Wanting the Worst for Your Children

           Every parent wishes good things for their children. If you’re a Christian, likely, you pray for them. It is, of course, a temptation to pray that your child will have friends, be successful in their endeavors and careers, be kept from harm and spared from illness or disaster. Perhaps the most tempting and popular prayer of any parent for their child is keep him safe. It’s a prayer that transcends religion. If there are no atheists in foxholes, I imagine there are equally few atheists with teenagers out past their curfew.

Since my son, Henry, was born I have tried to pray for the best things I could imagine for him. I’ve resisted the temptation to pray for election to prom court, football scholarships or perfect dental hygiene. Instead, I have prayed that he would be loving. I have prayed that he would be wise, that he would love God more than anything else, and that he would be brave and compassionate and just. Those are long term prayers, prayers that I may not see come to fruition for a decade or maybe not at all in my lifetime. God willing, though, I will see some of the seeds, some of the tender little shoots springing up from the ground that will grow into the fruits I have prayed for. But just as the first tiny sprig of a sapling bears no resemblance whatever to the peach or pear it will one day produce, the raw materials of character are rarely recognizable as such. So the question is, will I recognize them? Further, will I have the perception and the wisdom not to pray with all my strength against those little seedlings when they appear because they will look nothing like the fruits they portend, instead they will be small and vulnerable, easily crushed and terrifying in their fragility. Will they frighten me? And thus will I uproot them, clip them, throw them aside as weeds?

Henry is developing a stutter. It might be absolutely nothing. It might disappear in three months, replaced by the graceful, fluency of Tom Brockaw. Or it might get worse. It might blossom into an all-consuming handicap that makes him self-conscious and self-hating, socially isolated, angry and withdrawn, the next Dylan Claybold. The mind of a parent tends toward the morbid in regard to their children, like Steve Martin, in Parenthood, imagining his son one day spraying bullets from the top of a bell tower because he had to wear a retainer at age eight.

At first it was infrequent and cute. He was a very late talker, not saying more than a few words well past two-years-old. Now three, he talks a little more, but it’s still mostly set phrases. He tends to repeat questions rather than answer them. He’s not conversational. And now the stutter. It used to just be the occasional odd phoneme that tripped him up. The S sound was a common culprit. But now it’s spreading. His favorite book at the moment is, Maurice Sendak's, In The Night Kitchen. We read it multiple times a day, and every time he asks for it, he struggles, eyes closed, tongue pushing strenuously against his teeth:

Ni-ni-ni-ni-ni,

pause, try again, 

Ni-ni-ni-ni-ni-ni-night Kitchen, please?

Speaking is starting to look, for him, like a cardio workout. It doesn’t seem to bother him, thank God. And Peter and I don’t act as though we notice it at all, but the truth is, sometimes it looks painful. Sometimes, watching his head bow under this invisible opponent’s strength, it almost makes me cry. It hardly seems like a malady worthy of a mother's tears. Worse things could happen to a child, but at the center of my mother self, the truth is, I don’t want anything, ANYTHING, to be hard or painful for my son. Perhaps, more importantly, the problem is that I, like most human beings, have trouble recognizing fruit before it’s fruit.

                  

                                                             ***

Charlie-something, or maybe it was Charles: the kid in first grade, with the stutter. Looking back, as an adult, I can recall that he was actually quite a cute kid, a nice one too, well-behaved and gentle. If he hadn’t had a stutter he might have been popular, whatever that means in first grade, basically he might have been chased by a lot of little girls at recess. Instead, he was the kid with the stutter.

I remember him mostly for the moments when he was trying his hardest to be unmemorable, to step back out of some spotlight, to fade into the background. Popcorn reading, is a particularly clear recollection. The class would sit in a circle, and we'd take turns reading from a gigantic and unappealing textbook with some stuffy name like New Horizons in Reading. Plenty of the kids had trouble reading. They labored over unfamiliar words, fumbled over the odd multi-syllabic riddle, yet they lurched wearily on across the page, heads lowered and beleaguered like convicts in a chain gang. Then, always last, when there was no one else to call on, it would be Charlie’s turn.

