Spot on and thought-provoking. Also, it sheds new light on my baggage with music...
From Between Noon and Three by Robert Farrar Capon:
(Capon is speaking of the outrageousness of God's grace. Here he is responding to a reader's concern that he is not serious enough about morality. The Latin phrase, loco parentis, means 'in the parental role.')
If we are ever to enter fully into the glorious liberty of the children of God, we are going to have to spend more time thinking about freedom than we do. The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. It has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes that it has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our pieces, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music, but to avoid some flub that will get us in Dutch. The church, having put itself in loco parentis, has been so afraid we will lose sight of the laws of our nature that it has made us care more about how we look than about who we are - made us act more like the subjects of a police state than fellow citizens of the saints....[we need] the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.
I like this. It rings very true for my experience with church as well. I do wonder, though, about calling this *loco parentis.* Because I don't think this is necessarily the best use of the parental role either (though I think it is most common). We don't want to raise our children with this fear of mistakes any more than we want to ingrain our brothers and sisters in Christ with this mentality. So perhaps the key here is first re-evaluating our perspective on child rearing, and maybe that new perspective would better translate into the church as a whole. Just some thoughts I had while reading this!
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