The kid in the womb: Father whom I love?
Me: Yes, nighly-jettisoned blossom of the Toner gene tree?
Sonya: How much longer till I step into the light of day?
Me: Like two more months now, kid. Hang in there. We're all impatient.
Sonya: Are you ready?
Me: Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! Aaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha!
Sonya: . . .
Me: Oh, were you—were you serious? No, I'm not ready. Good Lord, no.
Sonya: There's not that much time left, Pop. How long till you're ready?
Me: Prob'ly about eighteen years? Sometimes the Big Guy just throws you in at the deep end, you know. I wasn't ready to be born when it was my turn.
Sonya: But you're a grown-up now.
Me: Well, I tell you what. It struck me recently that I am now older than my father was when I was born. And now that I'm groping my way through adult life constantly asking myself "Okay, what would an adult do in this situation?", I have a brand new perspective on what the average day must have felt like for Dad back then. Five'll getcha ten he spent a lot of time asking himself what his father would've done, and his father asked the same question before him.
Sonya: No bet.
Me: Clever girl. I think in the end, we become what we pretend to be; I hope to God if I keep trying to do what a good father would do, eventually I'll become one for real.
Sonya: Is that how you're preemptively justifying your interrogation of all my future boyfriends?
Me: Hellz yeah it is.
"Last chance, dirtbag. Where's the kibble?"
Sonya: So. . . What if you really screw something up?
Me: Oh honey, I will. I won't mean to, at least I pray that I'll never mean to, but I will absolutely screw up. It's the part about free will that they don't tell you: when you make mistakes, you're not ultimately the one that bears the consequence. I suspect Adam and Eve would rather have suffered in Purgatory for a trillion aeons than watch all their children pay for their sin. But we don't get that option. So when I screw up and you suffer, you and your mother and I will do what we can to fix it; but more importantly, I will beg God and trust God to find a way to make you stronger for it. In the end, that's the best I can really do.
Sonya: That is a hard outlook, old man.
Me: Turns out the great truths are rarely comforting in the short run. For me, it helps to try and look at this whole thing as less of a desperate hazard and more of a perilous adventure.
Sonya: Doesn't growing up mean giving up adventures?
Me: Oh, goodness no. It just means they get stretched out. They take way longer, and there's less moment-to-moment excitement. But the risks get bigger, and so does the grace. Dragons come fifteen years long, and they give you mortgages and ulcers—and the princesses fall asleep in your lap while you read them bedtime stories.
Sonya: That doesn't sound so bad.
Me: Nah. You remember Reepicheep? The swordsmouse from Narnia?
Sonya: Sure.
Me: Whenever something dangerous came along and the others wanted to get the hell out of there, he always said, "Let us take the adventure that Aslan sends us." That's the principle by which I'm trying to live.
Sonya: And if the adventure's more than you can handle?
Me: Handle it anyway, I guess. Jesus cursed the fig tree for not bearing fruit, even though it wasn't the season for figs. Sometimes you just have to do more than you can.
Sonya: So that's what makes you a grown-up.
Me: I think it is. We'll grow up together, you and I.
Sonya: Love you, Dad.
Me: Love you too, Magdalena Rose.
Everyone remembers H.G. Wells, and most people know G.B. Shaw, if only for Pygmalion (better known, of course, as My Fair Lady). But apart from that particular brace of Brits, most of G.K. Chesterton's enemies are now remembered solely as G.K. Chesterton's enemies. I've never heard of Dean Inge or Robert Blatchford or Joseph McCabe, except as people getting mowed down in big fat jolly hails of Chesterton, like black-suited goons in a gunfight with John Wick. I have no idea who Mr. William Archer may have been; but he pops up for a second in Orthodoxy while G.K. reloads after perforating Matthew Arnold. "Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny." But unlike most faceless cannon-fodder, Mr. William Archer actually managed to hit something.
