Friendship

I am rarely humble yet often humbled, which is maybe the surest sign that God has not given up on me yet. I remember, years ago, standing in judgment over a friend who came to me seeking grace. I offered him Bible verses, I lectured him on the stern truths of the Christian sect in which I was then immersed. He was wrapped up in torment and loneliness, and all he got from me was rejection.

I called him, years later, and asked his forgiveness. Of course he offered it immediately. Since then we have been in touch — an email here, a phone call there — but we haven’t stayed close. This wasn’t because of standoffishness on his part, but rather the realities of two men raising families and working twelve-hour days and living a thousand miles apart.

Now he comes alongside me as I face a struggle of my own, a struggle about which everyone, if invited, would have an opinion. He offers not judgment, but loving counsel. He asks not that I satisfy his demands, but that I take care of myself, of the ones I love.

He is there for me in a way I was not for him, and all I can think to myself is that I could spend the rest of my days trying to be a better friend, and I wouldn’t come close to being his equal.

Then I think about the number of friends I have who are that way, who would answer the phone if I were to call at 2 a.m. (and who may well get such a call before peace returns), who would listen and love me no matter what I say, what I do. At the drop of a hat I can tell you roughly how much money I own, the approximate amount of equity in my house, exactly how many frequent-flyer miles I have. But it takes some thought to conjure up the number of true friends, because I don’t think on them as often as I should.

Their number is far greater than I deserve, and maybe just enough to carry me through to the end.

It’s worth doing such a heart’s accounting, now and then, to remind yourself how many people love you, how many people would welcome you into their homes, how many pray for you and think about you and take joy in knowing you are well.

And then to ask yourself how many people would consider you such a friend.

Good men

Someone told me recently, “You’re a good man, Tony.”

This made me think of a James Taylor concert I heard about once. In the hush between sets, someone in the audience shouted, “I love you, James!”

Taylor stepped to the microphone and replied, “That’s because you don’t know me.”

Do you ever feel some days that the people who think best of you know you least? Perhaps you’re in that shivering crew of harder-luck folks, or well-deserving folks, the ones who are liked least by the ones who know them best.

Either way, it gets hard to put one foot in front of another, doesn’t it, when the person you feel like you are, or are becoming, or have become, and the person people think they see — when these persons feel like different people altogether.

Who are you? The you inside yourself, or the you outside, the you they think they know, or perhaps — and this is most frightening — the you someone knows better than you know yourself.

So when I heard this good man stuff I cringed, cringed all the way down to the nub of a soul that still rattles around in this empty frame, and the outside me laughed and made appropriately humble remarks and did his best to conceal the fact that he is only polish and glimmer, just smiling skin over soul-sick bones.

If nobody ever calls me that again it will be years too late. Last Friday — Good Friday, good in the deep, rich, holy sense of that word — I drove with my sons to hear the lamentations of Mary. I craned my neck over the steering wheel and peered up at the sky that was like dimpled steel, and I was overwhelmed by the sense that while I am in no ways good, I have been blessed with so many good things, and chief among them these children and this dimpled-steel sky and a Church so grace-filled that it will not turn away even the likes of me.

Good man? Hardly. But I know four boys who can be, if God is as good and merciful and forgetful as I pray he will be.

Gladness

Some of you may appreciate my latest essay at Image’s Good Letters blog. An excerpt:

“. . . I offered him my experience: we accumulate suffering as we grow older, so that the things which once brought us happiness no longer ameliorate the pain. Those things that give us gladness, however, give us even greater joy in the midst of our suffering.”

The good in them

I didn’t mean to be gone this long; the hours piled up into days and then weeks, and once again I was a negligent blogger. Sometimes I think there should be a social services hotline for blogs, to have them removed from the homes of people like me. I’m talking about people who let our blogs lie for weeks at a time, who change their identities whenever the mood strikes us, who fail to brand them and update them and make them the very essence of niche, which is what good blog-parents do, according to the standards of professional marketing type people.

Figuring out what this blog is supposed to be is always an exercise, for me, in figuring out who I am supposed to be. It seems lately I’ve mostly been learning who I am not, and so maybe it’s fitting that there have been few words here. I have been writing, but this has become for me mainly a space where I write about being a father, and I haven’t been a very good one lately. Maybe that’s what people want to hear about. Maybe I’ll tell you more about that, sometime.

But for now I want to tell you about these babies of mine. Caleb and Eli have internetty-type devices now, though I’ve disabled the internet so creepers can’t find them. They’ve both asked me why I worry so much about bad guys, and I’ve told them that if anyone ever hurt them I would kill him, with pain, and then I’d probably end up in jail.

They can’t decide if I’m joking. I most decidedly am not.

But they do have their apps and such, and one of these is a Scrabble kind of game, and so we play Scrabble, and we send each other little messages. They are clever little cusses. “Where’d you come up with that word?” I asked Caleb after he played a particularly good one.

“The brains, Dad.”

I realized that persistent, methodical, stoic little Eli doesn’t use the brains so much as brute force; if he can’t spot a word he randomly substitutes combinations of letters in different nooks and crannies until he comes up with something. That’s why I get words like “dux” and “hod” from my nine year-old. This is the boy who taught himself to ride his bike at age four, wobbling down the driveway, falling, getting up with bleeding knees, getting back on to wobble some more. Relentless little boy.

The three oldest have rip sticks now, which are like skateboards except that you’re supposed to wiggle your body to make them go. Isaac usually forgets to wear his helmet, I know this from the scrapes on his face. He’s also about to lose three front teeth, which I know because he’s done the math on what the Tooth Fairy is going to owe him. He looks like a hockey player, only his disposition is far sweeter.

They made me take them to a skateboard park, one of those places with ramps and platforms and bars that seem designed for the sole purpose of depriving me of grandchildren. The older boys rip-sticked and Isaiah careened around on a tricycle. Together they ran off the surly teenagers. I lay in the sun and read Dostoevsky and tried not to think about the impending injuries, none of which were as bad as I imagined they would be, which is something I wish were always true.

