Expert Offense

Some of you may like my latest Image post, even though (or maybe because) it ranges from E.O. Wilson to homosexuality to Michael Polanyi to engineers to literature to the Dewey Decimal System to sparking revolution with bedtime stories. Here’s an excerpt:

“. . . I confess I enjoy seeing scientists upset. Whenever you stumble upon a coven of them inveighing against a line of inquiry, you can be fairly certain there’s something worth inquiring after. Discoveries are frequently advanced by heretics, after all, and reviled, up until the very last, by the keepers of orthodoxy.”

You can read the rest here.

About what comes next

Sometimes I care about a political battle or news event or Item of Great National Debate enough to write about it, but then I stop, because I think someone has already said this better, or said its opposite more persuasively, or someone who donates money to the non-profit where I work will see it and not like it, or somebody crazy will see it and like it and then start giving money to our non-profit and then expect to have a phone call with me every day, or people in my family will see it and think I’m secretly talking about them — or ask how I have time to write so much when I haven’t called my mother since I was fifteen, or someone who believe he knows me by virtue of having traded rumors about me will write to explain that instead of writing about politics I need to work on my personal life/walk with Jesus/failed marriage, which then sets me to thinking that maybe I’m going to hell, which would be especially intolerable insofar as gossips and self-righteous Puritans are surely its chief denizens.

Or I think about how all the blog/marketing/carpet shampoo experts say you’re supposed to find a niche, a narrow crevice of a specialty for your writing, and then own that cramped corner like nobody’s business. Define a category, the marketing gurus say, and be number one in it. This mitigates against writing one day about one’s religious struggle, and the next about one’s grief, and the next about how one’s four year-old fell asleep in the clothes hamper again, and how one began to panic that he’d wandered out of the house and gotten eaten by feral cats, until one of his less-concerned brothers saw his foot poking out from under a tee-shirt and solved the Mystery of the Missing Boy.

So I’ve been thinking about what this space is for, and I figure since my name is on it, it may as well be for whatever I damn well please.

With a caveat, because of course I can’t say whatever I want here. One thing I learned the hard way last year is that however broken and fallible and selfish I can be, there are people far worse — evil, ugly, spiteful people with no qualms about using things I write to hurt me and my children.

But then that’s what fiction is for, to take the people you don’t like, change their identities, and then gleefully drive them off cliffs, or give them unmentionable diseases of their private parts, or perhaps even cause them to be eaten by feral cats, if feral cats actually eat living things, which I’m beginning to doubt, because the family of welfare cats living on my back deck seems utterly uninterested in the mice that have been finding their way into my house.

(This could be because nine year-old Eli, in charge of feeding the cats just every other day — in order to keep them lean and hungry and Cassius-like — tends to dump about a pound of food in their tray when he does feed them, as penance for the times he forgets.)

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m going to use this space more for working thoughts out than for capturing a niche in which to market my Personal Brand. Which I could probably have simply said right up front, and spared you the trouble of reading all the way through, but then that would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

Lessons

“Dad,” asks Isaac, “do you think it was disrespectful of you to leave the music playing while we prayed?”

“I guess so. I’m sorry. God will forgive me.” I notice the boy is wearing a big triangular colonial soldier hat. “Do you think it was disrespectful for you to wear that hat while we prayed?”

Isaac thinks for a moment. Frowns. “Yeah.” He pauses, smiles. “God will forgive me.”

I think a boy could learn worse.

The New Boy Scout

The thing with my 11 year-old Caleb joining Boy Scouts is that finally I can learn how to tie a sheepshank knot, and start a fire using only a fork and dental floss, and how to evade bears, and all the other stuff that I never learned how to do, never having been a Scout myself. My truck was filled with great excitement as we went to his first ever meeting. I think Caleb was looking forward to it also.

I’m still not sure what you call those meetings. A den meeting, maybe, or a club meet, or a coven session — I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s in the manual. Either way, it was heartwarming to see Caleb assemble with the other boys, and say the Pledge of Allegiance, and listen intently to his new Scoutmaster.

I had been anticipating for weeks what the first meeting might cover. Tracking animals, say, or how to set up an impromptu triage tent if your Scout Troop should suddenly find itself in a war zone. What mysterious and essential man-type skills were we — I mean they — about to learn?

Popcorn sales. That’s right, it’s that time of year when the Boy Scouts hit the pavement. Those great adventure camps and service projects aren’t free, you know, and someone, somewhere, decided that in addition to gutting a fish correctly and being able to identify poison oak, a boy ought to know a thing or two about how to move merchandise.