It’s amazing at what an early age the human specimen becomes acutely aware of the slightest variances in social dynamics. We, some twenty first-graders, would all collectively brace ourselves, as Charlie opened his mouth and froze that way. It looked as though he were coughing silently, head jerking back and forth gently, eyes pressing closed. Then it was more like choking. The muscles in his jaw and neck would strain, standing out like rigging on a ship’s mast caught in a gale, until he finally spit a word out. We would all let out a breath, as exhausted by the effort as he was. Charlie would read two, maybe three words, and though none of the rest of us could get away with such a skimpy contribution, the teacher never objected when Charlie at last, and with mysterious fluency, called the name of another kid to continue reading. We were all relieved when he was done. I don’t believe any of us felt what could be called compassion. We were too young, too primal. We felt irritation, or anxiety, or discomfort. Some rolled their eyes or silently snickered to friends across the circle. For my part, reading was the special area where I excelled. I was impatient with the reading of all the other kids, and driven near batty by Charlie’s torturous performances, though I at least had the raising not to let it show on my face.

As that year of school passed, and we each accepted the labels and roles pinned on our lapels by one another, there emerged a sort of tacit arrangement that Charlie would pretend to be invisible, and the rest of us would pretend he wasn't there. It wasn’t just reading time either. Speaking is a pretty pervasive element of all human activity, so Charlie had to be pretty thoroughly wiped from existence. He could swing a bat or kick a red rubber ball in the wordless realm of sports and P.E., but that was about it.

Of course Charlie comes back to me now, and of course, I recall him now with new eyes, the eyes of a mother, his mother even. I think about her anguish over him, her concern with how he was fitting in socially, progressing academically, how his confidence or self-esteem might have been suffering. I think about how, to her, Charlie’s stutter was just this one stupid, peripheral thing about her son, as meaningful as a hangnail, how she saw his whole life and every vast facet of his personality and interests, how to her he was so much more than a speech impediment, but to us that’s all he was, and perhaps, as time went by, it's all he felt he was too. I imagine how frightening and infuriating that would have been for her. I wonder now if Charlie ever got past his stutter. I wonder what he sees when he looks back at those elementary school years, how it affected him to grow up in the center of an unspoken agreement that it was better for everyone, including him, if he just wasn’t there. I wonder if for him his suffering was eventually a blessing, like it was for me, if eventually, his mother was able to see a great value in the years of pain her son, and thus vicariously she, went through.

I never had any obvious egregious disabilities. No cleft palate, no stammer, no weight problem or horrific acne, which in some way may have made it harder. The confused plea of my adolescence was, what is wrong with me? I never fit in. I was always on the outside looking in. I had always just missed the drawing up of teams. During those early years, my mom took a proactive approach, and I went along with it. I remember at the beginning of each year in elementary school looking over the roster of my new classmates with her, singling out potential candidates for friendship. Maybe Megan Lathey, she seems nice? Or what about Chelsea Appel? No, she’s already got two best friends in the class. Mom's tend toward the proactive when it comes to their children's pain. We want to eradicate it, annihilate it, watch it wither, shrieking, like the weeds in the herbicide commercials. We want to pluck it out with tweezers like a splinter, see the offending shard slide out in tact. All gone, all better, no more pain, off you go to play with a kiss on the head and pat on the back. If that pain is caused by disease we will scour the earth for a cure. If it is other children causing that pain we will swoop in for parent conferences, consider restraining orders, and, in our darker fantasies, hit men.

There was nothing, ultimately, that my mom could do. There is often very little that we mom's can actually do. My elementary school years passed in tears, both mine and hers, leading into worse junior high years, and eventually sinking to their nadir in high school. All she could do was listen and cry. And pray. Those were twelve rough years. Who they were harder on, between my mom and I, I'm not sure. But. Looking back, without a doubt whatever portion of compassion the Lord has worked in me, whatever humility, whatever wisdom, whatever capacity to love, was born to some extent from those horrible hard years. And if my mom ever prayed that the Lord would make me good, and not just happy, some of those days spent wandering the playground alone, hiding out in the school bathroom at lunch or later in my car, were surely the long slow beginning of a granted prayer. How she must have worn herself out pounding her fists against God's seemingly locked and barricaded door while it was happening? How quickly would she have obliterated my struggles had it been in her power? And what a great cost to my soul if she had?