Isaiah has a new song. When I strip him down to change his clothes or give him a bath, he sings, “I’m a naked boy, huh! I’m a naked boy, huh!” He has a little dance that goes with it. Friday night we came home late, so he was asleep when I carried him to his bedroom. I lay him on his bed, and changed him into his pajamas. In mid-change, he whispered, eyes still closed, “I’m a naked boy, huh. I’m a naked boy.”

They are sweet and they are good and mostly I pray I don’t mess that up. I used to have grand plans about teaching them how to use chain saws and shotguns, about showing them how to think and speak and be good men who do good and important things. More and more I hope on being able to protect what is already good in them, and hope, further, that some of it rubs off on me.

The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated

You know when you’re up against the ropes and you keep your hands by your head and take the hits while you catch your breath and wait for the other guy to make a mistake so you can lay him right on out?

Yeah, that.

But I’ll write soon, I promise.

In the meantime, you might appreciate my latest post for the Image Good Letters blog, “Sick Unto Life.” An excerpt:

“There is no high moral art at which I am skilled, and I am perhaps the most self-centered person I know, and so the best I can muster is some approximate imagination. I confess my first prayer, after hearing of the world-shaking earthquake, and the thirteen-foot high wave, and now the impending nuclear meltdown, was: Thank you sweet Christ that my babies are safe.“

Book review

John Wilson, whose work on behalf of art and the Christian faith I have long admired, gives a very kind review of my book in his podcast at Books and Culture.

Incarnate

Some of you may enjoy my latest essay at Good Letters, the Image blog. The title is “In the Flesh,” and here’s an excerpt:

“These are the sweeter moments, but the rare ones; more often than not there is tugging at my clothes, usually by hands sticky with jelly or orange juice. They yank on my sleeve to hiss a petition for chewing gum, they step on my shoes, they reveal what illicit contraband they have smuggled into the sanctuary by dropping on the hard floors of the acoustically resonant cathedral their Legos and Matchbox cars and rubber balls that bounce amazingly high.

This is the flesh—this grasping, rending, imposing physicality of a child. I suspect that when Christ demanded the faith of a child he had this in mind as well, the full-bodied physical presence that is faith to a child—faith he won’t be cast from my lap, turned away from the pew, forced outside the circle of his brothers.”

The girl who is gone

I don’t know the first thing about how to be a father to a fifteen year-old girl. Today is her birthday and if she had lived I would be puzzling this out, what I think about clothes and boys and music and especially boys, because all my babies are beautiful and perhaps Caroline most of all.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe we would not have gotten along. Maybe we would have been so alike that we ended up at odds. Mostly I imagine I would have been wrapped around her finger, at the mercy of her chocolate eyes and her curly brown hair and her tenderhearted ways. Maybe that would have made me a poor father. Maybe it would have made me better.

I suppose we all of us have shadowed places in our lives, places where reside only the ill-formed shapes of what might have been, never clear and untouchable and framed only by their absence of light. But we have what has yielded those shadows as well, or at least the memories of them. I can’t know how her voice would sound today, but I can recall her singing ABCs; I can’t know what it’s like for her head to reach my shoulder, but I can remember carrying her on my shoulders.

In every life there are the things we have and the shadows that haunt us, and which we call could have been. Maybe part of enduring is looking where the light is, rather than where it is not. Caroline is the daughter who was and the daughter who is gone and simply the daughter who is. I don’t know if she is fifteen, or three like the night she died, or some other age altogether. Perhaps she is beyond age, amongst the ages of ages, dwelling where there is no absence of light.

But she is, and she was my daughter, and this is the true thing I celebrate and grieve this day and every day, as well as give thanks for her and for her brothers, without whom I would be lost.

A New Kindle Owner’s Confession

Some of you might enjoy my latest Image essay, “Confessions of a Gnostic Reader.” Here’s an excerpt:

“You needn’t be theologian or historian to grasp gnosticism: disdain for the flesh, and a faith that there are secret, spiritual understandings that only the smartest and best flesh despisers can divine. It’s a spirit very much alive in modern American churches, and it’s in keeping with what many outside the church think the church really is.

It is, further, the reason many of us—especially artists—stay away from churches, out of a sense that our whole art, the wrought fusion of spirit and mind and body, is unwelcome, devalued, suspect. Art is the rendering—and rending—of heart and soul in physical space, and so the artist is never really at home in places where physicality is decried.”

Sanctuary

Sometimes I am overwhelmed, as I stand with my sons in the cathedral, by the feeling of safety. It’s not something I ever felt in church as a child. In those days I felt out of place. I thought I was pitied or judged because my parents weren’t there. I felt condemned by an angry god who demanded something I could not give.

Only later did I realize that I was pitying myself for not having a functional family, that most people cared more about what went on up front than they did about the comings and goings of an awkward boy. Still later I realized the hateful god of my childhood was the creation of dead men who had long ago come unmoored from the Church.

Church was never, however, a sanctuary. Not like this.

The world is filled up to groaning with untruths. They hook themselves into our flesh and hearts, tugging us in wrong directions, distorting us. We learn hunger for what does not fill, thirst for what does not slake, longing for what brings no comfort. We are taught that none of us is beautiful. We come to feel we do not belong. We come to believe that home is a house, and love a feeling.

The world overflows with untruth, and our children are tempted to drink from this arid fountain every day. All that protects them are the adults with eyes to see and hearts that love, the fierce and present Spirit of God, and the intransigent Church.

I am a parent with clouded eyes and a scorched heart, which means that every day I battle not just the world but myself, and it is for them, has always been for them; without them I would likely founder. The rooms where they sleep have crosses and icons and they are prayed in more than any other rooms I traverse, and this more in desperation than confidence, a sense that I am not enough, can never be enough, that one more whispered prayer, a cross over the bed, a blessing muttered over their sleeping heads can fill the gap, fill their hearts with what is good, so there is no room left for the great black empty of not God.

All of this is an admission that I haven’t enough confidence in the intellect, in theirs or mine, that with enough verses memorized and catechisms embraced they can reason their ways to heaven. They know more verses by heart, these children, than I, but it’s the heart we must protect, the heart that too often can be overcome even as we stand vigilant at the doorway to the mind.

