Humans Being
A letter to my favorite 21 year old
Culture is a fascinating thing. In ancient Bible times as well as more recent Gothard ones, you would be a young man everyone began to worry about being a lifelong bachelor. In parts of Pennsylvania, your chance for Rumspringa would be over. And in most of modern America, you’d be celebrating becoming an adult by the beverage that you are now allowed to consume, while truly only celebrating extended childhood. Fascinating what passes for life in different cultures, even at the same time. Even more fascinating is how some people fall so hard into it that they build little worlds around it; around something that shifts with the tide. They build organizations, philosophies, and theologies out of it and then use those unstable structures for classifying and judging one another- all based on culture- something that is not necessarily a lie, but certainly not the truth; certainly at least sometimes false. It’s a sort of tricky Monty Hall Problem that ends with a whole civilization built on a strong illusion; a false assumption: an assumption that every little thing that is good for us must be good for the entire world. A Casual Bravado. An Everyday Hubris.
I write to you, Son because we have the same sort of soul. Maybe we all have the same sort, but some of us just bear the burden of being able to deny it less. It’s the kind that makes me question so much of what I’ve done in life when I look back on it. So many times, I played the game even when I didn’t believe in it. And you know what I mean if only for those few moments you and I have shared where we stopped pretending and I found my courage to remind you that most of what you see is fake. Most of what culture (yeah, even church culture) calls life is just a mirage of what our hearts are after; what we were made for. I thought of this after our Sunday table conversation with a skeptic. You weren’t there so I’ll tell you about it. Nephew couldn’t say he necessarily believed that the earth was round and traveling through space at 67,000 miles per hour, yet we can’t feel it move and we don’t hit things and it still takes us 365 days to get around the sun. As a child, Nephew said he was astounded by all his classmates writing that down and saying, “ok, yes, seems perfectly reasonable” while he sat there thinking “preposterous, no way.” And so, we all vehemently defended a science that we ourselves don’t fully understand or fully care about yet were passionate about him understanding the realness and completeness of our own understanding (reminder: “People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”- Steinbeck). My point is not to say the earth is flat. There are scientific facts that cannot and should not be denied. My point is this debate we had made me think about how we come to the things we believe. How we’re always seeking some kind of structure or idea, preposterous as it may be, to hold on to for dear life, and how most of it is a house of cards. It made me start thinking about all the times I’ve felt l was hammering my square self into a round hole- and I know you feel it too. At first it is a challenge- “Yes! I can do this, and I will find LIFE!” Then it’s- “Oh this is too painful and seems pointless.” And finally- “Why do I even want to be round.” I’ll tell you why, bud, because we are most afraid of own ourselves; of the things that make us different. We are not usually striving for life or truth or goodness the way we think that we are… we are mostly striving to be something or mean something, and we are convinced we will be that something or mean that something because we are the same as everyone else, just better at it. We can’t see the beauty of the word “unique” for the loud word “different.” And we mistake this sameness for a home; this coping with death as life itself (“as tho to breathe were life”- Tennyson).
One time when you were a teenager you told your dad and me that you didn’t think spending time the way we did was the way you wanted to live your life. And at first, that offended me. But then right behind that, I thought, thank God. Thank God he wants to define his own life. Don’t be surprised that I said it that way, Son. A well-meaning person will tell you that it is God who defines life. And He is. But remember the way He defined it from the very beginning. He gave you a choice about it. He says come; live life My way, the way I intended it when I created you, but He didn’t force it. He offered it. He invited you to it. And this I know more surely than anything I have ever known, you must own something before you can give it to someone else, even, and especially to Him. Otherwise, you’re just giving sacrifices; pieces of yourself; pieces of your time and effort; the work of your hands. And what, to Him, is a multitude of sacrifices? Does a millionaire need your penny? Or would it just be a clanging symbol? Sound and Fury, signifying nothing (Shakespeare)? Bring no more vain offerings, they make Him sick. Forget your religious traditions, they are a burden to Him. As the most beautiful reference ever written to humanity says, He desires steadfast love, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings (Hosea). And so, He says, Come; that He will make you clean with His love and goodness. You will know His voice when you hear it; the one of the good shepherd. HE will show you His way. (PLEASE REMEMBER THERE IS NO FORMULA TO THIS and run fast from anyone who tries to convince you that there is). And He will keep you on this path. Your penance, devotion, and sacrifice doesn’t keep you there; He does. Sometimes out of fear for your future, I forget this and momentarily lash out. Thinking I can somehow coerce or bully or scare you onto His path. A fool’s errand if I ever saw one. The Father says it best: I have made and I will bear. I will carry and I will save (Isaiah). And Little Man, you know the voice. Remember that day, that conversation we had that inspired your ink? I hope you always do.
So Bubby, I guess what I am saying is when I look back on our two decades together, I, somehow simultaneously, wouldn’t change a thing and wish I could change ten thousand things. It’s so easy to figure out life when we look back on it, isn’t it? But we only get to live it forward (Kierkegaard creds). I say I wouldn’t go back and change it because I was never meant to. All those little missteps and those leaps of failures are what got us where we are. It is something to have been, isn’t it (GK Chesterton)? We all have so many flaws. The biggest being that we think those flaws are what make us monsters instead of being what makes us human; that they are what makes us unworthy of love when they are the very reason that He was moved by love enough to die for us. I should have been better at teaching you this by being brave enough to live my life instead of trying to live everyone else’s. I hope you do better at that, but if you can’t, if you don’t, then at least do as Ralph Ellison recommends: “Play the game but don’t believe in it- that much you owe yourself… play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.” And while you’re learning the game, or playing the game, or finally discovering that none of it is a game at all, remember this- I will be your home in all of it. Every big mistake anyone ever made, I believe, was made with a rucksack on their back, looking for a home. We can’t outrun love, though. It is the truest thing, and the only future God offers. I don’t deny you a rucksack wandering. Everyone in God’s world gets to find their own place in it. I only remind you that you have a place here at home; a place that God gave us in July 2001; a place I am privileged to keep saving for the rest of my life. There’s pain here too and flaws and weakness and fears, but there is also love. And that, thank God, transcends culture.
I love you, Son.