 

I wonder what Charlie gained by stuttering that he couldn’t have gained any other way? What wisdom or compassion, humility or sense of humor? The truth is that wanting the best things for your child might also mean wanting some of the worst, or at least being prepared for them in the bargain. It doesn't mean you can't help or ease the pain. It doesn't mean there aren't time when children truly need rescuing, but I have to remember that if I want my child to be courageous then he will have to face danger. If I want him to be compassionate he will have to be hurt. If I wish him to be humble he'll have to be broken. If I want him to love he will have to experience loss. And I'll have to remember that, to really hold it close, so that when the danger comes, or the hurt or the pain or the loss, I won't go charging into the fray like Rambo, waging war on anything that stands against my child, and so that, inevitably failing that, I am not so blinded by fear that I end up distrusting God, mistaking for weeds the tender shoots of prayers being answered slowly.

Review of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch

*Full disclosure* I must admit that I’m approaching this novel and this review from a bit of a contrarian position. This is because Donna Tartt’s latest novel, The Goldfinch, got such glowing, adulatory reviews before it was even released, that, I, suspicious-minded cynic that I am, smelled conspiracy.  

I will say this in defense of my own fairness, however: I wanted to love it. Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, is one of my all time favorite novels. It is one of the few books that I reread every year or so, not because I ought to, but, like a guilty pleasure, because I need to. I miss it. I long to be again in the company of those magnetic, dazzling characters, for whose friendship and approval the reader pines nearly as much as the main character, Richard. I miss that ivy-trellised old college that conjures all of the beauty and nobility of both the green-glades of Vermont and the airy, white temples of ancient Greece. And I would have given anything for Donna Tartt to produce a new book that achieves that same affect of complete enraptured absorption. That’s a tall order, I know, but I really believed she could do it. Unfortunately, in my opinion, The Goldfinch doesn’t come close.

If someone else had written The Goldfinch, a different novelist, without such an impressive achievement in her past, I’d say it was a very good novel. If it was a first novel, I’d be dully impressed. But the high school English teacher in me stubbornly insists that the same work that may get an underachiever an A will get a star pupil a B-. Sometimes you judge in terms of potential.

So, why not the A? Why aren’t I joining in on the general accolade showering with everyone else? Well, I think there were some very big choices Donna Tartt made in her novel that simply didn’t pan out.

First. As everyone recognizes when it’s pulled off really well, a writer taking on the voice and perspective of a character completely at odds with his or her own is difficult. That’s why Wally Lamb received such a to-do with She’s Come Undone. It was just downright creepy how authentically he maintained the voice of an adolescent woman over the course of several hundred pages. Nicole Krauss, likewise, channels an elderly Jewish man so convincingly in her charming novel, The History of Love, that one suspects she walks around at home exclaiming Oye! Who ate all the Gefilte fish? When it’s done well, you completely forget that the author is a balding, middle-aged man instead of an overweight teenage girl, or a pretty brunette rather than a lonely, heart-diseased, old immigrant. In fact, when it’s done well, you forget all together that the author is anyone other than the character speaking. Throughout the entire 784-page span of The Goldfinch, I never, for a moment, forgot that it was Donna Tartt writing from the perspective of an adolescent boy. You could certainly tell that she had done her homework. She demonstrated assiduous familiarity with World of War craft, the military tactics of high school bullies, and Manga porn, but at the center of all the accurate details and believably juvenile, profanity-studded dialogue there yawned a chasm where no amount of youth culture could fill the space that plain old character ought.

This could be for two reasons that I see. One reason might be that the world inhabited by the twelve-to-eighteen-year-old boy is just not a terrifically appealing one. Most of us, particularly the “high-minded” readers of “literature,” (sniff, sniff) would probably rather spend as little time as possible in the contemporary, video gaming, Dorito-snacking, gel-spiked world of the American adolescent male. It’s not an alluring literary milieu, and my personal opinion is that Donna Tartt’s tale does little to bolster its appeal. I am an adult female, however, and am willing to grant the possibility that a male reader might have a very different, more nostalgic experience reading this novel than I. In fact, I would be very curious to see the difference in this novel’s reception among males and females.