There are days I think my heart is too far gone, but not theirs, not theirs. In the cathedral filled with word and prayer and song, where they are surrounded by a cloud of heaven-bound witnesses, I can rest. This is the feeling. Sanctuary from the world, from myself. For these two hours they are safe.

Houston, we have a problem

You know you’ve been flying too much when you sleep through the better part of an in-flight emergency. It wasn’t the exclamations of my fellow passengers that stirred me from my takeoff doze, so much as the sense that what had been a lifting sensation was now most definitely a sinking sensation.

And most of us prefer our jets to lift, to lift, for the love of God to lift, until such time as we approach our destination, at which point they are supposed to gently drift, like a leaf in the hands of angels, to the runway.

But we were sinking, and turning, and there were neighborhoods and trees where I had expected to see moonlit clouds, and so now the situation had my attention. I connected the other sensations: the acrid smell at takeoff, the crack of landing gear reopening, the distinct no-atheists-in-foxholes posture of people all around me. There must be some trouble, I reasoned.

This is the sort of top-notch deductive reasoning I acquired in too many years of post-graduate education, you see.

The pilot announced that we were making an emergency landing at Dulles, having just hurtled ourselves into the airspace above Reagan National. The words of comedian Ron White came unbidden to my mind: Hit something hard; I don’t want to limp away from this wreck.

I thought briefly of sharing this with my seatmate, but decided it might be inappropriate, given the circumstances. He didn’t look like a Blue Collar Comedy Tour sort of guy. Or maybe he just had a lot to live for. Or both.

As we approached the runway, we could see fire trucks converging from different directions. How many fire truck stations they have at Dulles International Airport, I do not know. I do know, however, that had we been approaching the runway looking like a big flaming roman candle fireball with wings and a tail, they likely would have drowned us before the smoke had a chance to do us in.

Then I realized what a blessing we’d all received. I looked around and saw people facebooking, tweeting, calling the people they love. I tweeted it myself. As we rolled to a stop between the phalanxes of fire trucks and ambulances, people held their phones to every available window to record the drama. They took pictures of the firemen who came on board. They took pictures of each other. My facebook friends got a blurry shot of a firetruck ensconced in its red lights. Our captain came out to speak with us and everyone clapped for him.

We all got to live out a little drama, in other words, and imagine for a moment that we were in more danger than we were really in, and then to quickly realize we were safe. For a brief while, an entire planeload of people — coming out of Washington, D.C., no less — was filled with smiles and laughter. It made me think we could all use a little danger from time to time.

But not when I’m napping.

How we bless

I’m happy to announce that every couple of weeks I’ll be writing essays for Good Letters, the blog over at Image. Some of you will recognize Image as one of my favorite literary journals, and so you’ll know how honored I am that they asked me to join them. My first essay went up a couple of days ago, in fact. Here’s an excerpt:

“‘God bless you’ sets aside the barriers I need to function in the midst of my deep, abiding fear of rejection. If I were to utter it, there would just be you and me, helpless in this world of suffering, two needful souls looking heavenward. Your eyes might flutter in embarrassment, or worse still, the veils that cover them might lift, and I might peer into you, and you into me, a communion of souls that I fear more than most anything beyond the deaths of my children.”

Fierce-hearted gifts

As is true of anyone who is long on love and short on cash, Isaac likes to find things around the house, wrap them up in scrap paper, and give them to people. Tonight at dinner he gave me a present wrapped in old construction paper and about a half-mile of tape. The words “I LOVE DAD” were penned in thick black marker on the front.

To the back of the package he had taped a blue toothpick.

Why?

Why, the mind of a six year-old replies, in the world not? Blue toothpicks are awesome.

Inside was a faded, pocket-sized memo pad stamped with the emblem of the Hartzell Propeller Company, in Piqua, Ohio. How did it come to be in  the little basket of scrap paper at the boys’ art table? Who knows.

How did it come to be wrapped in scrap paper and far too much transparent tape, and placed in my weary hands?

The fierce-hearted love of a boy, is how.

Possibility

My work with non-profits over the years has given me the opportunity to sit down with a number of philanthropists. I’m just now flying home from visiting Tucson, Arizona, where I met with several people who have led very different lives, but who share a characteristic that I wish were more true of me. Quite simply, they have an expansive view of the possible.

I’m an analytical hypochondriacal pessimist, flavored with a dash of unreasonable hopefulness. Give me any situation, and I can tell you ten ways it’s bound to go south, and at least five of those ways involve me personally getting cancer in the process. The whole world is going to hell in a handbasket, and my corner of that handbasket is the bleeding hell-bound edge, and the only thing keeping us from striking flaming brimstone sooner is that the cerebral thrombosis working itself into creation inside my skull needs a little more time to quicken.

I’m sure of this, yet I daydream of sweet blessed peace in a cottage on a quiet hillside where I write in the morning and garden in the afternoon and my sons and their children visit me to talk about literature and God and to regale me with their stories of happiness and success. It could happen, I tell myself. I might get a lot better at saving money. Somehow my next book could maybe become a bestseller with a movie series spinoff.

Existential dread and insecurity, tinged with irrational dreams, is a recipe for failure. My only saving grace is that I’m driven by a relentless combination of fear, guilt, and regret.

Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. I hit more deadlines than I miss, and I get the bills paid. Still, it’s a poor recipe for life.

That’s why I’m often enthralled by the big personalities I encounter in my work. In the past few days I spent time with a woman who forged a music and acting career in New York many years ago, who endured with grace and self-sacrifice a great personal tragedy, and who has since given generously to medical and educational causes. She is now in the midst of composing a host of piano pieces. She has lived, and is living, a very big life.

I broke bread with a man who, when he was younger, was so disgusted with the corrupt incumbent in his state senate district that he refinanced his car and used the extra cash to challenge and unseat the rat. He still serves in office, has forged a successful set of business ventures, and at the same time is building a non-profit that brings veterans into classrooms to speak to schoolchildren about American values and public service.

