Daniel and the Quiet Community
This past week I was discussing the book of Daniel with Chris Pashley, our regional director for Indiana. As you may remember, in Jewish lore Daniel was a young Judean, the son of a nobleman whom the Babylonians took from the land where he grew up. The Babylonians tried to make Daniel believe and act in ways that were not true, things his family did not believe. As they tried to mold Daniel into a Babylonian court official, they taught Daniel their literature, their laws, and their culture. They even gave Daniel a new name.
So what did Daniel do? He came up with a plan, gathering other young Jewish men around him (Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah). Together they conspired to be something other– something apart, something different. It started with a simple choice of food: Daniel and his friends chose to follow Jewish food laws, despite this seeming strange to their Babylonians captors. While these young men would grow in stature and influence, they would never leave behind their core identity and commitment to walk by God’s law. As Chris and I reflected on this passage, two key points came to mind.
First of all, our thoughts turned to Daniel’s parents.
The Bible doesn’t record their names, but we can be certain that Daniel’s father and mother had trained Daniel in the ways of the Lord and given Daniel the moral courage and God-centered identity to endure the enormous challenges he would face. Though they are now anonymous, Daniel’s parents live on through his faithfulness.
Actually, behind most of our spiritual heroes lay generations of anonymous faithfulness, of parents who took the responsibility and stewardship of their children as a sacred trust. Even without political power, these Jewish parents laid the foundations for years of cross-generational faithfulness. Are Christian parents laying similar foundations? Do our families, immersed in western modernity–in a culture obsessed with seeking celebrity and personality–have the spiritual, intellectual, and practical resources necessary for similar longevity? If you, good reader, are not sure where to even start with your family, then you share in a common generational bankruptcy. We have forgotten what it means to build internal resilience, and have been taught to rely on third-party stewards, whether educators from kindergarten to college, professionalized clergy with pre-baked church programs, or the security of secular corporate employers: all can so easily become cheap and easy alternatives to the hard work of fortifying our families with resilient, God-centered structures that can withstand cultural secularism, political upheaval, financial crises, and philosophical chaos.
Secondly, Chris and I noted how Daniel did not eat, work, or study by himself. I wonder whether so much of our modern lack of resilience comes from the individualization of our appetites: whether with sex, food and drink, or our intellectual stimulation, none are intended to be enjoyed alone. Our world pushes us to the individual and self-actualized, rather than the liturgy of the common and the shared. Sexual activity is to be enjoyed only within the shared covenant boundaries of the marriage of a man and a woman; deviation from this communal boundary leaves us with a Freudian focus on the individual passions, rather than on the God-centered union of two becoming one. Similarly, food–at its most foundational the natural product of our work–is a celebration of the shared rhythms of common labor in both field and family. When we say grace at the table, we are celebrating with gratitude God’s provision and sustenance for our families. This provision includes the father’s physical sacrifices of labor in exchange for resources; the mother’s enormous generosity in the bearing, raising, and training of their children within the well-ordered household, and indeed the entire communal economy of God’s created order that brings food and drink to the table. However, modern society has reduced the consumption of food to an individual act: sitting alone in a Toyota munching down a quarter-pound cheeseburger has little that lends itself to either the liturgy of celebration or to a common table. In a similar manner, our modern education systems seek to extract the newly forming soul and its mind and body from its natural spheres of family, church, and God-centered rhythms of flourishing. We have been deceived into thinking that reducing our youth to one of thousands on the modern secular campus, or isolating them into a digital learning environment, is somehow superior to the wisdom of Christian community.
The antidote for this modern chaos is to be found in first principles: the family, with its God-given structures, hierarchies, responsibilities, with its cycle of births, life, and deaths, provides the fundamental building blocks for longevity, whole-life training, discipleship, and soul formation.
God’s Church is to support the godly family with resources, employment, intellectual history, liturgical rhythms, and the communion of other families. This should happen naturally, without fan-fare, and frequently in anonymity. Within this shared rhythm, our children’s children will have the resources, resilience, and shared memory to stand in faithfulness until the coming of the Lord. In doing so, we can adhere to the Apostle Paul’s exhortation that “we lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Tim 2:2). Together with Daniel’s parents, quiet lives might not make the history books, but history is built on the backs of such quiet lives.
