December 29, Christmas 1C (Luke 2:41-52)
Twelve years into this parenting gig, Mary knows there’s not much she can do to keep her son safe.
In the movie Home Alone, eight-year-old Kevin McCallister gets accidentally left behind when his family goes on a European vacation for Christmas, and he has to fend for himself for several days. I was in middle school when the movie first came out, and I was just the right age to think that it was hilarious to watch Kevin shopping for groceries and eating ice cream for dinner and defending himself from the burglars who were trying to rob his house. The movie invited kids everywhere to imagine how they might run free if all the grown-ups were suddenly gone from their lives.
I hadn’t seen Home Alone for a long time, probably decades, when we watched it together as a family recently. I could have sworn it was an entirely different movie. I thought it was a story about what a kid could do if left to his own devices, but it turns out—I realized as I watched with my own kids snuggled on the couch with me—it’s about a mother who has been separated from her son, doesn’t know if he’s OK, and wants nothing more desperately than to get back to him and hold him in her arms.
My son is 12 years old now, the same age as Jesus in the only story about his childhood preserved in the gospels. My son rides his bike to school every day along a bike path that is mostly safe but involves at least one fairly busy intersection. Sometimes I follow him on my phone, watching the little dot that represents him moving farther away from me in the morning and back home in the afternoons. I’m aware that this surveillance does little to keep him safe from distracted drivers, but still, I watch.