I think there is another less subjective problem, though, besides my snooty discrimination against youth of the opposite sex, and that problem is in Theo’s character, particularly that, in my opinion, he has very little of it. Theo is in the line of other famed, literary passive observers: Nick in The Great Gatsby, Watson in Sherlock Holmes, and even Richard in The Secret History. The novel chronicles his movement from the company of one vibrant, charismatic character to another: his mother, Pippa, Hobie, Boris, and even his father. Yet, he, himself, is incredibly bland, nondescript. He is a chameleon, taking on the traits, interests and behaviors of the dynamic characters around him, and shedding them just as quickly. What’s more, he spends most of the novel being acted upon by those vibrant characters, but doing little himself. When he does act, it is usually at the prompting, or even forcing, of another character. Even the central conflict of the entire novel is quickly and tidily taken care of by another, more interesting character, the same character who created a great deal of the conflict in the first place.

Does this story even need Theo? Well, yes, but only on a very mechanical level. He functions as little more than the hub around which a pageant of more charming, secondary characters converge. That, I think, is why my interest in the novel had a choppy, start-and-stop feel. The novel dragged a bit (and was particularly poorly edited as well) during the first couple hundred pages, as Theo grapples alone with the death of his mother, while watching a great deal of television (as a side note, it makes one wonder if contemporary life is simply less worthy of literary depiction because who wants to read about someone watching TV?). It picks up for a spirited jaunt in Las Vegas, where we are rescued from the tedium of Theo’s lonely introspection by the arrival of Boris, indisputably, the most interesting character of the novel, and the intrigues of Theo’s alcoholic, gambling father. When Theo absconds from Vegas in the dead of night, we are full of high hopes for further adventure, but no, it’s back to the old, somber, introspective, grind with shuffling, melancholy Theo at the helm once more.

I liked Theo. I sympathized with Theo. I wished him well, but upon turning the last page and closing the cover, having shared such a long odyssey together, I didn’t do what any author striving to write a truly magnificent bildungroman hopes I will. I didn’t miss him.

If a Tree Falls in a Forest...Being Great versus Being Famous

Some people deserve their fame: Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Van Gogh. Some don’t: Snookie, Honey boo-boo, Danielle Steele. Some deserve fame and don’t have it: There are probably countless examples, but of course, I don’t know any, except Theresa Williams.

There’s a little book, called The Secret of Hurricanes, published in 2002. This book is written with all the poetry and humanity of Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead, and all the violence, heartbreak and brutal truth of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, yet it has received no Pulitzer prize; Oprah has not held the hand of its author, gushed her praises and then sent forth multitudes of women to buy and read the book. In fact, its cover is clean of any little symbol of earthly acclaim, no Booker Prize, no Pen/Faulkner award, no New York Times bestseller, not even a stinking little Barnes and Noble Book club pick. It could easily merit a Pulitzer, but instead it got nothing. Why? Why do some writers get fame and prizes and others, who have demonstrated equal or even more talent go unnoticed? Well, the answers are obvious: better connections, better agents or publishing houses, or even just dumb ole, right-place-right-time, luck.

Maybe it’s an American thing, maybe it’s a youth thing, but I have this unquestioned assumption that accomplishment automatically equals recognition, that if I were to write a brilliant, breathtaking novel, a true opus, that immediately the clarion call would go out, the laurel branches and fine robes would appear, and an honorary doctorate from Harvard would just be a matter of course. Yet, it is entirely possible, and I dare say more likely than not, that absolutely nothing would happen. As an artist, I think it’s important to face this possibility, to ask myself, do I want to be a great writer or do I want to be a famous writer?

I think it’s ok to for an artist to admit that she would be wounded to have her best ignored. Van Gogh felt immense pain at the rejection of his work. In some ways, I think it weighed on him so heavily that it slowly, slowly killed him. And it’s not just about fame, wanting the laurel wreathes, and royalties and interviews on the radio. It’s also about wanting your love reciprocated. I believe that a true artist makes something out of the ecstasy of love that human existence provokes in him, and all he wants is to share that ecstasy with his beloved, to let it multiply between them like children. To have the world completely ignore that offering is like the pain of having love letters returned to you, your beloved cold, indifferent, unmoved. It’s not wrong to be hurt by that. I’d say it’s impossible not to be hurt by that, if your love was true. So I guess the question is not do you want to be great or famous? But will you go on, will it still be worth it to you if you are great and not famous, great and unknown? Will it have been better to love and yet be unloved than never to have loved at all? Were and are those love letters, nevertheless, worth writing?