At first I was — I hope you’re sitting down, because I know this will shock you — cynical about the exercise. My boy’s very first Scout meeting, and they want to turn him into a salesman. But then one of the older Scouts got up to give the younger whippersnappers a little sales advice. He began to recount how he kept a notebook on each house in each neighborhood, to remind himself where he visited, who had bought, who wasn’t home, who was wavering and needed a return visit. Carry samples, he told them, because if people get a taste of the more expensive cheese popcorn, they’re twice as likely to buy it. Hand them the literature instead of just holding it and showing it to them.

This kid was good. I started taking notes. Since I’m running a new non-profit these days, I need all the fundraising advice I can get.

Caleb was chattering as we left the meeting. He has big plans for covering many square miles of territory, and setting up a booth at a retail location where people with high net worth and outsized patriotism congregate, and launching a sophisticated and widespread email campaign.

I got tired just typing that. I have half a mind to buy $200 of popcorn from him anonymously and call it good.

But I don’t want to dilute the boy’s entrepreneurial verve. And so I’m doing what I promised him I’d do, which is sucker all of you in with what you thought was a sweet essay about one of my children, only to tell you that if you like cheese-flavored popcorn, or buttery microwave popcorn, or trail mix, or chocolate-covered pretzels, and you love Boy Scouts and America and Almighty God — or even if none of these is true, but you have within your heart even a scrap of a feeling of kindness for me — then you will make a new Boy Scout very happy if you go to his little popcorn webpage and order something. Otherwise his father will go another forty years without learning how to tie a sheepshank knot, and that would be a tragedy.

And if you do order something, please let me know in the comments section. That way we can keep track of who Caleb needs to thank. As an added inducement (or perhaps merely as evidence of my narcissistic overconfidence regarding your interest in my opinions), the highest popcorn buyer will thereby purchase the right to direct me to write an essay here on any topic of his or her choosing. That’s right — Astroturf, kittens, the precautionary principle, particle physics — you name it, buy enough popcorn, and this hired pen will be yours.

Thank you all, and God bless America.

UPDATE: In case the link I provided doesn’t take you to Caleb’s page, if you click the button that says “Change” next to the irritating message that says “You are supporting no one,” you can type in Caleb’s ID number, which is: 18960567. Thanks to everyone who wants to support the boy.

Death-defying

Some of you may enjoy my latest post at Image. Here’s an excerpt:

“I told Caleb about the time when he was two, and he fell from a second-storey porch to the hard-packed earth below. I told him how I turned too late, and saw his little rain-booted foot disappear from sight, and heard the thud. How I saw him lying face down, motionless.

I didn’t tell Caleb how I begged and cursed God as I hurtled down the steps. I didn’t tell him what I told God in my heart: if you take another of my babies I will never, ever forgive you.

I didn’t tell him that when you are a father and one of your children goes through the valley of death’s shadow, you would give anything—your very soul—for the right to hurl yourself at death and murder it with your own hands. There is no greater human rage than this, no more pitiable impotence.”

You can read the rest here.

Valley’s Light

This morning I drove past the house where she died. The light today is the way it was then, a light that doesn’t warn you how peace comes at a cost this day, how once she’s sleeping she won’t wake again, no matter that she is stronger than little girls are supposed to be, no matter that she will try mightily, at the very end, until breath won’t come.

I saw the awning over the window I would look out for hours each day, holding her in my lap, feeding her a sip at a time through her tumor-clenched teeth, because we couldn’t let her starve the way they said we should. Maybe we should have. When I die, I want it to be the same way, the tumor pushing its tendrils through my brainstem, so I can know what she knew, know whether she could hear us in the end, could feel love pressed into her skin, or only pain.

I drove past that house and I imagined it was twelve years ago, and that she was in that bedroom sleeping, and her mother and I relaxed, God forgive us, grateful for a respite after weeks of her pain.

I wondered what would happen if I knocked on the door and a younger me answered. Would I listen to these words, that it will be worse than you imagine, that it will be nothing like you imagine, that you can burn down your marriage and your friendships and set your very soul aflame in fury, and none of it will heal you, because while the rest of your life is tinder, that hole shot straight through the center of you can never be burned away?

This is what I’ve learned: suffering doesn’t make you noble. Suffering is a burden and a wound and a gift, even, but what you do with it, well, that’s on you, no matter how you rage at the sky. This is what I’ve learned, and maybe I haven’t learned it too late. Maybe it’s not too late.

This is what I would tell me, if I could knock on the door and get me to listen, if I didn’t know that the me twelve years ago was even more stubborn than the man writing to you, and all lit up with the self-righteousness of the afflicted.