Dr. Nitschke Sarco of Australia has invented a 3D-printable suicide machine. It's what it sounds like. I don't really want to get into the ethics of this, because that would be like entering a serious debate about whether or not the Third Reich was, on the whole, bad. I just want to talk about ovens for a moment. Apparently, up until the tag-end of the '50s, British homes were all heated with coal gas. Coal gas gives off enough carbon monoxide that if you should ever happen to feel like not being alive, you could just stick your head in the oven for a few minutes and painlessly drift away. However! In the '60s and '70s, the British government began phasing out carbon monoxide in favor of natural gas; and once those convenient little death-boxes were no longer in every home, the national suicide rate dropped by nearly a third and has mostly stayed there ever since. They call this simply, the British coal-gas story. The moral seems to be that sometimes suicide isn't the end of an elaborate plan: sometimes you're just having a really shitty day and hey look, there's the stove.
G.K. wrote Orthodoxy in 1908, the dawn of a century in which most of the great Rationalist philosophers were united in their prophecies of a coming golden age. Worked out great. I incline to the view that people will dispose of things they're taught to regard as disposable, and I would just as soon not make it any easier than necessary for my fellow men to murder themselves. That said, there's a cosmos of difference between discouraging a thing and discouraging the discussion of it. When I went to make a note in my phone about this blog post, the autocorrect kept trying to shunt me away from the S-word, favoring "suitcases," "diocese," and even, for Heaven's sake, "shivs," which honestly doesn't seem that much better. I get that this is a difficult thing to talk about, but you don't help someone with a problem by shushing them. Making suicide a horrible taboo topic is probably almost as destructive as "Doctor" Sarco tossing out nooses and razor blades like the Easter Beagle.
Catholic author Walker Percy, whose father and grandfather committed suicide, and who struggled with depression and suicidal impulses till his death by cancer, addresses this matter in Lost in the Cosmos. His contention is that rather than shying away from the thought of suicide, it may be productive to examine it as a serious option. Life may feel less like a trap if you know there's an exit, even if you've decided not to use it. He coins the term "ex-suicide" to describe someone who has weighed the option on its merits (not stating but leaving open the inference that he himself is such a one), and explains the potential liberation of doing so. "The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from his past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on his step, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to."
We cannot do evil that good might come of it. But all things work to the good, for those that love Him. Sarco's machine is just another abomination, but perhaps Our Lord can once again turn the Enemy's weapon against him. Perhaps, like a recovering alcoholic who keeps a sealed fifth of bourbon on his shelf, a recovering victim of despair might find a strange consolation in knowing that thanks to the dweller in the land down under, the coffin lid is just a mouse click away. And for those who overcome. . .
So this week's post is going to be a little different. I shan't elucidate the mighty verities of earth and heaven today, but shall address myself to a humbler and happier theme: what makes a good fight scene. Let us first cordially invite the sort of horrible awful Communists who don't enjoy watching people kick each other in the face to depart at once from this forum, and then those of us who are not dreadful, dreadful human beings may continue our disquisitions in peace.
After a long, strange life of applying my powerful brain to the analysis of cinematic action sequences, I have distilled their essence into four key points. Herewith:
1: Basics. The actual choreography and execution must be competent, preferably superlative.
2: Uniqueness. A really good fight should contain some distinguishing element that we've rarely or never seen.
3: Wisdom. A superior fight scene gives us a hero who's not just stronger or faster than the bad guy, but able to out-think him in some way. Victory should come about (at least in part) by the hero using strategy, environmental factors, or best of all somehow turning the enemy's own strength against him.
4: Context. Action movies have been insightfully compared to musicals, in that each "number" should be advancing the plot and/or developing the characters in some way. Otherwise they're just noise. Early in Rush Hour, for example, somebody clearly felt there'd been too much plot and not enough punching, and it was time for a random fight scene; and so, we get Jackie Chan walking into a black bar with Chris Tucker, hearing him address a patron as "my nigga," and repeating the phrase with no idea of what it means—whereupon the offended bartender attacks him, and Jackie Chan beats up everybody in the bar. The black bar. Into which he just walked and called one of the patrons the N-word. It's played for laughs, of course, but. . . yeesh. That's what happens when you have a fight just for the sake of a fight.
Let's look at a selection of great cinematic fight scenes and discuss, by the light of these criteria, wherein lies their greatness. I'd like to begin with Kiss of the Dragon, starring Jet Li.
1: Basics. Impeccable choreography and execution. Five stars.
2: Uniqueness. We've seen the glass-breaking theme, and the evil twins theme, but they're used in conjunction here in a fairly memorable way.