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.

Severed Limbs and Gauged out Eyes- There Jesus Goes Being Scary Again

I used to work at Trader Joe's when I lived in Minneapolis. One day at work, I saw a man, probably about sixty, who'd lost an eye: like, that morning. There was gauze over the empty space where the eye had been. The gauze was taped at the brow, temple and cheekbone, but it was loose and askew. There were faint blotches of blood on the gauze that really seemed to advertise the wound more than conceal it. I had the familiar sensation of something ghastly beckoning me to look at it, the way road-kill does when I have to drive right over it. There's some morbid draw that pulls at my eyes like a magnet toward tiny organs and bones and torn flesh, and I have to pass my eyes over it quickly to resist it. It didn't help that I'd just finished King Lear with the homeschool kids I taught, so that the image of a wandering, blinded, old man carried all kinds of tragic, Shakespearean overtones. I couldn’t stop the brooding curiosity that flooded my mind. Was the bandage askew because he couldn’t see that it was askew? The carelessness of the bandage gave the impression of it being there as a token courtesy to others because an eye that isn’t there cannot look with disgust on it’s own absence. He had another eye though, so of course, he could have seen it. Perhaps, I thought indignantly, it was the shoddy work of some heartless nurse, who hadn't even the respect to properly bandage a man's wounds and shield him from prying eyes...like...mine. All this intrusive wondering went on in the time it took for my spine to shiver with repulsion as we passed in the frozen aisle.

I was working cheese that morning, and to be honest, I was hoping he wouldn't come near me. I was already mentally exhausted from our first split-second encounter. Nonetheless, he ambled over to the deli meat section right next to me where he stood briefly, considering the rosemary ham while I knelt before the dairy case, arranging triangular stacks of Brie and aged Parmesan. Because of the looseness of the bandage and my vantage point, to the side of him and below, I was at the perfect angle to see the space where his eye had been. I tried to resist, failed, and stole a couple quick, horrified glances. It looked like that part of his face had been taken out with an ice cream scoop. I pictured his surgeon hitching up his sleeve to the elbow the way the guy at the ice cream shop always does before plunging his hand down in.

Later, I was on register, and of course, he came through my line. He set a loaf of multigrain bread, a can of turkey chili and a box of English breakfast tea on the absurdly small ledge Trader Joe’s supplies its customers for unloading their groceries. A bachelor basket, I thought. I imagined him at home in front of the stove, stirring his pot of turkey chili, the gauze over his eye, or worse, the gauze not over his eye, taking it to the living room, sinking into his reclining chair, and eating his chili alone and eyeless, glad for his loneliness for once since it meant no one staring at him and his one eye. 

He pulled me from the downward spiral of my pitiful thoughts by cheerfully asking me how I was today. He said he loved Trader Joe’s but lived too far away to come often. He said he was coming in to the cities more often lately because he’d had his eye out at the VA hospital, and he made sure to stop by Trader Joes every time he had an appointment. He said they’d caught something just in time, and that he was really very lucky. He said that he loved this fall weather, and pointed out the windows to the trees that were burnished gold and very beautiful. He thanked me and wished me a good rest of my shift. He was one of the more grateful people I’d met in a while. I have both my eyes, but hadn’t seen much to be happy about for a while.

That man got me to thinking about something Jesus said, probably one of his better known horrifying, distasteful statements that he seemed to so enjoy tossing out. He says, if your eye causes you to sin, you should pluck it out. He said it was better to enter Heaven with one eye than to be cast into Hell with both eyes in tact. He also said, if your arm causes you to sin cut it off because it’s better to enter Heaven with one arm than to have two pretty arms in Hell. I paraphrase.

There was that hiker a while back who got his arm pinned under a boulder while he was hiking alone in the middle of nowhere, and eventually sawed his arm off with his pocketknife. They made a movie about it with James Franco, (which, coincidentally, I'd watched just weeks before meeting the man with one eye). It wasn’t until the hiker was absolutely sure he would die if he didn’t cut his arm off that he made the decision to do it. The movie was called 127 hours; that was how long it took him to decide to cut his own arm off, almost six days. It would seem that only death is worse than hacking off your own arm. I wonder how long it would take someone to decide to gouge their own eye out. My guess is more than 127 hours.

