My wife takes my eldest daughter shopping, leaving me and my younger daughter with a few empty hours to fill on a Saturday afternoon.
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
“Let’s make a craft,” she says. She goes on to explain her vision: something about hearts and glue and a variety of colors. “For Valentine’s Day,” she concludes.
“That’s done,” I say. “A month ago. What about St. Patrick’s?”
She shakes her head. “Valentine’s Day for next year,” she says. Like that makes the most sense, the obvious answer. Why didn’t I assume that?
The hour arrives, and I begrudgingly hunker down on the floor amidst markers and papers and sparkles and cat hair. She hands me a piece of paper with two small green hearts that she’s drawn and colored and tells me to cut them out.
“So, you did go with St. Patrick’s Day, huh?”
“No,” she says. “Valentine’s Day.”
I shrug and start cutting. I hand them back to her. “What do you think?”
“Cut them in half,” she says. I quibble with her for a moment, unsure of the instruction and concerned that she’ll regret such an irrevocable cut. But she’s insistent, and so clip, clip, our hearts are halved.
“Now we have to glue it,” she says, pouring an obscene about of Elmer’s glue on the paper. She places the heart halves on the page with about a thumb’s length space in between them. Then she tells me to color in the blank space. She shows me what she expects; I mirror her work to a passable degree.
“It’s perfect,” she says. “What do you think of our craft?”
“That’s it?” I ask. Then, trying to back peddle a bit, I say, “It’s lovely — but don’t we need to add more?”
“Oh, right,” she says. She squirts another puddle of glue onto the page, sticks a blue pompom right in the middle of the paper. “Now we have to wait for it to dry,” she cautions me. “But I have another craft we can do.”
And to my horror, she begins to collect the necessary materials for a second project.
It’s taken me some time, but I’ve finally realized the discrepancy in how I understand crafting compared to my children. For me, the craft is the end result: What are we making? What are we going to do with it? How should it look, and why? I want it to be perfect, and so I often never begin.
But for my kids, craft is a verb. It’s a way of engaging the hodgepodge of beads, crayons, string and cardboard we have sitting around. It’s active. The end result is nice — and, at times, a source of frustration and fighting — but it’s not really the point. Or, it’s not the whole point.
My girls want to craft. They want to craft with others — their parents, grandparents, friends and so on. They know full well and have no problem with the fact that the great majority of these crafts wind up in the recycling bin.
That’s okay. They’re still crafting.
I wonder: Do we stumble into this same temptation in our spiritual lives? The fruits of our faith are important; Jesus tells us “by their fruits you will know them” (Mt 7:16). And yet, if we do not engage in the act of living our faith, no fruit will ever be borne.
Is our faith a thing to be placed on a shelf: beautiful, pristine and forgotten? Or, is our faith something to be muddled through each and every day, grappled with and wrestled down and delighted in?
If the latter, perhaps we should be more patient with ourselves, more kind to others, as we trudge along this spiritual path. We’ll use too much glue at times. But it’s better to be moving, to be persisting, to be acting upon the life of Christ within us then to be paralyzed by the threat of perfection.
Perhaps this can be part of our Lenten prayer: God, give me the persistent grace to love the work of faith, to trust that even in moments of imprecision, you still delight. From that place of love, may I bear good fruit.
