Amanda McMillen, “The Captain of Your Soul”
In our country, we live under the strong, seductive myth of the self-made man - and like most myths, there’s some truth to it - the American dream of pulling oneself up from their bootstraps, going from rags to riches, is close to our hearts. My own extended family finds a great sense of identity in this story - my great-grandparents brought their young children to the US from Greece in the 50’s to escape war. My Papou worked as a tailor in DC for many years, he worked hard. He found opportunities and he jumped on them for the sake of his family.
But of course, with this story and others like it, we know that no one lives in a vacuum of self-creation - for my Greek ancestors, having family already in the US helped make their move happen, for example. It wasn’t all only on the shoulders of my great-grandfather. It makes me think of the joke in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” which we love in my family, where the yiayia says - “the husband may be the head of this family, but the wife is the neck. She turns the head any way she wants”.
But in all seriousness, my great-grandfather was not his own, or his family's own, creator and preserver. Like all families, God was involved in our origin story.
In a recent article from the Atlantic called “Enough with the Mom Guilt Already”, the author talks about this myth of parents as creators and preservers of their children’s well-being. She describes what she calls “therapy culture” - “the growing landscape of Instagram posts, self-care products, and self-improvement guides that encourage ongoing self-scrutiny and the pursuit of constant personal betterment” - also known as “optimization culture”. She expresses remorse at the ways that this culture of self-scrutiny leads to immense “mom-guilt” - the term for the gnawing underlying feeling that we could and should always be doing more for our children. The message, the author explains, is for all parents, mothers and fathers - and the message says that if “you do enough ‘work’ on yourself—regulate your nervous system, master emotional attunement, follow the rules of attachment parenting— you can safeguard your child’s psychological future.”
Talk about pressure! I mean, what an immense weight to bear. And let me be clear, I love therapy (I’ll shout that from rooftops if I have to), I am all for it. But the value of self-creation and self-preservation, of working on ourselves, of building our own future, is a strong one in our culture, not just in a kind of self-optimization, but also in the creation of our children and their futures. And it can be a heavy weight to bear. It brings to mind the famous line from William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus” - “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” - add on to that, I am the captain of my children’s souls, too.
Now of course, parents do have influence over their children. As a parent myself I’m kind of banking on the fact that I have at least some influence over Danny, otherwise why am I spending any time at all thinking about how to teach a toddler not to throw food across the room? But perhaps we are assuming more influence, more control, than is really appropriate. That’s not to say that trauma and deep wounds from childhood do not follow us later in life, because they do of course – but still I found this to be a word of real grace, not only to me as a parent who fears that I could mess every little thing up at any turn, but also a word of grace to my own parents, and the assumptions I make about how they were responsible for my destiny as a child.
In our Old Testament reading that we just heard from Jeremiah, we hear the story of Jeremiah’s call by God to become a prophet, and like all stories of a prophet’s call in the bible, Jeremiah argues with God. “I’m only a boy!” he says, “you definitely have the wrong guy”. But God insists that Jeremiah is the right person for the job - but not because of his impressive qualifications (he is only a boy after all) - rather, because God created him and God will preserve him. Who Jeremiah will be as a prophet is not in Jeremiah’s hands, but in God’s.
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” God says to Jeremiah. In other words, Jeremiah, you really don’t even know yourself the way I do. Your defense against why you’re the wrong person for this job doesn’t even have all the information. I knew you before you were even born. And not only that, God says, I will put my words in your mouth. You shall go to all whom I send you, and you shall speak the words I put in your mouth. In other words, Jeremiah, do not fear, because you are not the master of your fate, you are not the captain of your soul - I am, says the Lord.
God, in this passage, makes two huge claims: One, that he is our creator - “before I formed you in the womb, I knew you”, he says. So in a theological but very real sense, we do not create ourselves, we do not create our children, and our parents did not create us. God is our creator.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams put it this way. He writes, because of God: “I do not have to be my own origin. I do not have to try and be a self-creator. There is a level of affirmation bringing me into and holding me in existence which I do not have to work for.”
