Case of the Missing Prunes

The other day Samuel wakes up in the middle of the night and needs to defecate. Then again in the morning he needs to go again. The following evening at dinner, he smirks and says he had taken prunes from the pantry. We’ve been telling the boys that sneaking food from the pantry is a no-no, so I pressed Samuel for more details. He said Levi was involved, but Levi denied it. To make his case, Levi begins acting out just how Samuel snuck the prunes. Levi tiptoes down the hall from his bedroom and peers into the kitchen. He glances either way, turns the corner into the kitchen and slinks to the pantry. This he explains is exactly what Samuel did while he (Levi) was sleeping. Now, I’m no prosecutor, but…

Dr. Samuel

I'm in the kitchen the other day and hear Samuel ask Levi if he wants to play doctor. Levi agrees and heads down the hall to join Samuel. They play peacefully for a spell until I hear Levi running back down the hall laughing. Samuel is upset and shouting after him, "Stop! You forgot your blood pressure! You forgot your blood pressure!" (In the boys' toy medical kit is a strap and pump for taking blood pressure.)

Well, I thought, their drama is pretty true to life. At my last doctor's visit, I scooted out of my doctor's office with a smirk on my face while he called after me, "Wait! You forgot your Lipitor. You forgot your for Lipitor."

OK, I've stylized my interaction with my doctor, but that was the spirit of it.

A Four-Year-Old Speaks

Levi is all into superheroes these days. At dinner he asked an astute question: "Would it hurt, if we shot heat out of our eyes?"

I didn't have an answer, but Annmarie said it would, although I've never seen her do it.

This afternoon, Levi and Samuel were wearing hats and playing Stormtrooper on the porch. Annmarie thought it was cute and asked Levi for a hug to which he replied, "Stormtroopers don't give hugs."

I haven't seen the new Star Wars, but from the ones I have seen, I think he's right.

Fatherly Fondness Amidst Hollywood Kitsch

At around page 200 of the novel Everything Matters! I was thinking how I could pan it: "Ron's Currie's book reads like the fourth season of sitcom with all the wit and pathos used up, he resorts to secret agents, a cancer cure and drug culture references."

What moved the book from "pretty stinky" to "OK" was a vignette in its waning pages when the protagonist John Thibadeau Jr. gets a call from his mother that his elderly father is too weak to get up from the toilet. In the book's second-person voice (a key to its conceit), John Jr.'s encounter with his father is described.

You crouch in front of your father and look into his eyes and what you see there very nearly breaks you. "Dad," you say. "I'm going to pick you up, all right?" He drops his gaze and nods. You slide your hands under his arms and try gingerly to find the best purchase, though there is no gentle way to lift a grown man. Your mother's still on her haunches to the left side of the toilet, ready to pull your father's pants up once he's on his feet. She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand.

John Sr. was moved and so was I. Fatherhood is a theme of this blog and this little moment revealed a little something about it -- the loyalty, the messiness, the heartache and the love.

Outside of that little scene, the book reads something like a screenplay for a stereotypical Hollywood movie. There's a comet coming to destroy the earth. Only one man can save it: the protagonist who from birth is addressed in the second person by an omniscient voice. But, oh no, his foibles lead him into drug addiction and heartbreak; he's lost his way.... But wait, now he's reunited with his old girlfriend and sleeps with her -- there's hope! Then she dies. He's already found a cure for his father's cancer, only to have the father die days later, but the comet is still coming. Cue the special effects ... the multiverse is allowing our hero and his family and second chance!

The whole end-of-the-earth thing is supposed to add a philosophical dimension to the story. What is the purpose of life if it is all going to come to an end some day? John Jr.'s response mostly plays out as addiction and rehab, culminating with the profound conclusion that "Everything Matters!"

Well, OK, that's fine for a sitcom or summer flick, but I'm going to go back to being a dad.

Lawnmower and Man

No theology here. I am watching my sons play in the backyard. Because it is hot, I filled the plastic kiddie pool for them. After splashing in it for a bit, Levi climbed out and got his mini lawnmower. He pushed it up the side of the kiddie pool and in, which made Samuel laugh. In Levi's brief act -- lawnmower into pool -- I see a kind of performance art about maleness and suburban life. I'll call it "Lawnmower and Man: A Twenty-First Century Performance Art Piece by Levi Todd."

Addendum: Minutes after this post, Levi enacted the encore to "Lawnmower and Man." He peed in the pool and got out.

A Father Figure: Michael Lewis' 'Home Game'

In a year, I may not remember much from Home Game . That's not to say Michael Lewis' writing is bad; it isn't. He writes here in just the style I like -- a kind of themed memoir that weaves together anecdotes and life lessons. The theme is, per the subtitle, An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott is a parallel that quickly comes to mind, and Paris to the Moon too (Adam Gopnik), which contributes to a laugh line in Home Game.