I had iced tea with a lady who likewise challenged a politician she saw to be unprincipled, who is more technologically savvy than many adults half her age, and who invests her time and money in a variety of charitable causes. And I spent time just today with a man who dropped out of Dartmouth to fight in the second world war, came home to forge a career, and has since built a set of very successful businesses. He’s also become quite an expert on western American art, and he’s active and witty and sharp as a tack.

They’re different ages, from different walks of life, but what these people share in common is that they believe they can accomplish what many of us shrink from attempting. They’ve achieved far more than most people, and in the process failed far more than most. They recognize what I often forget, which is that you can’t have one without bearing the other.

This has set me to wondering how I, as a parent, can cultivate in my sons the same belief in possibility, the same courage, the same willingness to get knocked down repeatedly and still strive.

I’m ashamed to admit how often I’ve discouraged my dreamer, ten year-old Caleb, from trying something I know won’t work. He’s the kid who wants to go into commerce. “Dad,” he says, “I could draw pictures, and then set up a booth at the end of our driveway, and sell them to people who drive by.”

Instead of helping him build the booth, I explain to him the economics of the street-corner art world. One dream deflated.

“Dad,” he says, “I want to design a train in the sky so that people can get from place to place really fast.” Instead of getting him some maps and markers to begin planning it out, I tell him that migration patterns make fixed-rail transportation systems highly cost-inefficient. One more dream killed in the crib.

I’m thinking I need to dive in wholeheartedly and help my children fail. It’s not my job, after all, to tell them how their ideas won’t work. It’s my job to inculcate in them bravery, and creativity, and hope.

And then, when the art sales booth or the transportation system redesign hits the wall of reality, it’s my job to help them shake off the disappointment and dream the next dream.

It takes so much energy, doesn’t it? Helping them try, failing alongside them. But it’s our job, isn’t it? So here is my vision for my boys: that they will discover what is possible by dreaming big dreams, and acting without fear, and picking themselves off the ground with thankfulness when they fail.

That’s my big dream. That’s the great thing I want to accomplish.

New reviews

I’ve been reticent in gratefully acknowledging some very kind words by two readers of my book. Kevin Holtsberry offers up a gracious review both on his own site and at Redstate.

Atozmom, meanwhile, also has some very nice things to say here and here. If you know anything about me you’ll understand why I appreciate her openness about her struggles as a parent. Thanks to both of you for your generous words.

On Tiger Mamas, bad art, and the heart of a child

My first thought, upon hearing of Amy Chua’s now famous (or infamous) essay about the superiority of Chinese mothers, is that it’s irrelevant to me. The odds that I will go out and father a child with a Chinese woman are exactly zero. Further, even if Chua has brilliant mothering tips, there’s no way I’m going to elucidate them for the mother of the children I do have, at least not so long as we have guns and knives in the house.

Chua’s essay, however, and its reverberations in the chattersphere, are hard for a parent to ignore. We’re all gripped by the fear, at least on occasion, that we are going about this all wrong. It’s hard not to pay attention when someone comes along to say, so very forcefully, “You have no idea just how wrong you really are.”

Chua’s thesis can be summed up as follows: Tiger mamas don’t give a whit about self-esteem. They demand excellence, and they’re willing to push, prod, threaten, cajole, and punish their children to far greater lengths than Westerners in order to get the academic and artistic performance they want. This is okay because children are resilient. What’s more, it’s necessary. “Nothing,” Chua writes, “is fun until you’re good at it.”

I hope nobody tells my six year-old, who can draw me pictures at a clip of roughly one every five minutes. It’s not high art, but he certainly does love doing it. Chua, meanwhile, admits in her book to forcing her daughters to give her better birthday cards when the ones they produced were unsatisfactory.

Who’s happier at the end of that experience? Chua’s daughters may draw better after being rejected and shamed, and they may in turn derive some satisfaction from being better artists, but while the poor little Chua girls are more carefully tracing out “Happy Birthday” to suit Mommy dearest, my Issac has made me another 87 pictures, and beamed through every one of them.

That’s not to say we ought to spare our children the arduous tasks of developing excellence. But we also shouldn’t forget that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

We need to balance the necessary suffering of skill-building, in other words, with enjoying actions of creation, however meager. Joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy describe not just the walk of faith, but the path of a life well lived.

There’s a deeper problem with Tiger Mamas, however, and it’s evidenced in Chua’s critics as well. This is the notion that we parents are fashioning producers. This latent utilitarianism runs through the heart of today’s schools, and through too many of our churches, and we parents have embraced it without question.

Do we want our children to learn values and skills that enable them to craft valuable things in the world, and to care for themselves and their families? Without question. But is our primary function to raise productive members of society? Movers and shakers? Spellbinding artists? Captains of industry?

If this is the lens through which you view your parenting, then Chua has valid points. And so does David Brooks, who argues that she’s missing, in denying her children the chaotic joy of slumber parties, a chance for them to develop complex emotional intelligence. As does Ayelet Waldman, who counsels parenting tailored to the needs of the child.

They all make sense, and my strong hunch is that any of them is a far better parent than the schlub who lets his kid watch five hours a day of television.

But at the end of it all — no, at the beginning — you have to decide what you want the lives of your children to mean. Not in fine detail — their lives belong to them, after all — but writ large. What is your vision for your child? To be the best student? The finest pianist? A champion athlete?

Why in the world would you envision any of these things for your child? To what end? Your vision has to go further, in other words. Further inward, to the heart of your child, and thereby to your own heart. I want my sons to know God, and to know peace, and to know love — genuine, sacrificial, risk-taking love. I want my sons to find places in the world where, as Frederick Buechner writes, their deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger. I want my sons to be better men than I.

Playing concert piano or curing cancer or digging a ditch — any of these can be right, and any of them can be wrong, and what will determine whether they are right or wrong for your child, for my child, is whether we have cultivated, in our brief time with them, hearts capable of love, and of joy, and of faith. Set all your will and hope on that, mother. Make it your constant prayer, father.