I can’t go back there and make that man listen, can’t yank him back from the precipice. So I’ll whisper it to this man who is whispering to you, as he climbs up from the cavern, hands bloodied and slipping, straining to see just a crack of light above, to know this is not his tomb. I’ll whisper to him — and to you, those of you who need to hear it — that it’s not too late. I’ll remind him of that girl, eyes fluttering open even as death crushed her, eyes opening out of stubbornness and love, faith-filled that there is light even in the valley of death’s shadow.

Especially in that valley. For if there is no light there, where will it be found?

Holy cow, a whole bunch of words that don’t direct us to something Tony wrote somewhere else!

I realized this morning that part of the reason I haven’t written here in so long, the reason I balk at the thought of it, is that I got the most hate-filled letter I’ve ever received, back in July, in the form of a comment someone tried to post here. The writer claimed I was headed for hell, and likely my children too, because sons tend to fall into the sins of their fathers, you know, and because “God is not as merciful and forgetful as you pray He will be.”

As best I can tell, between the IP address and the embittered comments about how my last church should have kicked me out before I could leave (recall from time to time I’ve written here about the soul-destroying heresies of Jean Calvin, and about my previous church’s decision to excommunicate all the children of congregants), the person is a member, if not of my former church, then of the sect to which that church attaches itself.

Which is a shame, because nearly everyone there, including most of the leaders — as dreadfully wrong as I believe they are about Christian dogma — are good and loving people. Now the thought of walking through its doors ever again makes me cringe, in much the way one might be reluctant to dive into a pool once he’s found a thick ugly snake slithering about in it.

But I realized only this morning, as I thought about all the things my boys are doing, and what I’m learning from them and about myself, and how surely there are other parents who find themselves caught up in maelstroms who must struggle to be present and good in spite of these — that I scribble these things down but don’t put any of them here, because I know there is this ugly person lurking out there, judging not only me but my children. And there are a dozen more like him, who don’t just content themselves with hate mail to me, but write letters and emails to other people — publishers and pastors with whom I associate — in an effort to get them to cast me off.

Then there is my family, and people I’ve alienated, and employees, and people I’ve fired, and preachers I’ve angered, and people who don’t even know me but think they do because they know someone who knows something about me and so feel entitled to have an opinion about me, and all I can think is that years ago I should have named this bloody thing ruminationsofananonymousbozo.com instead of tonywoodlief.com.

But then half the writing gigs I’ve ever gotten wouldn’t have come my way, which I suppose would have been a bad thing, though half the time I wish I hadn’t written half of what I’ve written, not because I disbelieve it but because there’s nothing people hate more than someone who will not fit himself to their ideal of him.

The thing is, I don’t like writing cautiously. I had the honor of speaking at Ruminate Magazine’s Faith and Arts Dinner a few weeks back, and I put it this way:

“I’ve not been accused of sugarcoating. I’ve been accused of exaggeration, and slandering dead theologians, and libeling living ones, of homophobia and homophilia, of socialism and libertinism and judaism, and I’ve been accused of heresy so many times that I’d start to worry if it wasn’t coming from a pack of heretics — but I’ve not been accused of sugarcoating.”

It’s hard, now, to feel like I have to sugarcoat, because someone may not like what he reads when he comes to the place with my name on it, where my words are, where nobody has to venture if he doesn’t think himself up to enduring what I have to say.

I know, I know, it’s a two-way street. If I’m going to be in the business of calling something a God-damned heresy, then I ought to gird myself for the other side of that transaction, which is that some Puritan somewhere is going to decide it’s me who’s God-damned. And so he’s going to say so, and if I think I’m man enough to write boldly, I ought to be man enough to read what someone thinks about what I’ve written. That’s only fair and right and par for the course.

But this person wrote about my children, about the hell to which they’re headed because of me, and suddenly I was right back in those old Baptist churches of my youth, listening to some fat, sweating bully rail at all of us for not being good enough, for heading to a place where we’ll burn and burn and burn unless we shape up, because if He is nothing else, God is really, really angry.

All of which just drains my soul right through the bottoms of my feet, which is sometimes why I think they call that place your sole, because that’s where it feels like it’s gone sometimes, doesn’t it? Down through your belly, screaming along the veins of your legs, into your feet and spilling out through the bottoms of them, into the dry dirt on which you stand.

But then I think — this is how these people rule each other, in too many churches. A few amateur scholars set up shop around the ramblings of minor, abstruse theologians, and a bevy of chattering hens surrounds them to cluck away at questioners, and so those who disagree, who feel their souls oppressed by the doctrines and the dynamics and the denuded aesthetics of the place, slink away in ones and twos and entire families, until the church isn’t what it once was.

