Father, Fathering, and Fragility

As the son of a man who was diagnosed with cancer this week and the father of a boy who is 19 months old I find myself sandwiched in fragility.  For dad, this will be his second bout with cancer.  This time he is 20 years older and also fighting genetic heart problems that have caused 2 heart attacks in the last 6 months.  His faithfulness to a morning exercise routine may be a significant part of why he is still with us.

Even though Kai has transitioned from a baby to a little boy, he certainly is still so fragile.  Falling into the small pool we have in the back yard and tumbling backwards down cement steps are just a few of the "heart skipping a beat" moments that have occurred in recent weeks.  He is such a busy guy, the picture of both vibrant life and certain injury.

And here I sit between them, the two men who pull on my heart the strongest.  I can't help but feel their fragility thrust upon me.  Certainly it has always been there, but this week I am much more aware of it.  I was playfully tossing Kai on the bed when my wife came to talk to me about the news of my father's cancer.  I was aware of the edges of the bed, the angle of the toss as not to hurt Kai's neck, and the grip on my father that can't keep him from his edge, whenever and wherever that may be.  My love for them both makes me deeply yearn for a relationship between them that will stretch on for years to come.  But will they know one another much longer?  Will dad be around to see Kai grow up?

I can't help but feel the fragileness in me too.  I lay out my hope, my desire, my longing before my heavenly father and am so aware of my own powerlessness, so afraid to be too real with my longings.  If I don't guard myself against the depth of my desire for more years, more relationship, am I leaving myself open to complete undoing and the undoing of my faith?  It feels like familiar territory.  The depths of my wife and my desire to conceive children feels similar and though we have been pleading  for our heavenly father to intervene our cry has gone unanswered.  Kai is so fully our delight, but that can not remove the pain of  barrenness or the tenderness of hope so long differed.  Hope and longing are so fragile in me.

I know the answers that a heady, secure, stable faith offers.  "God works it all out for your good."  "Do not be afraid."  "He will never leave or forsake you."  I believe those things are all true, though I defiantly resist them if they stand alone.  They are not the complete story.  It is also true that the story holds, "My God!  Why have you forsaken me?"  "Walk with me through the valley of the shadow of death."  "Where are you?  I'm surrounded and the forces that oppose me are having there way with me!"  It is all there together.  I find myself sandwiched here too.  Some days that sandwich feels like a vice squeezing me without mercy.  Other days it feels like being enfolded in the arms of a father who sees my sorrow and holds me near.  And there I live, fragilely in the midst of hope and dispair, strength and fear, resilience and concession.... my dad and my son.

Neighbor Love & Self Love

Had a conversation today that stuck with me.  Part of the reason it stuck was because of the convergence with a few books I have been reading.  In Henri Nouwen's book Spiritual Formation he offers a model of life with priority for solitude, then community, then ministry.  Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's book Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers also talks about the need for prayer and community as necessary to engaging the needs of the marginalized.  The conversation today included a reference to Jesus' summary of "all the law and prophets," Love the Lord with everything you are: heart, soul, mind and strength.  Secondly, but not separate from the first one, love your neighbor as yourself.  As if we can avoid loving others as we love ourselves.  We can't.  The framework for love we adopt for ourselves, like it or not is THE framework we have for love.  Highly self critical = highly critical of others, shame yourself = shame for others, grace for yourself = grace for others.

I won't deny the appeal of believing my framework for others is really different than my framework for myself.  I'd like to think I have tighter control on the rigidness with which I evaluate myself.  But honestly that rigidness is splattered all over the way I think about and see others.  I can't even spare the ones I love most.  I don't want to give the same "pep talks," I give myself to my wife or son.  Which leads me to an anecdote that makes me smile.  Yesterday Kai and I were getting ready to leave and I couldn't find my keys.  Under my breath I said, "Come on Andrew."  At 19 months old, Kai is a little parrot and wasn't far enough away to miss my mumbled exasperation.  "Come on Andrew," was really quite cute coming out of his mouth... even if it was repeated 20+ times on the way to meet Mel at her office.  At the time I was impressed that he had made the connection between Andrew and daddy.  In light of today's reflections I see it quite differently.  Yesterday's incident was really quite lighthearted, but the implications for the future are a bit more weighty.  Even if he is not there yet, it won't be long before he is perceptive enough to know that when he can't find his jacket or his shoes that I will be thinking "Come on Kai," and he may in fact have learned to say that to himself.  Disgust and shame are too heavy in that tone for me to wish him to carry it.... now or later.  How can I help but to love him only as I love myself?

Though this seems a simple example it holds something much bigger in scope and points to a beginning point which I must give my full attention.  If I want to love well, whether that be those dearest to me or a person I meet on the street, I must attend to loving myself.  I have a few ideas about how I can do that, but honestly I am not devoting the priority to it that I believe it deserves.  The practice of solitude and prayer in which I know all the more deeply who I am and whose I am seems like the foundation here.  Sure, getting proper sleep and exercise and keeping margin in my life are all there too, but it must begin with the attention to the voice of the one who calls me beloved.  That is where I find my true identity and the affirmation I need to love and be more gracious with me..... and eventually my neighbor too.

Clarity & Confusion

I suppose we all have moments when an experience in close proximity to a strongly contrasting one makes each the more vivid.  A warming day that feels of spring next to the bitter chill of more snow, ice and cold as winter refuses to relinquish; darkness then sudden bright light, squinting, blinking, groaning; tasty fumbling through sunflower seeds before the bitter gag of a rotten one.  I had one such moment recently, though it had to do with a different sense.