By all means, make sure they read good things, and exercise their bodies, and eat all their carrots. But the heart, the heart is the key. Be attentive to the rest, but passionate about this.

The heart’s health

I’m trying to do sit-ups. I’m inhibited by three year-old Isaiah, who has crawled onto my chest and put his warm face against my neck. He’s crying in frustration with a shirt that he can’t seem to make fit right, but which he resists letting anyone help him with.

I wrap my arms around him. “Are you my sad little bear?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I not a bear.”

“Are you my sad baby?”

“No. I not a baby.”

“Are you my sad little boy?”

“I not a boy.”

“Are you my sad Isaiah?”

“Yes. I Isaiah.”

I hold him tight against me, willing time to stand still. Soon he is smiling. Isaac joins us, and together the two of them try to emulate my sit-ups and push-ups. They chatter at me and fall against each other and roll under me and it’s quite clear that Daddy’s exercise time is done.

My body is not as healthy as I might be without them. But my heart, my heart sings.

Intentional heart

I started a garden last summer. It went to weeds, and then the weeds grew parched under the relentless Kansas sun, and then they withered and died. I traveled more than I’d anticipated, and when I was home other things competed for my time, if only fatigue. I think on that garden and I fear it will be my fatherhood — ground broken with good intentions, but scorched and barren all the same.

All we parents begin with dreams of what our lives will mean. We dream that our children will be healthy and safe, that they will learn good things from us, that our God will be their God. We dream that when they are older they will be people we like, and that they will in turn want to be near us.

Lately I have wrestled with bouts of panic. I fear I am too far behind, already, in this father’s race. I am apart from them more than I want. This is how our lives will be for the next several years. They used to ask when my traveling will be done, and now they don’t. They have been fishing more with other fathers than with me. They have been to Boy Scouts with other fathers, but not with me. This is our life into any future I can foresee, not that I have ever seen the future well.

Sometimes I panic, and then I despair. Your life stretching out before you holds a series of choices, and what you don’t realize until you are older is how quickly those choices can accumulate and choke off possible futures. If you are not care-filled and prayer-filled and intentional, your days may pile up with more regret than hope.

One of my deep griefs is that I didn’t accept Wife, in those early years, as a partner. I looked on her too often as a bundle of wants and inadequacies and comforts, but not as a partner. Only lately have I come to appreciate her counsel.

It is hard, I think, for men to accept the counsel of a wife. We want to have the answers, and to be strong, and — above all else — to be admired and respected. The last thing we want is to be humbled. To be truly counseled, however, is to practice humility. And to be counseled by your wife, well, that is to let this person — who you want more than anyone else to see you as strong and admirable — inside that place in your heart where your fears and flaws and pettiness reside.

I never treated her as a partner and I rarely valued her counsel and now some things are broken that will never on this earth be unbroken.

But there is grace in broken places, you have to know this. I poured out my heart to her a few days back, my anguish over not being as present in their lives as I had dreamed I would be, over not doing things with them each day, not having as many hours with them to teach what I had hoped I might teach them.

I mourned all the time I have wasted and all the time I will not have.

She reminded me that what a boy grieves — the boy whose father comes home every night, or the boy who never meets his father — is the absence of love. She reminded me that this was my great wound, thinking for years and years that no father wanted me. I never learned how to rebuild an engine or sight in a rifle, nobody took me to Boy Scouts or church, nobody came to my track meets or wrestling matches. But the wound that has run right through the center of me as a man was the absence of a father’s heart.

So I took hope. This I can give them. This they will know, that they are loved.

That can only happen with our children, though, if I am intentional, if you are intentional. Every moment with them, every conversation with them, offers the opportunity to strengthen the bond holding heart close to heart, or to let those bonds erode in the silence.

I don’t have as much time with my sons as other fathers have with their children, and I don’t know how to do the things that other fathers teach their children. But I do have this heart that is theirs, and this prayer on my lips day and night, for patience, for fatherly love, for peace in their presence.

I pray it will be enough, that I will be enough.

Ritual and vision

When I was a little boy, I was a pagan. Like our ancestors who had lost sight of God, yet saw visions of him in the luminescent peace of a harvest moon, or the spine-rattling fury of a thunderclap, I believed in supernatural things. I believed there were rituals and incantations to invoke them, or to ward them off.

In a quiet wood, treading silently on a carpet of brown pine nettles, I thought if I peered from the corner of my eyes, I might catch sight of a tree spirit, or discover a secret passageway to some other world, a more full and present place.

The life of a child is magic-filled, which is to say that it is filled with ritual and vision. Science and religion press these out of him soon enough, or worse still, pervert them.

People who knew nothing yet of hell taught me what they imagined it to be, and my nightmares began. I believed if I kept the blankets over my head at night, and pulled my knees to my chest, and held myself tight as a drum, the demons wouldn’t get hold of me. Someone taught me about hell, but no one taught me how to pray, and so this was my ritual, and in this I was no different than my pagan forbears, whirling in fear and ecstasy around midnight fires on starlit hillsides.

Ritual and vision permeate our spiritual lives, though often we misperceive them, or embrace one at the expense of the other. The life without magic, the life of the lost child, is staleness and drudgery and death.

I watched light stream in through the windows of the cathedral only days ago, and listened to the scriptures sung like angels must sing the Word, and how the Word might sing Himself to them and to us, and in the hearing of my heart all were present in that space, in that full and present light, the voice of man and of the angels and of God. And my voice was caught up with them, whispering the liturgy with all the gathered witnesses.

That light came pouring down on all we with upturned eyes, and I remembered being in the ocean with my sons, the day becoming twilight, and clouds gathering above us so close you might try and touch them, and behind these clouds a sun so rich and brilliant in its descent that those clouds were like boiling copper. The warm seawater lapped at our skin, it tugged us shoreward and outward, shoreward and outward, landward and homeward.

I floated with my children in that ocean baptizing us in blue and bronze and emerald, and gazed up at a sky so fiercely beautiful that I wanted to weep, and I was overwhelmed by the great power of sea and cloud and sun, and with knowing that we all of us were held safe in that moment, safe in the hands of magnificent adoration, a love that makes the ferocity of this love thudding in my chest for my children like an echo, like fading grass, like dwindling sight.