We slink away because we are polite, and because we feel outgunned, and because we want peace, not a fight. Those are all good reasons to slink away, but I don’t suppose a writer is much of a writer — or a man much of a man — if he gets bullied away from his own website.

Which is my longwinded way of saying that I’m sorry I haven’t written more here, and I’ll try to do better, and if you happen to be one of those lurking vipers, I’d appreciate you attending to your own brats, and leaving mine to the grace of God, which is far greater and wider and grander, thank God, than you would have it be.

Truth through lies

Some of you may like my latest Image essay, which is about writing truth through fiction. Here’s an excerpt:

“Maybe we have to come at truth sideways, which if nothing else means saying it sideways, which is what I like about fiction, that you never have to worry about some literal-minded pharisee insisting that actually it happened at the dinner table and not the beach, or that it was a Thursday and not a Sunday, or that he doesn’t recall people really being that stricken the day Kennedy died.”

You can read the rest here.

Against principle

Some of you may appreciate my latest post at WORLD, where I argue that Alabama’s contested anti-immigrant law is neither conservative nor Christian, and hence people who imagine themselves Christian conservatives have no business supporting it. Here’s an excerpt:

“If conservatism has any animating idea, it is that great power in the hands of government inverts Genesis 50:20. “You meant evil against me,” Joseph told his brothers, “but God intended it for good.” But what we have seen to be persistently true about any government armed with great intrusive authority is that no matter how good the intentions such power tends to be corrupted and the liberties of the virtuous destroyed.”

You can read the rest here.

Dreaming God

Some of you might like my most recent essay at the Image Good Letters blog, “Dreaming God.” Here’s an excerpt:

“. . . my experience is that nothing enrages the rational, scientific atheist more than when you get rational and scientific with him.

If you want to make a Richard Dawkins aficionado more apoplectic than Dawkins gets when he contemplates children going to Sunday school, you need merely point out that for all his pretense to intellectual rigor, it’s just bad science to assume the supernatural doesn’t exist because senses attuned to the natural cannot detect it. . .

We are god-obsessed and god-seeking and at least the intellectuals of earlier ages—even if they couldn’t bring themselves to belief—recognized this. So many of today’s intellectuals are so far removed from religion that they don’t know the half of how deeply it’s intertwined in the lives and hearts of the rest of us.”

You can read the rest here.

On plans set aside

It’s been so long since I’ve been here that I almost forgot the uber-complicated password I constructed to keep Chinese secret agents from hacking in and orchestrating the downfall of Western civilization. Because we all know once this place goes, the rest isn’t far behind. Which is why I won’t give it up, though I do neglect it so.

I’ll write again, I will. For now, I recommend to you A.G. Harmon’s lovely essay at Image, “Best Laid Plans.”

Be well, dear readers.

Liberty

My July 4th thoughts in brief and extended form. I hope you all had a lovely 4th, and have all your digits intact. The boys and I launched all manner of barely legal rocketry into the Kansas night. It was glorious.

Father’s Day

There’s certainly no distinction to breeding, and so Father’s Day must be intended to celebrate something other than one’s ability to procreate. It began in tragedy, which is maybe the truth of too many things, the world’s way of daring us to bring beauty from ashes. Two hundred and ten fathers erased from their homes, one thousand children orphaned in a day, and all anyone could do — all any of us can ever do — was remember.

So on Father’s Day we remember what our fathers have done for us, and unless we and they are saints, we remember what they have not done for us, and so perhaps on Father’s Day we forgive, too. We forgive, and we pray, those of us who are fathers, that we might be forgiven as well, some day, for the thousand little neglects, and the dozen graver sins. We pray forgiveness for the stretches of time when we are not fully their fathers, when instead we yearn to belong more fully to ourselves, forgetting that you can never love richly and deeply so long as it is yourself you seek.

This morning I huffed atop the rickety elliptical machine in our basement, when Isaac stumbled into the room, bed-headed and bleary-eyed, to tell me happy Father’s Day. Then he set himself to love’s labor, making art and then cleaning the art table, two things he knows will make his father and mother happy. He did it smiling, and with intention, and I saw in his face what it must be to fully enjoy giving oneself to others.

As always, I am humbled by the open-heartedness of these sweating, striving, stinky little boys. I don’t know if I was ever that way, but it is the way I would like to be, and so I stretch toward this goodness I see in them, even as they look to me to learn how they should live.

One vowel can make a big difference

Yesterday it was just me and my three year-old, Isaiah John. We were cruising down the road in my truck, past bars and tattoo parlors.

Yes, there are tattoo parlors in Wichita.