I read My Name is Asher Lev over our recent vacation.  I wouldn't describe myself as a voracious reader, especially of non-fiction, but I actually finished this book in less than a week.  That qualifies as voracious by my standards.  The evening I finished we were in a hotel.  After consuming the final few chapters I sat silently letting it digest.  I had wondered if I would continue at points throughout the book, somewhat dissatisfied by its pace, but having come to the end I found myself moved.  There was pain, long and drawn out.  There was wrestling with a conflict between gifts, purpose and tradition.  There was a family who shared faith, but it actually ended up driving them apart.  Love, jealousy, generosity, hope, dispair, pride and disappointment.  It was rich and real.  Real in its passing of time, real in its questions, real in its tension, real in its dividedness.  It was rich in the ways it portraid all of these with clarity and beauty.  I was moved.

After several moment I stood and walked across the room, still savoring the story.  A magazine on the desk caught my eye. "Can Porn Stars be Rock Stars?'  I won't deny the appeal of the title.  I flipped through a few pages and saw the subtitle of another article: "How to Make Big Money in the Music Industry and Look Like You aren't Even Trying."  I suddenly lost my appetite for any more.

Both reads had an appeal.  The one invited you to feel the reality of pain in a long journey, a good struggle really that very much included love and connection.  The other invited you to crave, to thirst for power, lust for more.  They both spoke to desire, to a commonly felt absence, but what they were offering as an antidote was very different.  The one encourages faithfulness and authenticity in spite of the reality that it will bring rejection along with intimate knowing.  The other offered the fantastical: excess, slack, admiration, eroticism.

The difficulty in being invited to pursue these ends is that they are contradictory.  You must choose.  Sure, you can sample each, but you can not simultaneously turn your life to chase fortune, philandering and the affection of the masses while also intentionally walking toward vulnerability, fidelity and intimacy.

Contrasting offers in such close proximity.  One offeres clarity for the deepest longing of our lives.  It offers sustainance along an arduous trail over the course of many seasons.  The other confusion, confounding our efforts at satisfaction and connection.  It offers empty calories in a superhighway chase that only drains your tank leaving more exhaustion and hunger.

The invitations persist.

Moving

Planning, packing and departing... but there is more.

Disoriented
Unfamiliar, unrecognizable, unrecognized, confusion, displaced
belonging?

Loss
Familiar faces, places, patterns, surroundings

Longing to be Settled
in a community of friends,
in a home and land to which we belong,
to have a compelling calling that breaths life into us and through us

Companions Along the Way
Memories, questions, fear, insecurity, mourning, gratitude,
hope, dispair, anxiousness

Anxiousness
keep moving, eat...again....more, sleep, lay awake
grasping, running, stirring, stirring

We are being stirred... to what end?

to what beginning?

Costco

We were in Chicago Easter weekend and, as has become our habit, we decided to do some shopping at Costco while we were there.  The friends we visit have a membership and the appeal of dried mango and an oversized bag of pistachios is usually more than we can resist.  Of course we never leave with just those items.

As we went into the store I was keenly aware of a sense of strangeness to the place.  It is true we hadn't been in over a year, but the store was just as I remembered it.  I couldn't quite tell what it was until I began my usual routine of hitting up the samples while Mel did the shopping.  I waited my turn to try the bagel and with cream cheese and upon taking it instinctually looked at the man who was serving it and said "thank you" before turning to get out of the way so others could fight there way in.  My own voice suddenly woke me to the silence.  I hadn't heard anyone say a thing to the man or woman who were feverishly trying to smear cream cheese fast enough to feed the hungry hands that snapped up each piece as quickly as it was put down.  Not only was there little to no acknowledgement that these sample servers existed, there was little to know acknowledgement that anyone else in the store existed.  I was in a crowd of people who were isolated within the bubble of the ones they came with.  Well, isn't that always the way it is in a crowd?

Thankfully I have been in a few places where that isn't the case.  I rode a train from Chicago to Philadelphia a few years ago.  I was struck by the laid back and conversational mood of the passengers.  One couple I visited with was actually on the last leg of their journey from the west coast and they were clearly at ease, naturally moving in and out of conversations with the people around them and sharing snacks or the newspaper when they were finished.  It wasn't at all one of those "why do they think they have to talk to me, can't they figure out my body language is saying I'm not interested and shut up."  They really reflected the mood of the entire train.  People were at ease.  They were not in a hurry, for if they were they would have taken a plane.  They were enjoying the scenery and the people around them.  Another memorable experience where a crowd did not equal busy isolated bubbles of people was at a farmers market not too many miles from Costco.  That experience too was one of vibrant conversations, real connection and interest between people and contagious pleasure.

Honestly the contrast between the two is so discomforting that I would rather wrap up this post instead of go on... though there is so much more that could be said, like the amount of packaging on the Costco products, the distance they had traveled, the quantity and variety of preservatives and unnatural additives,  overconsumption, the number of SUV's in the parking lot that consume large quantities of fuel in order to give the "tough off road" feel and yet had never left the pavement and only occasionally left the city, or the amount of debt, excess and envy that these and other oversized or high priced cars give.  As you can see, to continue to follow along these lines of thinking is really quite exhausting.

So, I'll close with this confession.  Though I despise so much of what I saw the truth is that all of it is in some way present in me too.  I can't escape it by leaving Costco or if I were to move into the country and live off the land.  In all this you hear a crying out for something more... for conscientious community and in order for that to even be possible I can't remove myself from the problem or the blame.  Indeed, each of the SUV, oversized cart fillers, multinational food conglomerate owners, inconsiderate food package designers and the like are my brothers and sisters.  How will I be as a brother to them?