there is no time
On Parenting and Martyrdom (Sort Of)
This newsletter died for a variety of good reasons. I'm resurrecting it for no reason at all. We've had a second child and whatever time used to slip through my fingers and into this newsletter now pools at my son's feet. He sleeps okay at night, miraculously, but he's puritanical in the daytime. He wants to work while the sun lasts. He doesn't understand naps, which are for idlers and layabouts. He has a smile as bright as several galaxies. This isn't exaggeration. Other parents do that. I am merely reporting facts. He's perfect. That's just observable truth.
My wife's and my schedules are such that we have only one day off together: Sunday. We snatch a few hours from the week here or there if we can, but Sunday is the only time neither of us is trudging off to a job. We tell ourselves that the horizon of life is necessarily limited by small children, everyone knows this, I have siblings who have proven as much with their slightly older children. The world shrinks, but in ways that are mostly enjoyable. I like having kids, not just the kids themselves (who are great!). I like family activities and our singing/reading/walking events and the daily rhythms and all of that nonsense. Flaubert's famous quote has become my default almost solely through the demands of responsible parenthood: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
But as much writing as I've continued to produce, there's another public aspect of life that's difficult to engage. Namely, "He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife" (1 Cor 7:32-33). For the irreligious (or perhaps nonreligious is a better term), substitute "things that belong to the Lord" for "activism." Hell, for the religious maybe make the same substitution. The work of the Lord and also of the Public Good are concrete activities, time-sucks, infant-nap disruptors. Protests, crisis-line volunteering, church food drives, and any number of worthy endeavors feel out of reach for the bourgeois parent strapped to his Baby-Wise manual like so many suicide-bombers before him. Wrest it from me and I will explode.
I spent the last few weeks reading Charles Marsh's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor murdered by the Third Reich for his association with a conspiracy to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer has become a model of Christian dissent in the face of the 20th century's ugliest politics. His situation feels ever-fresh, but especially relevant in this particular moment of apparently (perpetually?) resurgent nationalism. His dismantling of nationalist churchhood is a great wrecking ball to the facades of most evangelical patriots I grew up around, including the most popular American biographer of Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas. I'll leave that irony for another time. Marsh has his own distortions, apparently, but I'm not a scholar. They can duke it out themselves.
What I don't want to risk in my own life is the cowardice of good excuses. My best excuse for sitting on the sidelines of any given dogfight is temperament. I relate to early-Bonhoeffer, who was accused by friends of being ethereal and abstruse. Pontificating is boring. Aesthetes are superfluous. I'm drawn to both. Christian imperatives and my hodgepodge of politics insists I be more practical, more present for other humans. My other best excuse is parenthood. Children might inspire political infighting about school curriculum, and climate change seems terrible and relevant to a degree that "relevant" minimizes, but my problems are immediate. I'm living half-an-hour to half-an-hour. The future is all my kids have, if they're lucky. I want to help shape it for their good, but diapers are also an ecological disaster and they stop for no petition. The intimate (if never exactly private) good of raising children, however embedded in community and society and so on, is especially constricting during early parenthood. Public duty suffers for the family's betterment. Arguably. And it's a trade no parent generally balks at making in some fashion and to some degree.
The easy turn here is to make the argument for families as the atoms of society, the building blocks of community that every individual is subjected to upon entering this world. Your family, even if absent, is the context and the initial container of the individual. Or something. Who knows. What I'm sure about is that I don't want to punk out, and that young parenthood isn't forever.
"Human relationships are the most important thing," Bonhoeffer said. Needing nothing, "God allows himself to be served by us in all that is human."
- Strange Glory, by Charles Marsh
Reading: Godric by Frederick Buechner (a re-read!); The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies (my first Robertson Davies, who will probably be a future favorite!); wood-working how-to books in an effort to convince myself I can carpenter; Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison; The Bonhoeffer Reader, but in drips and drabs only.
Podcast: Stranger in a Strange Land for the Big Read Cast!
Poetry: from "Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps" by Sheryl Luna
I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians,
refineries, and a border’s barbed wire,
but I am unlearning America’s languages
with a mop
I love you all. You'll probably never hear from me again.