Dismemberment is pretty grotesque stuff for the Son of God to be chatting to people about, or for a priest to be sermonizing about, and I remember hearing that passage in Catholic church when I was young, and being terrified. Most older people, I think, decide Jesus must be exaggerating, or "speaking figuratively," which is another way of saying exaggerating, another way of saying It’s alright folks! He’s not really saying what it sounds like he’s saying. Don’t be scared. Come on back in. There will be no amputations this service.

That hiker and the nice man in the grocery store are the only two people I’ve ever known, or known of, who voluntarily cut off their arm or plucked out their eye. They did it to save their lives, not to save their souls. Each loved the rest of his body enough to sacrifice one part to keep it. I think most people would give up one body part to stay alive, and if they don’t have to cut it off themselves the choice is even easier. I don’t know a single person who has sacrificed a member of their body to save their soul. Maybe that’s because the things that might cause one to stumble can usually be cast off less gruesomely than an arm or an eye. Maybe arms and eyes are generally behaving themselves these days, whereas the more common offender tends to be something like, say, a computer, a relationship, a job, etc. Still, I don’t think Jesus is exaggerating. Even if it’s only hypothetically, my soul has been dogged by the question I feel Christ asking: which do you value more, your body or your soul? Which do you value more, this fleeting life or the eternal one to come?

As the man with one eye left my line and walked out of the store, I swear I saw, as though a veil had been lifted, just how seriously we humans take our lives and how casually we regard our souls, and I saw how totally, insanely backwards that is. I think Jesus is trying to get us to see that it is our souls we ought to be in a frenzy about while our bodies, he basically says, can be tossed onto the chopping block. If his statement is shocking it is because of how inverted our values are, how much we love, love, love our precious hides. Sin is a boulder pinning us down, we’re losing blood fast, death is imminent, and if we were whole and unfallen and had the vision and wisdom of God we would feel the identical urgency of that hiker to cut off the offending limb rather than perish. The math would be clear. We don't see it though. We don't recognize the boulder as a boulder. We don't see that we're pinned, and we love our mangled, gangrenous and unsalvageable arm there under the boulder too much to cut ourselves loose for a life we don't see either, and not seeing don't value. We tend, mistakenly, to believe that our passing mortal life is a thing of enduring eternal value and our eternal soul, if it gets a thought at all, is a trifle. We are like a snake who’d rather die than part with its skin. A snake prettying up and working out and dressing up to the nine's a skin that's rotting while it suffocates the real, vigorous, and potentially immortal life surging beneath it. The whole thing would be silly if it weren’t so truly tragic.

Some Thoughts on the Economy in Light of the Upcoming Presidential Election or, Why the Middle Class is now the Spoiled Baby of the American Family

:The Economy! The Economy! This is the cry of a nation unified at last on one point, if on absolutely nothing else. At the moment, nobody cares two cents about social issues (except to get rid of those damned illegal immigrants who are taking all the jobs and money), about the environment or foreign policy, we want someone to pat our hands and soothe our fears about THE MONEY! Loudest among the cries and most discussed and pitied is the beloved baby of the family, “The Middle Class.”

First of all, before I launch my offensive thesis, let me establish some credentials. My husband, son and I live on about $40,000 a year, in Brooklyn, where the rent for our 400 square foot apartment is $1600 a month, and that’s a pretty good deal here. We have thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and are part of the lost generation of college grads, who will probably never have high paying jobs in our field of study. I am currently looking for work and having a hard time at it. The longer I go on unemployed the lower we see our savings account drain. My son is due to have costly surgery that will require some fuzzy math to work in to the family budget. Beyond my immediate family, my dad is in his fifties and has been searching for work desperately for almost a year now. He and my mom are behind on their mortgage payments. They, like so many others in their situation, have never been behind on a payment in their lives. My uncle likewise is out of work. My father-in-law was out of work for a while. My Aunt will be kicked out of her home any day. I’m there. I’m in it. I get it. We are truly in the throes of a nasty recession. That’s not up for debate, but I would like to make the contentious, distasteful claim that the real problem, at least for the middle class, is not a money problem. The real problem is that we want too much.