I laughed more than once. Home Game was easily entertaining. I suppose Lewis would have been in trouble if I -- an educated new father with a dry sense of humor and sympathies for themed memoirs -- didn't laugh. I was I believe, part of the book's target audience. He hit his target.

Here's my one knock. Lewis playfully describes how fatherhood is, at least in his experience, for the bourgeois America. He hardly touches on how fatherhood should be. This isn't strictly a criticism as Lewis doesn't claim to cover this ground (can you deride baseball for not having enough tackling?). But fatherhood itself -- the ideal, the archetype, the form -- is what I find moving, compelling. Wisdom along those lines is what would have made the book, more than entertaining, memorable.

Facing the Waves: A Portrait from Fatherhood

Recently, my family joined my brother-in-law's family at the beach for a long weekend. I wasn't sure how my older son, almost two, would enjoy it -- the sun, sand, waves and two older cousins. Last year on a similar vacation, Levi was too young to play with his cousins and he recoiled from the surf.

This time, he and I headed out alone for our first walk down to the beach. Upon arriving, Levi did what he often does in new places: He picked a direction and just kept walking. He may have walked 300 yards (a long way for a two-year-old), when I turned him back around. On the way back, I coaxed him to the edge of the waves. At first he was apprehensive but over the following minutes he experimented with the waves -- running from them, planting his feet in them, taking a few more steps towards them.

Soon, he was in the ocean up to his knees and the stronger waves would knock him down. I watched to see if being thrown to the wet sand would end our frolic. It did not. He turned the maneuver into a game. When a bigger wave came, he let it push him down so he could ride it out on his bottom.

The position he eventually took was lying on his stomach facing the sea near where the waves crested on the beach. The effect was the most junior form of body-surfing; the stronger waves reached just high enough to envelop his body. I saw an opportunity for father-son solidarity and lay down next to him. As each wave came in, I turned my head to check if the saltwater had overwhelmed him.

"More," Levi said between waves ("more," being one of his thirty words).

This is the image I'm left with from that weekend: My older son sprawled in the sand, saying, "More," as ocean waves lap at him. I pray this is his posture in life. I pray he doesn't fear life's waves, but makes a game with them -- points his head towards them and says, "more."

'Stages of Faith' Book Belies Its Faith

The book Stages of Faith by James Fowler was recommended to me. My overall reaction is that it expresses what I believed – more or less – before I acknowledged Jesus as Lord. So, I have a rebuttal of sorts in mind, but I also am reminded by it, in a therapeutic way, of my own spiritual seeking.

Fowler’s intellectual project is to put Christianity and other faiths on a Freudian foundation. More specifically he takes Erik Erickson’s model for human development (as well as a couple other psychologists’) and layers it with an account of God and man from Reinhold Niebuhr. What comes out is a kind of humanistic Deism, in which people ascend a ladder of transcendence via an expanding perspective of their place in the world. To buttress his case, Fowler provides excerpts from the many interviews he and his grad students have done, in which they probe for people's life narratives and core beliefs.

One interviewee, the book's main case study, reminds me of my own journey in faith. The woman, called “Mary”, came of age in the late sixties and early seventies. She says, “I was involved in all sorts of things; you know Eastern religions, pop psychology, the occult, illicit drugs and sex, and all that kind of stuff.” Then at age 22, she has a conversion to Christ (spurred in part by an LCD trip) and begins bouncing around among Christian communities, some more faithful and filled with grace than others. At the time of the interview (1978), she is 28 with a child, recently separated from her husband, and still firm in her faith. My story follows a similar, but (at least outwardly) tamer, arc.

This is helpful: To be remind that, like Mary, I am a pilgrim. Many people are. My two boys are. They will no doubt struggle with the issues of identity, trust and independence that Fowler lays out, and I will help shape how they do that.

Fowler rates Mary a three, on a scale from one to six, for his “faith stages” of spiritual maturity. Here is where my sympathies break from the book. The faith stages chart is, to me, a predictable psychological model of increased appreciation for complexity and broadening of perspective. I’m all for recognizing complexity and expanding my horizons; I just don’t think it works as a religion. True religion is a person’s relationship with his heavenly father; it's hard to map out the course of a child-father relationship in six steps.