I stood in that magical place and reached for the children who were closest, just to touch them as I do in church, to have my hands on their heads as God lays hands on me, that whatever magic fills me might fill them, forever and ever amen.

Be ye as a child, says the Word, and I was again, and some days still am, waiting for another glimpse of that coming kingdom, that final peace.

The Loughner boy’s eyes

When young men take up guns and set about killing to satisfy whatever dark insanity has possessed them, I think of my sons. I think about the world in which they walk, a world that is physically safer than most people have ever known, but which is singed by the devil all the same, and which sometimes feels like it’s sinking beneath our feet. I wonder what in this world gets hold of young butchers, what inside them snaps or rots or never forms rightly in the first place.

Perhaps like some of you, I’m gripped with a fear that one day it will be my son leering at the world like that Loughner boy, his loveless eyes like a demon’s, his smile divorced from joy.

I read that his mother has been in bed weeping since she heard what he did. His parents blame themselves. Perhaps they should. Perhaps they shouldn’t. Neither will make their boy not a monster.

There is a soul-sickness in the human monster, but there is a soul-sickness in me, and maybe in you. Why does it swamp the storm-tossed hearts of some, but not of others? Will it claim my child one day? Will it claim yours?

It’s easy to imagine this only happens to the bad, bad children of bad, bad parents. I had such a notion, back when I thought I knew how to be a good father. But most days, these days, I struggle to be a decent father. I snap at one of my sons, and I see his heart close up. I get caught up in work or distraction and a precious day is gone, another day I didn’t knit up the ever-fraying bonds between father and sons. I want to believe a parent has to be utterly negligent to yield a boy gunning down people on street corners, but then I think of that woman weeping in her bed over her lost, monstrous son, and I don’t know. I simply don’t know.

I want to get it right. I’m terrified I’ll get it more wrong than a father can bear. Does anyone know, before it’s too late, that he’s taken a wrong path? Can we retrace our steps?

Maybe it’s madness, and nothing more. I don’t sleep any easier at night, thinking on it that way. Why do some minds crumble? Will it happen to my child? Will it happen to yours?

I feel like I could pray all the days and nights I have left, and it still won’t be enough. I could get all the father-son moments right, and it still won’t save their lives, their hearts, their souls. God spare my child the madness in that Loughner boy’s eyes.

On suffering

If you believe God loves His children, and then you suffer something terrible and tragic, you have to face head-on the question: Is there God? Close on its heels comes the second query, just as hard: Why does He sit quiet as we suffer?

Now, you can avoid these questions for a time. You can put on your pious face, and receive the good wishes of your pious admirers. The wakeful hours, however, are stacked up on your life’s horizon like so many storm clouds. You will grapple with these questions, if only by retreating into safer things than God, like work, and easy friendships, and church. One way or another, though, you will answer them with the testimony that is your every day of life from this moment until your heart’s last quiver.

Raging as I was against God, my ashen daughter in an urn on my shelf, the first question answered itself. You can’t rage, after all, against a Nothing. It was the second question that nearly undid me, and that schemes sometimes to undo me still. “Where is your God?” the mockers asked the psalmist, and so escapes the thought from recesses of my mind still given over to anarchy and gloom.

In my book I work through the answer that gave me a measure of peace. I can’t fathom what purpose of God is served by my three year-old girl writhing in fear and pain for weeks on end. But I can grasp that there are things I am not equipped to understand. I can imagine there is a universe, and a Creator atop it, that are each inexplicable to this man.

This was how I let go the anger, in faith that there is a Why beyond my own, scarcely illumined why.

I recently finished G.K. Chesterton’s novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. His protagonist confronts Satan as the deceiver stands before God, denouncing man. The First Attorney is incensed that we should receive God’s favor, having paid nothing for it.

The protagonist cries that suffering persists on the earth “. . . so that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’”

Now here is an interesting possibility, that a purpose in suffering might be to rebuke the very devil. Do we testify, with these scars, that we have been humbled, and yet did not make God our enemy?

This reminds me of an interview I read years ago, with the writer of the screenplay for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. In the telling, a faithful girl was seized by demons and tormented unto death, despite the ministrations of a priest. When the writer was asked what he makes of a child being slowly murdered by demons in the very sight of God, he replied that the only sense he can make of it is that some among us are appointed to suffer, to be witnesses that in spite of all man’s advances, we are still a creation crying out to God for deliverance from hell.

Still, there is this other fact, this inescapable reality of God that we cannot forget in our suffering. Chesterton’s protagonist, going too far in imagining that it is man who has paid the bill, demands of God, “Have you ever suffered?”

“‘Can ye drink,’” comes the reply, “‘of the cup that I drink of?’”

I can’t understand why this suffering, any more than you can know, perhaps, your own. But we know that God has suffered with us, out of love for us. Perhaps, if nothing else, knowing a portion of that suffering enables us to grasp, in turn, the depths of the great love for which it was undertaken — for me, for you, for those we have loved unto their graves.

It’s not an explanation. But maybe it’s something even greater than an explanation, if you can imagine such a thing.

We pray the anger melts

I’ve got all four boys to myself and I’m trying to plot a course halfway across America, a course that doesn’t entail careening off an icy highway to our deaths. They are, meanwhile, chasing one another about upstairs, with occasional crashes that sound to me, hunkered in front of a computer below, like they are near to breaking through the floor and landing on my head. They smell bad, and they need baths, and now that I have plotted our course I must engage in a kind of geographic sudoku, wherein I endeavor to find a hotel somewhere near our first night’s stopping place that will take some of my tens of thousands of points and yield up a room with two clean beds and a pull-out couch. I am not in the mood for silliness.

This is when they are silliest.

I put the youngest two in a full, warm tub of water, and warn them on pain of death not to play while I finish up the trip arranging downstairs. I don’t know why this sounds reasonable to me, leaving a six and three year-old in a perfectly good tub of splashy water and expecting them not to play. I tell the ten and eight year-olds, meanwhile, to stay in their room and be utterly silent. Might as well double down on the stupid demands, after all.