My mother-in-law told me recently about a family she met many years ago. Her family was new in town and didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, so this family invited them over. The family consisted of a mom, a dad, and six children. My mother in-law told me about discovering something curious at the family’s house on Thanksgiving. She had gone to pop her head in on the children, who were playing in a bedroom (which the four girls shared), and immediately noticed a marked absence of clutter. There were two sets of bunk beds with simple linens, and a couple dressers, but little else. She peeked in the closet and saw that each girl had one pair of shoes, one jacket, and a warm blanket folded on the shelf above. They didn’t have a black coat and a brown one, a light one and a heavy one, a snow one and a wind one and a rain one. They had one coat that would, admittedly, probably manage for any of those situations. They didn’t have every kind of shoe they might need for all shade of casual or dress attire, just one basic pair of shoes to keep their feet off the ground. Each kid seemed to have a toy each as they were playing in the center of the room, but there were no shelves jammed with books and toys, no overflowing containers of crayons and markers and paints and bubble blowers, Nerf guns, or piles of half assembled Lego structures, Bop Its or Jenga logs, My Little Ponies, or hammocks heavy with stuffed animals. They had no “stuff.” Rejoining the parents in the kitchen, she realized it wasn’t just the children who’d been deprived. The family seemed to have just the things they needed and not one thing more. No one had to sit on a milk crate at dinner or eat with their hands, but the whole house still felt sparse. She asked the mother about this later, and the mother just said that they had what they needed and they didn’t need anymore. They were going for the proverbial lilies of the field approach to life.

In America this is bizarre, some would even think it unhealthy, damaging to the phyche or creativity of those poor kids, a hair away from neglect. For the most part, we Americans don’t hope to have our needs met, our “daily bread” as it used to be called, we feel entitled to have our wants met. We are great worshipers of variety, easily bored, easily disenthralled with acquisitions. We delight in opening our closet in the morning and seeing a bounty of options for how to fashion ourselves today, or opening our cupboard and seeing a bounty of options of delicious things to eat today. How often do we clothes shop or grocery shop, bemoaning how “there is NOTHING to eat in the house!” or we have “NOTHING to wear!” when of course, technically there is food in the pantry, but it’s those potatoes and canned vegetables and bags of rice that have been in there forever because you haven’t had the energy to do anything with them. What we mean is there is nothing yummy to eat. And of course, there are garments in the closet as well, pieces of fabric that would aptly hide your body from the eyes of strangers and protect you from a draft, but there are no fun clothes, there are no new clothes, there are no clothes of a particular pattern, cut or shade. And that feels like deprivation.

Now lest you misread me as self-righteous and judge-y, let me say that this is all coming from self-examination. I am judging, but I’m starting with myself. This lust for the unessential and for variety manifests itself in all kinds of ridiculous ways in my own life, from my excess of shoes, to the three types of shampoo in my shower and two types of conditioner, not counting leave-in conditioning sprays, of which I have two. My two-year-old son has no less than four pairs of crocs, all in different colors. My bookshelves hold as many books that I haven’t read as those I have because secretly I want my own, in-home, bookstore. I have an unconfessed desire for a constantly stocked collection of wine; I pretty openly aspire to an impressive array of tea flavors, and I have an admitted fondness for cute coffee mugs, which is why I have a whole cupboard shelf of them. I could keep going.

Sometimes I have the acute sensation that my home is a black hole gently, quietly sucking things into it. This is the consumer economy we speak of with pride, a country dotted with black holes gently, quietly sucking things into them, “driving the engine” of the economy. This is why the middle class is getting so much attention in this crisis because our economy is buoyed up by the force of this sucking. These hundreds of thousands of black holes sucking are just like hundreds of thousands of little cogs and wheels turning and making this thing run. Our insatiability keeps the lights on in this country. That is why we must be put back to work, so that we can get back in our over-sized vehicles and drive to Target and Walmart, T.J Maxx and Best Buy, like the dutiful, avaricious consumers we’ve always so dependably been and buy things that will add that old spice to our lives, Variety.

