WHEN I FOUND SOMETHING I THOUGHT I LOST LONG AGO
Two years ago, I left staff of a local church to work from home as a consultant. Around then I also became a father for the first time, which required me to square the demands of parenting with those of my new job. How to manage conference calls when my son is screaming in the other room because he is over-tired was a certain issue in need of immediate resolution. Also, I couldn’t get an early start on my workday anymore, which I had come to feel entitled to because my son, James, would inevitably wake up at 6:00 AM and often earlier at which point the serenity of “me-time” gave way, rudely, to hysterical predawn whining, diaper changes, bottle feedings and the like. Eventually, parenthood became a sort of spiritual crucible for me. Any control I had over my life, or the illusion of control, came under what felt like an unrelenting siege by this sweet, gentle — although at times, highly intolerable — one-year old. The only way forward was to give in to the futility of expecting that life would be the same as before, as if one could simply add parenting to the drink, stir and enjoy.
I first learned this one afternoon when my wife, Christina, was recovering from childbirth. She lay in bed sore and tired and unable to do much of anything at all. The trauma of delivery and the constant breastfeeding and sleepless nights had taken a physical and emotional toll. “So I’m off to CrossFit, OK,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I had missed a few days of exercise and felt I was badly in need of a workout. She looked at me belligerently, as if I had asked her to deliver another baby right there on the spot. Whatever verbal response came with the look I don’t recall but the immediate feelings that arose I won’t forget — a burning in my chest and twisting of the gut. Then a sense of lostness and desperation took over. In that moment, I became aware of an utterly terrifying and inescapable truth — I could no longer do whatever I want.
Guilt that I even suggested exercise, the insensitivity of it all, struck mere seconds later. “I should probably stay here with you instead,” I said in a sad, thin attempt at empathy. And so began an often excruciating yet strangely beautiful spiritual journey of confronting the boundaries of my ego. I had lived as a career-oriented, performance-driven bachelor up to the age of forty-two, dangerously unaware of my attachment to the autonomous pursuit of my life plans. The transition to marriage felt natural, I believed I was ready for it, although in the brief time we had been married, prior to our son’s birth, I was already learning that my decisions, often whimsical if you ask my wife, had an affect on others.
“That boy is still you.”
Now, with a kind of piercing clarity, I could see that any preferred future I had for myself was no longer attainable. The PhD I wanted would have to wait. Five years? Ten years? Fifteen? My fitness goals needed to be modified to something along the lines of, “I’ll exercise whenever I can find a spare twenty minutes.” Even something I thought as indispensable as meditating was now out of reach. Instead of soaking in the poetry of Christian mystics at daybreak, I was cramming through titles like The Happiest Baby on the Block and Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. Parenthood, it seemed, was a slow death of all these little self-constructed fantasies of how I thought I needed my life to be, of constant frustrations of not being in control of how I wanted to grow personally, and it all left me with a certain amount of resentment in need of processing.
One afternoon as I was sharing all this with my spiritual director, the subject of joy came up. James seemed to have quite a bit of it and it had me wondering if he was my child or not. “Joy” was not a part of my vocabulary nor would anyone I knew of characterize me as particularly joyful. “Intense” is much closer to the mark. I am serious, by nature, about everything — my work, health, studies, hobbies, etc. My default mode is to make play an endeavor of cold calculation and comparison. And what, please tell me, is “play” anyway?
Our conversation sparked a memory of this photo of me when I was six or seven years old, running with a grand smile, wind in may hair. Pure joy. “That was you as a boy,” my mom told me once when we came across it thumbing through shoe boxes of old family photos. “That’s how you were.” Sitting in the room with my spiritual director, it seemed like the photo was taken a lifetime ago and perhaps, in a manner of speaking, it was. I felt a certain sadness about that, as if something God had given me, something so essential to me, was no longer.
“…perfectly incapable of giving me the one thing I desired most.”
“That boy is still you,” my director gently reminded me after a few silent moments passed as I reflected on all of it. “Maybe God has given you James to remind you of that,” she said. That got me thinking about how all the frustrations I had been feeling, of not being able to do whatever I wanted, might be an invitation to recover something that I lost of myself in vain attempts to make myself happy, much of which only led to frustrations anyway. She encouraged me to be present to James, to play with him and see the world through his eyes, to delight in my being just as he does at 6:00 AM throwing Legos over the hardwood floor waking up my poor wife.
I did. And it got me thinking more about joy and what it means for me. What it would be like to take my foot off the accelerator in life and simply delight in my being? How could I be more present to myself? to life? to my son? That led me to the following practice: No earbuds during my morning walks with James. Up to then, every morning at 7:00 AM I would stick James in the stroller with a handful of crackers for a brisk half an hour lap around the neighborhood, just enough time to take in the podcast du jour.
The reality this created was nothing other than a self-serving one. I was using the time to fill my head with more words because I was unsettled. There was an idealized self I was chasing that I naively assumed these words would somehow transform me into and in the urgency of my chasing I was utterly unaware of the world my son was experiencing. What does he see? What sweetness does the world offer a boy each day that brings to his face the kind of laughter and to his being the simple freedom that was now nothing more than a faint memory to me?
The silence, at first, was strange and eerie and unsettling but eventually gave way to an inner stillness where words no longer seem to matter. Now I hear birds sing as we pass by under power lines and tree branches where they are perched. And I hear the sound of dry leaves crushed as the stroller rolls over them. Often, there is the faint echo of a jet carving a white line in the sky miles away, the gentle hissing of sprinklers as they billow out pale mist onto cracked sidewalks. James likes to point at squirrels running with an electric charge along the tops of backyard fences and over front lawns. “Sally!” he squeals with delight.
One day, I looked up at some treetops in the backyard of a house not far ahead. They waved slowly in front of the wide open sky with the sun shining down on us and the bigness of it all took me back to an afternoon in my youth when I looked up and saw the same things — treetops, a glowing sun — and felt the palpability of a love and concern that was at once both in me and absolutely beyond me. The longing to know more of that warmth, that love, was as real and alive in me that morning as it was in the afternoon of my boyhood, the first time I sensed eternity.
It was then that I was overcome with this deep sense that the boy in the photo was still in me. That beneath the casualties of pushing hard to find love out there there has always been a love within me to claim. It wasn’t found in the noise and the fury of the world in which I was lost, but in the deep silence of my heart, that sacred space where there are no words and there is nothing to do but to be, that space of love and joy and gift. And in that moment when time seemed to stand still, I heard a Voice singing to me in a gentle, errant breeze. Beloved.
Long before vocational ministry, I once dreamed of working on Wall Street and had my dream handed to me. I thought the Heavens had opened up and delivered a career “soul mate,” the one thing I would do in life that would make sense of everything else, answer every gnawing question I could never resolve on my own. But somewhere along the way, I got turned around and my career became a callous lover with a cold heart, perfectly incapable of giving me the one thing I desired most.
Ministry couldn’t soothe the ache either; nor could exercise or books or any other balm I sought for that matter. I have lived many years endlessly feeding ambition only to have been left alone, hungry at the table. And any success I’ve experienced always demanded an even greater one. It was only in welcoming the silence around me, only in the simple stillness of delighting in what was right before me, that I could ever take hold of what was inexplicably always in me — joy.
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