My real bone to pick with the book is in what Fowler describes as form versus content. In short, this is a tension he sets up between in what you have faith (Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, etc.) and how you live out your faith (prayer, alms giving, meditation, etc.). For most of the book Fowler wants to set aside the question of “what” and focus on the “how.” He claims true progress runs along the lines of maturing in how you practice a faith – from childish fantasy to fundamentalist literalism to a wise appreciation of symbol and ritual. Towards the end of the book he begins to grapple with the content -- the particularity -- of faith (he did, after all, get some training in theology). However, he comes up way short. The best he can do is:

The issue is finally not whether we and our companions are on this globe become Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, Confusionists or Christians, as important as that issue is. The real question is, will there be faith on the earth and will it be good faith—faith sufficiently inclusive so as to counter and transcend the destructive henotheistic idolatries of national, ethnic, racial and religious identifications and to bind us as a human community in convenantal trust and loyalty to each other and to the Ground of our Being?

To me now, this statement so obviously lacks intellectual integrity as to be boring. However, that wasn’t always the case. In college, I joined a group called the Self Knowledge Symposium, which espoused a philosophy along the lines of Fowler’s (“process over content”), only more Eastern/Gnostic in its goal of an all encompassing enlightenment experience (Fowler presents a blander Deist theology centered on an amorphous, impersonal Ground of Being). My conversion from this brand of Gnosticism to Christ could be material for another post, but I’ll summarize here the intellectual insight that accompanied it. The assertion that particular faiths – Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, etc. – rest on top of a deeper more ultimate structure of faith stages is itself a faith, a particular one. It is not a benign observation. It stands in conflict with, for example, the Christian claim that Jesus is the one true Lord of the universe in unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Pointing out the conflict (and there are many) does not immediately settle who is right -- the question of truth. But it does unmask the falsehood that one can smugly stand on neutral ground and point out “faith stages” of the world’s religions.

To illustrate my disagreement with Fowler, I’m going to rank the two of us on his stages of faith scale. They go from one (infantile) to six (saintly). Fowler never says it, but it’s clear he fancies himself a five. This is the proper rank for a professor. He understands the great complexity of the world and yet is able to navigate wisely through it. However, he is not a six because this is reserved for men of greater action – Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc. (An engineer would be a four, with his logical mind, and a religious fundamentalist a three because of his literal interpretation of scripture.) I will give myself a one. That’s because the faith I admire most in the book is that of a boy call Freddy. He is Fowler’s interview subject who is used to illustrate the first faith stage. Freddy is described as “an alert six-year-old from a Catholic family.” Here is how Freddy articulates his faith.

Interviewer: What happens when you die?
Freddy: I don’t know. Never been up in heaven before, only when I was a baby.
Interviewer: When you were a baby you were in heaven?
Freddy: Yeah.
Interviewer: How do you know that?
Freddy: Well ‘cause I felt the cold.
Interviewer: It’s cold in heaven?
Freddy: Yeah, no, I think it’s warm, real warm.
Interviewer: Where is heaven?
Freddy: Uh, high, high, high up in the sky.
Interviewer: What’s it look like?
Freddy: Uh, high mountains, so I know about heaven.
Interviewer: Who is in heaven?
Freddy: God.
Interviewer: Just God? Is he by himself?
Freddy: No.
Interviewer: Who else is there?
Freddy: There’s, there’s the shepherds—the shepherd man—I mean the wise men that are dead.
Interviewer: Is there anyone else in heaven?
Freddy: Baby—no, not baby Jesus.
Interviewer: No?
Freddy: ‘Ca—yeah, baby Jesus is God.
Interviewer: He is?
Freddy: Yeah.
Interviewer: Okay. Is anybody else in heaven?
Freddy: There’s Mary. Saint Joe—that’s all I know.

May God give us the faith of Freddy.

Trembling

For a time, my son's hands would tremble when he sat in his high chair and began to eat this breakfast. It wasn't a long time, neither in the moment (maybe ten minutes at a time) nor in his development (about a month). This was mildly concerning to my wife and me, but it was short lived enough not to cause real anxiety. What stays with me is the sight of a little boy, fifteen months, shaking slightly in innocence and vulnerability. For me, it's an image of the Christian. We are, of course, God's children. And in moments of truth we see we are helpless; we shutter, then, in weakness and for glory.

Spanking

My wife and I recently went to a parenting seminar, at which spanking was condoned but not emphasized. Neither of us have a philosophical objection against it, but neither do we have an inclination towards it. So, I asked a friend attending the seminar, who has children older than ours, whether he spanks them. He said he once spanked his son. The boy started crying and said, “Daddy, why are you hitting me?” My friend started crying too and replied, “I don’t know.” He stopped spanking his son and hugged him. That was the end of spanking for him.

I have s sense that’s how it would go for me too. I know the Bible says it’s not good for children to spare them the rod; however, I think Christians have to ask the question, Who would Jesus spank? He’s quite gentle with children and doesn’t even smack the Pharisees who obviously infuriate him. Going strictly by Jesus’ example, it seems the worst physical punishment you can mete out on your child – if he’s really doing something notorious – is to overturn his coloring table.