Zombie Love

When Peter and I were living in Honduras we had a weekly ritual. Tuesdays were 5 Limpira day at the movie theater, which is about a dollar American, so every week we would first go to Pizza Hut, (which in Honduras is about as swanky as it gets) and then to the Mall to jostle high school kids in the line for the dollar movie. We saw some really awful movies that year, "Jumper," for instance, pronounced "Humper" in Spanish, which was the only memorable thing about that movie.

One of the less awful movies that we saw that year was "Soy Legende" or "I am Legend." Don't get me wrong, it wasn't good, but it had a couple scenes that stayed with me, sort of burrowing into my subconscious to pop up at other moments. One such scene was when his beloved trusty golden retriever falls victim to the nefarious zombie bite. It spreads like a disease, with just minor symptoms at first, but over the course of a couple days, it finally takes complete hold of it's victim, transforming it into something completely different, loveless, blind, unknowing, unthinking, self-destructive, flesh hungry violence. The moment I remember was when Will Smith's character was holding his dog tightly in his arms with the animal's jaw locked. He was holding him and crying and loving the friend buried somewhere deep within a demon, while that demon tried with all the strength of body and soul to devour him.

So what occasion prompted this image to reassert itself into my consciousness? Why, marriage of course, what else? Marriage is the ultimate zombie love story. If I were going to write a zombie flick I would make it so that the zombie-ism (?) was a condition that came and went in episodes or attacks, like asthma or schizophrenia. In most zombie movies the emotional tug is in the tragic farewell to an unsalvageable identity that has been irrevocably consumed, and that's good stuff, but that's such a short lived emotional conflict, and it doesn't seem all that true to life either. I prefer the concept of loving someone, journeying with someone, who, when they're in their right mind is your best friend, your beloved, your mother, your child, but when the meds wear off will attempt to take a bite out of your femur.

Sometimes I feel like that, and sometimes I feel like all the people I love are like that too. 90% wonderful, amazing, devoted companion, 10% blood-thirsty, lumbering, psychopath. It reminds me of The Apostle Paul, talking about how he couldn't stop doing the things he didn't want to do and couldn't make himself do the things he wanted to do. Sometimes it's like we're possessed, completely overtaken by a spirit of selfishness, wrath, jealousy or self-pity, and the arms go up and the gaze goes blank and the teeth start gnashing. This behavior is especially obvious in marriage, where your zombie curbing inhibitions might be a just a scooche less vigilant. Now most of us, in fact I'd say any normal human being with the self-preservation instinct of a gnat would flee the zombie, barricade ourselves behind the heaviest doors we can find, pile furniture against that door and then pick up an axe for good measure. But God holds the zombie in his arms like Legend held his dog, he bear hugs it as it thrashes and snatches and snaps it's jaws in his ear, holds it until the human soul inside the demon comes back to him all shaken and shivering and in a cold sweat. And that is what we're called to do too. We are called to hug the zombies. When those we love, and more importantly those we don't love, attack us, malign us, use us, disrespect us, shatter us, we not supposed to flee or chop their arms off to render them powerless, we're supposed to hold them close and know that there is a precious, made in the image of God soul in there, and whisper steadily as we hold them, Forgive them Lord, forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do. 

Messing Up Your Kids

We had a bad morning. He woke me up too early, after a night of uncomfortable, pregnant, half sleep. I woke up rabid, angry at the world, angry at him. I could feel molten lava surging through my veins where the blood should be. I felt like a train barreling down an unfinished track, the dizzying speed, the inertia, whistle blasting, no stopping until the impact of an inevitable crash. Who knows what it was. He didn't want his diaper changed, didn't want to get dressed, something trivial and stupid, and instead of the momma who gently persuades or puts out the fuse with a song, a tickle or a hug, he met the runaway train momma and KABAAAM! He's screaming and crying. I'm hissing at him like a viper, threatening spankings, disownment, Guantanamo bay, all the while screaming inside, Help! Runaway train! Somebody stop this thing! I finally set him in time out and walk away to my own time out feeling like a huge failure and knowing that it didn't have to be that way, that it all happened because I woke up a freight train.

There might be nothing people shy away from talking about more than how they are failing as a parent. People will talk years and years after the fact about how they could have done this or that better, wish they had done more of this or less of that, and that's good. Twenty years distance grants an incredible amount of perspective, clarity, and humility, and also a pleasant amount of anesthetizing vagueness. In hindsight things blend and balance out, a parent can just sort of wave a hand of ablution over the whole messy thing, forgive themselves, and usually it seems, be forgiven by their children.

What people won't talk about either because they don't see it, or because it's too painful to speak aloud, or because they're afraid someone will call Child Protective Services, are the moments when the worst in you comes flooding out and you see in your child's big, clear eyes that they are learning, when you watch your child break beneath the weight of your own flaws, when you see them suddenly channel an anger, a frustration, an aggression that is not their own and you know, right then, in that moment that you are changing them, that you are fashioning into them emotions and patterns of behavior or thought that, one day, they will anguish to be purged of. And even as you see it happening you can't stop it. Maybe you'll stop it one time or ten times, but you won't be able to stop it every time. Eventually you will have to, if your honest, face the fact that you are messing up your kids.

There are ways to feel better about this. For one, you're also giving them everything good and strong and noble and loving about yourself. You're not only messing them up, you're also bettering them. They likely would not be better off without you. They likely would not even be better off with someone else. Everyone else is messed up too. Other parents would mess them up in other ways, maybe worse ways, and if they didn't someone else would. We all walk around like living sculptures with chisels in hand that we take to each other mercilessly; school mates, friends, enemies, lovers, we chisel away with incredible casualness. Our children will be chiseled at one way or another.
These truths can assuage the personal burden of guilt, but still, I don't want to damage my children. It hurts me more than anything in the world to be deeply irreparably flawed and making my children pay for it, and eventually it leads me back to the question, "Why, why, why does God give so much power to messy sinners? Why does God give babies, those most vulnerable, beautiful little creatures, who simultaneously have the most potential either for good or evil to evil people who will mess them up?""What kind of a God? What kind of a God! WHAT KIND OF A GOD!!!" Well, the more I ask myself that question the more it seems to me that it must be a very interesting God. It's an incredibly interesting and, if one can say this of God, unorthodox way of doing things.

If I were God I would probably establish some kind of Platonic Gymnasium for children. Babies would immediately be rescued from the unclean hands of their parents at birth and brought into the perfect, safe, sterile nursery of my own construction and under my own oversight, where they would be reared to perfection. But then I'd have to establish a divine middle school, divine secondary school and college because once perfection takes its hand away from imperfection the whole thing is bound to fall apart. I'd basically have to wrap my human creations in bubble wrap and keep them away from each other forever, because sooner or later the messing up would begin.

Hemingway wrote that, "The world breaks all of us and afterward many are strong in the broken places." I've never heard a better summation of God and the world he has made. I think God prefers the company of interesting, strong, broken people to that of innocent, perfect, untried people. And that is really what God is doing after all, he's making company for himself, but he can't directly make the kind of company he desires. Hardship and pain and brokenness and love and sacrifice are what make the kind of people he likes to be around, and that, fortuitously, just happens to be the specialty of the messed up. We can't make perfect, but we can make interesting.