So God is our creator, number one, and number two, God is our preserver, which means that our very existence began - and remains - in the hands of God. “I am with you to deliver you” - God says to Jeremiah. Which is really important for Jeremiah, because, due to his doom and gloom prophecies, he’s known widely as the “weeping prophet” - in art he’s depicted with his face literally downcast, or with his head in his hands. He’s the author of both the book of Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations - which is a pretty depressing read, as you might imagine. That’s because Jeremiah prophesies the coming destruction of Jerusalem, when his people will be exiled from their homeland, their temple destroyed, their families broken apart, their women and children killed or sent away into exile for 70 years, for literally generations. God promises to deliver Jeremiah, to be his preserver, but Jeremiah finds that his life is not actually devoid of suffering because of that, not by a long shot. The weeping prophet has lived a life of sorrow and loss and lamentation.
The Lord tells Jeremiah, “Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” God tells Jeremiah about his future, a future of destruction, of suffering, but also one of hope and new life - “to destroy and overthrow, and to build and to plant.” The Israelites have a life ahead of them of both suffering and of redemption. Of creation, of destruction, and of ultimate preservation. Of death and resurrection.
A couple of weeks ago on vacation with my family, we re-watched the classic Tom Hanks film Cast Away, and I was overwhelmed watching it this time around by the inspiring story of survival. After a deadly FedEx plane crash, Tom Hanks’ character, the FedEx logistics manager Chuck Noland, is stranded on an island for years, fighting to stay alive in hopes of one day being rescued. It’s a story of hope and the power of the human spirit to survive in the face of chaos and complete despair.
There’s a FedEx package that survives that plane crash with him, having washed ashore, and on it is painted the image of angel wings. These wings become Chuck’s beacon of hope - (that and, of course, a volleyball named Wilson) - but he paints these wings all over his cave dwelling, clinging to the hope of rescue and deliverance. He spends over four years on this seemingly godforsaken island, alone, fighting for his life. And what saves him in the end comes out of nowhere, comes from outside of his island of self-preservation - and it’s a metal wall of a port-a-potty that is washed ashore on his island. He paints on that metal port-a-potty wall that same image of wings, and that piece of sheet metal becomes a sail that is used on his makeshift boat to push him through the enormous breakers as he finally sets sail to open sea in hopes of rescue. As he glides through open ocean, the wings on his sail, his guardian angel, a holy spirit, carries him through to deliverance, when a passing ship finds him and pulls him out of the water. He should have been lost so many times. He should have died in that plane crash. He should have died on that island. He even tried to kill himself. But somehow, he was preserved. And in the end, he is rescued.
That God is our preserver does not mean that we are preserved from all suffering, but rather that God does not desert us in it. When Chuck felt sure that he was alone on a deserted island, the most unlikely rescuer comes to him, from outside of himself, in the form of a sail to carry him to deliverance.
God does not say, I will be with you from birth to death, but from before birth, from before you were created in your mother’s womb, until after death, to deliverance. Only a God who has been through suffering, who has been through death, can possibly make such a promise.
Maybe there’s somewhere in your life right now where you feel like you alone are responsible for your own creation and preservation. Where you feel like you are on a deserted island. Maybe you feel the burden of having to create your own identity in this world, through your career, or your network, or your skills, and you’re tired of figuring out how to carve out your niche. Or you feel that your mental, physical, and emotional health is in your hands alone - with each choice you make having the power to make or break you. Or perhaps you feel completely responsible for the future lives of your children.
The good news in all of this is that your origin and your destination are in the hands of God, and so is that of those you love. Even into and through your suffering. Even into death, where God, the incarnate Christ who comes to you in this suffering world, delivers you from your burdens and fears on the cross; and where God, the incarnate Christ comes to deliver you from that isolated island of self-optimization, in the form of some unexpected wings on a makeshift sail, as the captain of your soul.
Amen.
