c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is author of “Turn Toward the Wind” and publisher of Religion News Service.)

(UNDATED) My oldest son turns 13 next week.

While many of his friends celebrate this passage with a bar mitzvah or confirmation, Chase will ease into the teenage years with mostly secular festivities. Presbyterians don’t make a big deal of puberty.

In retrospect, it seems ironic that we marked his birth with such fanfare, holding him up in front of the congregation while he squawked and drooled.

At that point we made a covenant before God and our church family to raise him in our faith and do our best to teach him to know God. Between the crying and the squirming, he missed most of the ceremony.

Today he doesn’t miss much. He knows what rock groups are in, which clothes are cool, who’s who in the NBA, and what kind of snowboard is the absolute best.

He makes pronouncements about politics and social issues, speaks with authority on subjects he has just learned about, and rolls his eyes at least once a day at something his parents say.

He also hugs me when I least expect it. He says “I love you” in his suddenly deeper voice and even helps me carry the groceries now and then. By all physical, social and emotional measures, he is in full-fledged puberty.

Spiritually, it is time for him to come to grips with the fact that he’s now on his own. His parents have dutifully taken him to Sunday school and tried to set an example. But there’s not much we can do anymore except pray for him and love him.

As a maturing young man, he will have to choose whether he will follow the faith of his father and mother, or if he will make room in his life for any beliefs at all. His childhood commitment will be tested by adult realities. He now must decide if he will “walk the talk.”

I want so much for Chase. I hope he will grow into a man of integrity, a person of passion, a fighter for justice. I hope, too, that he will continue to be a believer in God, and that his faith will be as real to him over the years as mine is to me.

But I cannot give that to my son. He must embrace faith himself, in his own way, and in his own time. He may doubt and struggle, fear and hope, but he will grow in his spiritual life in a deeply personal way.

Part of me wants to prepare him for the inevitable bumps of life. Part of me wants to protect him from any harm for as long as possible. And part of me has already acknowledged that he isn’t mine anymore at all. He barely needs me to take care of him; I can only hope to influence him.

I must learn how to hold Chase with an open hand. I have raised him as “a child of the covenant” and he now can act of his own free will.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons we have no ceremony for such a passage. We believe that by the time a child comes of age, he must make his own decisions about God.

And if a child, even one raised in the faith, chooses a different path, the parents and congregation must stand on the sidelines. The struggle is between him and God.

Theologically, this makes sense to me. But personally, I find it difficult to accept. I have worked out my own relationship with God, and it hasn’t always been easy.

There were times when I was angry and rebellious, distant and disinterested. There were times when God seemed irrelevant and other things were far more important.

I suspect Chase will have some of those times, too. But I pray they won’t last long.

Looking at my sleeping almost-teenager this morning, I flashed back to just the other day when he was curled up in a crib. I worried then about skinned knees and stubbed toes. Today the stakes are so much higher.

And so I pray that God will help me be a mother who knows when to step back and let her child become a man.

END BOURKE