, 2025
I. Coming to Terms with an Era of Apparent Church Decline
II. Understanding Our Post-Christian World
III. Attending to the Signs of These Times
IV. Spiritual Discernment or Looking Before You Leap
V. Reclaiming the Child Within
VI. Revisiting Your Local Church
VII. Growing Up Into Christ: But Really Growing Up
Mini Meditation Seven: Growing Up Into Christ: But Really Growing Up
What does it mean really to grow up? My wife, Laurel, and I were part of a small tour group a few years ago, mostly composed of academic types. As our small vessel made its way through some canals in Holland, I had more than a few moments along the way to reflect about what it really means really to grow up, I being the oldest member of that group, and typically the person way at the end of the line, who was slowly, O so slowly, trying to keep up with everyone else. Was I really a grown-up, or was I just – old?
Growing up really isn’t chronology, is it? So, taking my cue from the great psychologist of the last century, Eric Erikson, I decided, while I trudged along at the end of the line in Holland, that I had been right all along (!). Growing up is going through stages, none of which, hopefully, you ever leave behind. Really growing up into Christ, more particularly, is at once to be like a child, an adolescent, and an adult. I want to sketch that threefold vision of our life in Christ now.
I’ve already discussed the first moment, childlikeness, but I want to touch on it here again, before I try to identify what I consider to be Christian adolescence and Christian adulthood.
Consider Christian childlikeness to be the priestly moment of the Church’s life. Here the emphasis is liturgical festivity or lament. Children really know how to be joyful or how to be sad. Consider the joy, in particular. Forgive me, but these days in my retired existence, as I sit expectantly in the pew along with all the other sheep, I applaud after the sermons (my wife always looks the other way). Everybody in my Church (including my wife), applauds after the pomp and circumstance of postludes. Let’s hear it for clapping your hands, all ye children of God.
Consider Christian adolescence to be the prophetic moment of the Church’s life. Here the faithful are driven by the Spirit to address the injustices of this world and, as the Spirit gives them occasion, to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ to every creature (preaching to the birds, a la St. Francis? – of course): to hear and respond to the groaning of the whole creation, insofar as circumstances permit. A case in point: I’ve written elsewhere about marching with a tiny band of Lutherans, along with 310,000 others, in the Peoples’ Climate March in New York City in 2014. What a holy, prophetic blast!
Finally, consider Christian adulthood to be the pastoral moment of the Church’s life, attending especially to the individual sheep lost in the wilderness and developing I-Thou relations both inside and outside of the Body of Christ. Here the emphasis is conversation, and its characteristic features are wisdom, sensitivity, discipline, and consolation.
Taken together, then, when the Church is genuinely faithful to its calling to be the Body of Christ in this world, each one of us will live, in variegated ways, like a child, like an adolescent, and like an adult. Spiritually speaking, this is really how to grow up.