The following was written for our Episcopal diocese's monthly newsletter by someone we have gotten to know through Doug's work on a diocesan committee. It's the only post I moved over from my old blog format, only because I think it's fabulous. I guess there will come a day that's not filled with diapers and infant's Tylenol, with toddler defiance and the amazing pace of children under five. Then, too, I guess there will be a day without infants, and toddlers...and adolescents...and children at home. And I'm sure that day will come all too soon for me, just as it has for Don.
Lay theologian: This hole in my heart
I took our first child, Slocomb, to college last month. I am in denial about how big a hole this leaves in my heart. Slocomb has been ready to be gone for months now, skipping our family dinners for time with friends and sleeping through Saturday morning “playtime with Daddy,” which we’ve been doing since he and Caldwell were in elementary school. But among the stretches of not spending time with him, the episodes of adolescent rage, the times when he was so disappointed in himself, were still moments of Slocomb’s special tenderness and loyalty. Slocomb’s birth changed me deeply. They let me be present for the Caesarean section. The department secretary at the North Carolina university where I was teaching pulled me out of class because Charlotte had called. She had received the sign. It was going to happen. I clutched Charlotte’s hand when the anesthesiologist gave the spinal. I watched the ob-gyn making his way to the form within her. And there he was. It was me, somehow, there screaming for breath. He was an extension of Charlotte and me, there in Charlotte’s arms at home. He was the very image of us as he ate his first birthday cake on the sheet on the living room floor, in only his diaper, relishing that chocolate icing like it was the very substance of life. And somewhere along the line, at some point after Caldwell so wonderfully entered our lives, he became Slocomb. At least it was during those years when I began to admit that he was not primarily a projection of me. And now he lives in another state. I wonder whether he will be as homesick as I was my first term in college. Will he deny it to himself and not call home? Will he test the limits a bit too dangerously? Will he let me know when it hurts? As a child, I learned that God felt like this once. I had no idea then how it would feel to have a child, let alone to give one’s only child to redeem sinners like me. I also didn’t understand how the father could so joyfully welcome back the prodigal son, as the parable suggests God does, though I knew how the brother felt. I had a brother. I knew about sibling jealously. But I understand that father better now. I have spent a few nights tossing and turning, near anger, wondering how I’d failed as a parent. The biblical authors of the exilic and post-exilic literature tell similar stories about God’s frustrations with us. God had saved the people from a bad situation in Egypt, and also when they were wandering in the wilderness, but they had strayed again and paid the price. The Northern Kingdom had been taken away by the Assyrians (about the time of Homer) and the Southern Kingdom by the Babylonians a little over a century later. Would they ever get home? Slocomb, of course, hasn’t been taken into captivity. He may feel like he has been delivered from slavery. We know that adolescents begin to stake out their independence through conflicts with parents over who controls which parts of their lives. Parents so often press them to keep their rooms picked up, and to look nice, blah, blah, blah. Adolescents almost as often resist, not because they reject their parents as such, but because they are ready for autonomy over areas of their lives which their parents have held to be under their own dominion. Parents adjust late to the idea that their children are not just extensions of themselves but are agents of their own destinies to one degree or another, sooner or later. Then they leave home. Some leave and experience an unsettling loss of the false security of a good home. They have to redefine themselves and learn to think on their own. They go lost, searching, unaware of how home has prepared them for all this. Others leave home and immediately seek another intimate community to replace their family, where they will not have to think for themselves. They can avoid the awful ordeal of self-definition. They sink into some other false security, and they follow the crowd a bit too willingly. I wonder whether God feels this mixture of pride and fear and longing when we venture out, sometimes to do God’s work, sometimes our own. I miss Slocomb more than I was prepared to admit I would. Does God know what this feels like, this hole in my heart?
Don Collins Reed is a member of Christ Church, Springfield, and is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Wittenberg University.