This is what makes me uncomfortable about our economy; it is dependant on vice. Or if that is too strongly stated, let me rephrase it. Certain virtues are destructive to the vitality of our economy, virtues such as contentment, thrift, frugality, resourcefulness, and quality workmanship. We have been blasted to bits by our lack of financial prudence, by our over-reaching, by our lust, and it seems that the way forward that is being proposed is to return to those same foolish habits as quickly as possible. Consumer confidence is rated and reported daily, as though our greed were some idiot turtle that must again be coaxed out of its shell. We must not learn any lessons, we must not reign in our appetites, we must not scale back, do without, repair, reuse, pay cash, eat in, grow our own food, or play cards around the kitchen table. Those things are dangerous to our economy. The nightmarish premise for the next apocalyptic film could easily be, The Day Every American Became Content With What They Already Had; systems would come crashing down, lower Manhattan would be reduced to rubble. Maybe the system needs to come crashing down because a system threatened by virtue is inherently unsound.

I came across an incredibly apropos quote the other day. Henry James in The Varieties of Religious Experience writes:

“Poverty…may…be…the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.

Among us English-Speaking people especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor…We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul…the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have…

I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”

We have come so far from where James stood that we’ve probably never even heard of any “ancient idealization of poverty,” and when he says that we have “grown literally afraid to be poor,” most would probably knit their brows and think “…and that’s bad??” Fear of poverty seems to us middle class Americans as basic and unquestionable as the fear of death. But as everyone knows, the old recipe for overcoming a fear is facing it. Our grandparents and great grandparents faced poverty, looked it square in the face, and in the voices of the ones I’ve talked to I hear this undertone of pride. They’re proud of what it made them, proud of the industriousness and self-sacrifice it called out of them, proud that they know the worth of five left over green beans that would have to sprout wings and fly away before they were ever thrown in the trash can, proud of something as silly as knowing how many squares of toilet paper were actually necessary to get the job done without wasting a one, proud that they turn off the shower to lather and then turn it back on to rinse. They do peculiar things like collect the postage paid envelopes that companies send to people in the mail or hold onto appliances forever meaning to fix them, when we would just dump them and buy a new one. They do these things because they know the true value of things. Everything is cheap and disposable to us, so we look around and don’t see the mammon piling up around us.

I was in Egypt for a while just out of college. I remember the first morning, waking up and looking out of the window of my hostel at the crammed crazy city of Cairo, and noticing on every rooftop, people sleeping on mats or families rising in the early cool hours and gathering around some burner for breakfast. The floor of their home was the roof of the building, the walls of their home were the draped clothes-lines around them and their roof was the sky. It rocked my world.  It completely recalibrated my sense of what was necessary for life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anyone with an actual four walls and a roof over their head is bourgeois swine, I’m just asking what would happen if we reset our standard of living? What if losing a ranch house and being forced to move into an apartment wasn’t experienced as a kind of Jobian catastrophe, but was just ok? Maybe the practice is still too much for us spoiled children to muster, but what if we at least reestablished the virtue of asking only for “our daily bread,” of desiring only what we need and no more.

My mom told me about a guy who comes to the shelter where she serves breakfast on Saturday mornings. He told her that everyday he wakes up and thanks God he has a roof over his head. This is humorous because he lives in his car. He means it to be funny but he’s also dead serious. My mom was chastened by that, so now she wakes up each morning in a house that she may lose and thanks God that she gets to spend one more day in it.

Some might hear me and think, well she just hates wealth! Why’s everyone got to be hatin’ on wealth. My like or dislike of wealth isn’t the point, my point is that if your happiness is in things your happiness is extremely fragile because the unavoidable fact is that things are subject to destruction and decay and theft and the stock market. It could all be gone tomorrow. My aim isn’t to make people feel guilty for what they have, my point is that our society is in a bind for sure, and right now we have choices as to how to forge ahead. The choice I see us making is to do whatever it takes to get the money back, get the stuff back, reopen the playground gates and let our greed play again. I see us not learning a damn thing. I’m saying what if instead of trying to get things back to the fragile, unsustainable way they were, we tried changing ourselves instead? What if we tried learning from our mistakes, redistributing our values, and becoming more grateful people, who humbly ask just for what we need, and rejoice with gratitude if and when our cup spilleth over? What if we forced our economy to adapt to fit people of virtue and character rather than require immaturity and avarice? The great irony is that all the wanting and spending and getting is all about feeling good, but it doesn’t feel good, not ultimately. It’s just sand in a sieve, but being content with what you have, even if it’s very little, that actually feels good. Eh, it’s a pipe dream, I’m sure, but I had to say it.