Complex trip planning completed, a quick prayer uttered that somehow we’ll actually leave on time in the morning and complete our first leg before midnight, I go back upstairs.

The tub is completely empty. Isaac and Isaiah look up at me with a mixture of amusement and guilt. They are trying to determine, I can tell, whether my head will actually explode.

I burst out with a fit of blustering, half-articulate outrage, much like Clark Griswold’s discovery that Uncle Lewis has burned down his Christmas tree. Where, I demand of Isaac, did all the water go?

“Down the drain.”

This does not help his cause. We do some root cause analysis, which amounts to my asking him, over and over and over, what the heck happened to all the water. He finally confesses that he was playing with the drain plate.

I give him a disgusted, angry, glowering look. I have had enough with this child, and I tell him so. “You make messes and you cause work for other people and you don’t care one bit,” I lecture him with a snarl. His face clouds over, and he cries, and I don’t care.

Then it is as if I’m standing outside myself, looking at my crying child with his water-matted tangle of hair and his puffy red eyes, and at my angry posture as I loom over him, and I am ashamed. This is not how it is supposed to be, I think. This is not how I am supposed to be. But I am so angry, and so very tired.

I get him out of the tub and dry him off, and all the while I am praying: Please help me be patient, please help me be better than this. I dry his head roughly, and his neck and arms and back less so, and his legs less roughly still. I wrap the towel around him and cradle him in my arms, even though he has become such a big boy. I carry him to his room and kiss him on the head and tell him I love him. And I do. I really, really do.

Are you resolved?

I’ve been thinking about what I can resolve to do differently. There’s plenty I could name, but it’s the resolve that gets you, isn’t it? There’s a scene, towards the end of The Untouchables, when Jim Malone (Sean Connery), his body riddled with bullets, wheezes at Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) through blood bubbling up from his mouth: “What are you prepared to do?”

Malone doesn’t ask Ness what he feels like doing, or what he thinks he might do. He doesn’t care about emotions, or reasoned probabilities. He’s seeking resolve. What are you prepared to do?

It’s worth asking ourselves, each of us alone, in the lonely night’s dark when bluster and delusion have left us, when the hard truths of our lives press in close as shadows. What are you prepared to do?

There’s so much I need to do, and so little I feel prepared to do, but those sad truths are neither here nor there. The question isn’t about what we aim to accomplish, so much as it is about what we strive for with everything that’s good within us.

This is liberating, if you think about it. You can’t control outcomes, after all. You can’t make your son stop drinking or your husband stop cheating or your daughter stop cutting herself. You can’t make the boys in the upstairs office give you that promotion, or guarantee that all your hard-earned savings won’t get poured down the drain by some cabal of feckless politicians, all of them blaming one another while they look to you to replenish the till.

You can’t control outcomes, but you can control your actions. You can be kind to your mother even if she no longer recognizes your face. You can pray five times a day — ten if you need to, hour by hour if you’re like me — for a temporary release from the grip of self-centeredness. You can be sure to tell each of your children every day this year that you love him. Every day. Look him in the eyes and say it.

Nothing you or I do guarantees a happy ending. The world can take everything from us like that. But each of us decides what his next step will be, and the step after that.

What are you prepared to do?

The SitG New Year’s Pop Culture Leave-it-Behind Countdown

This is the time when we resolve to do things differently. I’ve certainly resolved to do a number of things differently, but most of these are neither here nor there to most of you, and probably little different from your own resolutions about Bible-reading and body fat and general niceness towards one’s fellow man, no matter how nasty he may be in return.

But there are a number of things I think we should collectively consider doing differently. More specifically, a number of things I think we should dispense with doing altogether. Ten things, to be exact, because let’s face it, the making and consumption of meaningless lists is something none of us wants to do away with. So without further ado, here are the Top Ten Pop Culture Icons that I’d like to leave behind in the new year:

10. Owen Wilson Romantic Comedies. Like many popular actors — Seth Rogen, Vince Vaughn, Adam Sandler, Tim McGraw, Michael Cera, and his own brother, Luke — Owen Wilson has less range than a Pixar character. At least when you watch Vince Vaughn playing precisely the same character in movie after movie, you can take solace in the fact that he is amusing by nature. The mash-nosed Wilson is, by contrast, dull as dry toast. Watching him woo a girl is like watching a hobo tap dance. He seems happy enough doing it, but you doubt he’s a professional, and you’re puzzled why you paid good money to witness the spectacle.

9. “Epic Fail.” The first word should only be applied to literature penned before 1869. The second should be reintroduced to public schools, and applied mercilessly until schoolchildren tremble at its utterance.

8. One. Word. Sentences. Yes, I know I do that sometimes. But I also pick my nose sometimes.

7. Vuvuzelas. It’s not the noise that’s troubling, it’s that the name just sounds so dirty.

6. Snooki, The Situation, and Every Other Jersey Half-Wit. I realize that last part may be redundant.

5. Justin Bieber’s Voice. I blame his parents, for letting him get made up and prance about like a little girl. Any princess is bound to be heartbroken when her testicles finally drop.

4. Popped collars. They just lead to parachute pants, Swatches, and glam bands. I thought all this went by the wayside when Nicolas Cage punched out Michael Bowen in the penultimate scene of Valley Girl. Clearly I was mistaken.

3. Pretty vampires. The Twilight imitations alone now litter the shelves in the juvenile fiction section of big box bookstores. One day we’re going to get invaded by rabid vampires from some crypt far beneath the earth’s surface, and all you collaborators are going to be singing a different tune. I, on the other hand, have a working chop saw, live on twenty acres littered with hardwood trees, and stand prepared to put a merciless, bloody end to any vampire, no matter how sensitive he looks. When the vampire stuff hits the fan, rendezvous at my place.

2. Bristol Palin. I think I speak for all of America — black, white, Latino, liberal, conservative, apathetic, rich, poor, middle class — when I say: “Please just stop.”