The sun was out, the wind was blowing, and we didn’t have anywhere to be for a couple of hours. It’s times like that when a man can really appreciate a cold one. So I turned to Isaiah, only half-joking, and asked, “Hey buddy, what say we go get a beer?”

“YEAH!!” he shouted. He sat forward in his car seat, eyes ablaze with excitement. Now, I like a smooth draft as much as the next fellow, but this reaction seemed inordinate, especially since at most he only ever takes a tee-tiny sip of mine and then scrunches up his face, pronounces it “too spicy,” and then demands lemonade. He’s practically a little Carrie Nation, this kid, without the attendant theocratic fascist mentality.

All of which made his enthusiasm for a brew suspicious. Then I realized. We’ve been reading this book at night, you see. And in it, the brave little cowboy has a big furry sidekick.

“Hey little man,” I called back to him. “I said beer. Not bear.”

His joyous face became crestfallen. He looked at me reproachfully. “Oh.”

Bad father. Must learn to enunciate.

Bad Christians make for bad artists

Some of you might like my latest Image blog essay, “Bad Christian Art,” in which I try to connect some of the elements that make for bad art to the elements that make for bad theology. Here’s an excerpt:

“To know God falsely is to write and paint and sculpt and cook and dance Him falsely. Perhaps it’s not poor artistic skill that yields bad Christian art, in other words, but poor Christianity.”

Heaven presses in

I was asked to speak to some graduates last week, and so I spoke to them about finding their place in the world and about endurance in the face of suffering and about decisions that once we make them can never, ever be undone. I don’t know how to talk about these things any more without telling what few meager stories I have about running from God, and about being swept up by the sense of a presence so good and true and faithful that I only know to name it God. I only know my own stories any more, and I think maybe that is something precious, if each of us can finish life knowing his own story, the truth and beauty and pity of it.

I didn’t say much about my daughter except to say that she got sick and nobody could help her and so she died. I don’t think I even said her name, because this is something you must learn, how to forestall an ache that wants to come thundering into your hollowed out heart all these years later. I don’t think I said her name, but of course the pain of her absence is etched into my face, and it leaks into my quivering voice sometimes, and though the point was not that my child is gone, I am afraid this is all some of them will remember.

Afterward, one of them told me about her own cancer, and asked how to cope with the anger and the hurt of it, the sense that maybe God or the universe or fate has betrayed you, has singled you out for this burden while your friends have their flesh unscarred, their hearts free of fear.

I recalled for her a time towards the end of Caroline’s illness, when every day was consumed with just feeding her and managing her pain. I didn’t tell her all of it, how I would start the morning with my daughter in my lap, a roll of paper towels and cans of a nutritional drink beside the bed, how I would dribble sips between her tumor-clenched teeth, and catch most of each dribble with a paper towel, and how filling her little belly usually took five or six hours, and how in between we had to give her morphine and sometimes we had to just stop trying for a while because she would begin to cry and not stop crying until she passed out.

I told this young woman, though, about coming downstairs one afternoon, my body and heart empty, with time only for a short respite before going up to begin administering medicines and painkillers. I sat at our kitchen table, and the afternoon sun was flooding in through a window, and every wooden surface was golden with it. I cut an apple with a paring knife, and listened to the whispered separation of flesh from flesh. I put a slice of apple in my mouth, and I bit into it, and the sweetness of it and of this moment were so overpowering that I couldn’t even weep, I could only taste and breathe and give thanks to God for all the wonder of creation cradled here in this wedge of apple.

I ate, and I let the sun warm my skin, and I have never, ever tasted anything so sweet and life-giving in all my days since, and I suspect I never will on this broken earth.

I trudged back up those stairs and with my wife nursed that dying girl to heaven, and when she died things came apart in me that can never be remade, but in the midst of those evil days I entered heaven through an apple wedge.

This is what I tried to tell the young woman scarred by cancer, that heaven is here, that when we are taught how the gates of hell cannot prevail against it, this is not because hell presses against heaven, but because heaven pressed into hell.

Heaven presses into hell, and this is why you get up and breathe again when you’d rather not, because even when you are in hell, grace comes to you. Especially in hell.

The ladder

Some of you may appreciate my latest essay over at the Image Good Letters blog. Then again, some of you may not. I thought including kittens might make this one a little lighter than much of my recent writing, but oh well. An excerpt:

“I bring my sons to the cathedral every Sunday and we watch everyone take communion and sometimes I bite the inside of my mouth so hard that it bleeds, because we all of us need the Blood, and we take it where we can get it.”

Puppies! Next time I’ll include puppies.

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.