1. Zombie celebrities. I’m not talking about AMC’s new series. I’m talking about celebreality shows in which Leif Garrett tries to get sober, or Bret Michaels pretends he doesn’t have a receding hairline, or Ozzy Osbourne tries to formulate a sentence. At least in actual zombie movies, there’s a protagonist with a shotgun to put these drooling parasites out of our misery. In reality they just keep multiplying, and taking up perfectly good TV space that George Foreman could be using to sell his very handy and affordable mini-grills.

I recognize there are many more pop icon candidates for disposal. Feel free to share some of your own, and have a lovely start to what I hope is a peace-filled new year for all of us.

A very special Sand in the Gears Christmas

It’s the Christmas edition of Sand in the Gears, and very much like a fruitcake in that it’s rum-soaked, chock full of things that likely don’t belong together, and not really something you want to eat.

I’m sick. I know this because I felt last night like a train hit me, and because I slept 12 hours and feel only marginally better today, and because I’m actually contemplating trips to both ToysRUs and Bed Bath and Beyond. Healthy people don’t do that on normal days, and certainly not on Christmas Eve Eve.

Perusing the interwebs, I see all kinds of disagreements about Christmas. There’s the smug atheist crowd, proud of themselves for sussing out that pagans had a winter solstice before Christmas arrived on the scene, which is something every schoolboy once knew, but which now we’re supposed to take for a Dan Brown-esque expose of the dirty underbelly of Christianity.

It’s not theft of a pagan holiday, it’s an efficient use of marketing leverage. Besides, if you want to stand shivering around a snowy tree stump, giving thanks to Gaia for rationally self-generating so you can be in touch with the Inner Wonder of You, the fact that I’m going to church to sing “Silent Night,” doesn’t impinge on your revelry one little bit.

Then there’s the whole “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” kerfuffle. Some non-Christians are offended when wished the former, as if the sentiment conveys a desire to dunk them in holy water. Some Christians are offended when wished the latter, as if Christ Himself went around wishing people “Merry Christmas,” and any deviation from the Sacred Greeting during this holiest of holy holidays is anathema. I think the best solution is to lock all these insufferable people into a gymnasium until Christmahanakwanza is over.

And now a word or two about the season’s worst pharisees, the Jesus-was-a-soup-ladler-and-you-should-be-too crowd. I find they come in two strains, militant atheists and militant Christians. Ironically, they share the same politically self-indulgent vision of Jesus, differing only over whether He actually emerged from the tomb.

The atheists don’t give one whit for anything Christian, except insofar as their caricature of Jesus can be used to pummel Republicans. The actual Christians do give a whit, often two or three or four, but they’re so caught up in their social justice vision that they can be taxing when the eggnog goes unpoliced. It’s one thing to make a donation to Habitat for Humanity in lieu of a Christmas present, and decorate your door with a wreath hand-woven by little orphan Mexican children, and sign all your emails with “Peace.” It’s another to get up in my business because I want a lower tax rate and haven’t volunteered half my time this past year, especially when one of the reasons I don’t volunteer and want lower taxes is because I’m supporting the four kids who will need to be gainfully employed to cover the retirement you haven’t bothered to save for.

And Santa Claus. Look, reasonable people disagree about whether to propagate the myth or not. But you’re not traumatizing your children to entertain the fantasy for a while, any more than you traumatize them by leveling straight out of the shoot that St. Nick, while he was a heretic-jackslapping saint, doesn’t come down the chimney. Many of you know my own point of view, which is that I’m a firm believer in encouraging all kinds of fantastical thinking. The world is filled with holy magic, after all, and we learn this in part through fairy tales.

Finally, lawn decorations. I went ballistic on this years ago, which I hesitantly link here. If you don’t want to read the original, then suffice to say this: one baby Jesus per yard, please.

I wish you a blessed celebration of the birth of the world’s only Savior, the Incarnate Christ, fully God and fully man, born of the Theotokos, the Mother of God, herself a virgin, and He begotten of the Father, not made, coming to this earth not just so that a few would be saved, but that all might be liberated from sin and death.

How’s that for offensive?

Active love

Kansas City writer Vern Barnet on incarnational love:

“But perhaps an even greater miracle occurs when human selfishness is transmuted into service to others, when one’s own suffering is embraced as the fee for saving others, when Christmas is not just a story from long ago, but rather when surpassing love becomes incarnate in the work of our own hands.”

Read the rest here.

Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!

Agents from the Federal Reserve have decided visible displays of Christian faith are verboten. At a private bank, no less.

“Specifically, the feds believed, the symbols violated the discouragement clause of Regulation B of the bank regulations. According to the clause, ‘…the use of words, symbols, models and other forms of communication … express, imply or suggest a discriminatory preference or policy of exclusion.’”

UPDATE: As SitG reader John points out, the Fed reversed its demands after a public outcry. That’s good to know, though it’s still disturbing to see federal agents walk about clueless as to what are and are not their proper authorities. Perhaps we could have a rolling set of training days for federal employees, during which they are all required to study the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights in particular, and view a few webinars featuring reliable lecturers on these topics.

And to remind them of who’s in charge, perhaps they might all read a pamphlet on the American Revolution. If King George were alive today, he might caution every would-be tyrant and petty bureaucrat on American soil: Don’t poke the bear.

Cocoa is for cobblers

HT: Trent S.

Careful what you pray for

“You that cry out so loud for right and justice,
Do you mean justice? deed and word and thought
Judges in yourselves by one eternal measure
Of absolute and incorruptible right?
I do not think so. When you call for justice
You would make God your bailiff, to collect
Your legal dues; but not your almoner,
Still less your judge. Alas! you cannot bend
God to your service; yet He may hear prayers–
Sometimes His vengeance is a granted prayer,
When a corrupt heart gains its whole desire
And finds itself in Hell. Children, take heed,
And do not pray for justice; you might get it.”

Dorothy Sayers, “The Just Vengeance,” in Four Sacred Plays

Book data

For the past two weeks, readers in Chattanooga, Tennessee have purchased more copies of my book than in any other region of the U.S. Which makes Chattanooga my new favorite city.