3: Wisdom. Firstly, Jet Li's use of the narrow desk space to stop the opponent's kicks. Genius at work. And secondly, his recall of the opponent's back-flipping drop-kick counter when someone catches his foot, and the use of that knowledge to predict his final attack and snap his neck. Dat's da good stuff.
4: Context. No difficulty here, this fight is the climax of the whole movie.
Just for grins, I'm going to include a fight between Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren from the first Expendables, in which Jet uses almost the exact same strategy of incorporating his environment and using the opponent's size against him, except with a slightly different outcome this time around. It's not anywhere near as good a fight, but I give it some points for expectation subversion.
All right, next up is Jason Statham in The Transporter, his first starring action role (after wing-manning Jet Li in the "who needs plots, we've got CGI"-era Highlander/Superman 3 mash-up, The One). This scene is affectionately referred to as The Grease Fight, because. . . well.
1: Basics. Goofy but solid. The flailing and brawling is pretty realistic, and meshes surprisingly well with the cartoony flash of Statham's fighting style. The grease makes it all believable somehow, even four spin kicks in a row all connecting with an opponent. Haven't seen anyone pull that shit since my man Mark in Only the Strong.
2: Uniqueness. I mean
3: Wisdom. This one's kind of cheating, because it's really the same as #2. But still, Statham shows great shrewdness in using the grease in this manner. Full marks.
4: Context. Acceptable. This fight happens towards the end of the movie, as he's gradually punching his way through the goons to rescue the girl with the face and beat up the guy that, you know, kicked an orphaned puppy or whatever the plot is. It doesn't develop Statham's character, because his character in no way changes from being a badass at the beginning to being a badass at the end. But it does move the story along, so. You know. Not a thinking man's film.
Next! I want to talk for a moment about Man of Tai Chi, starring Tiger Chen as Tiger Chen and Keanu Reeves as Evil Keanu Reeves. It's an absolutely amazingly written movie, in that it contains like fifteen different fights (admittedly, several of them occur in a montage), and every single one of them is visibly developing the protagonist's character. It's like a Dostoevsky novel, with tai chi taking the place of soul-shattering epiphanies as the vehicle for personal growth. It's also impressive because with only one exception, every fight is one on one and takes place in a handful of static environments, and yet the martial choreography is so damned spectacular that they're always visually interesting. Let's go to the clip:
1: Basics. Just. . . man! Five stars.
2: Uniqueness. To play fair here, I have to take off points in this category. There's no "gimmick" in this fight, it's just two guys hitting each other. The true strength of this scene, and of the movie as a whole, is that it shines despite (or perhaps because of) the stripped-down purity of the fighting. It doesn't need any gimmicks.
3: Wisdom. Again, just. . . man! Tiger ultimately triumphs because he's able to let go of his own ego (that's essentially his entire character arc), and tap into the sort of Zen inner emptiness from which the power of tai chi flows. And the reason he's finally able to do this is because Keanu himself gives him the prompting to do it—as a taunt. "You're nothing," his last insult before pulling the dishonorable knife, becomes the reminder that Tiger needs to accept his own smallness and become humble enough to ascend. Evil defeats itself.
4: Context. As I mentioned (oh, uh—spoilers?), this scene brings Tiger to the perfect conclusion of his hero's journey. It was Keanu's manipulation that watered the seeds of hubris already within him at the beginning, and in the end it's Keanu's own malice that helps Tiger to defeat himself and thus defeat his external foe as well. Just a magnificently solid character study, and some truly delightful martial artistry. Great flick. We love you, Keanu!
I mentioned Mark Dacascos earlier (star of Only the Strong, the greatest of all capoeira films). Bizarrely, he's probably best known as the back-flipping host of Iron Chef, but he's a phenomenal martial artist, and I have a creepy habit of writing roles into my novels that he could play if they ever become movies. Somehow, he's never quite broken into the action mainstream. For me and my cousin Jes, it was a dream come true to hear that he'd be co-starring with Jet Li, who brought along his buddy DMX from Romeo Must Die for the kung-fu/hip-hop fusion Cradle 2 The Grave. Good idea on paper; but sadly, the movie was pretty mediocre, and even Jet seems like he's phoning it in. Mark was easily the best part of that film, but I want to discuss a different Dacascos delivery: Drive. (Not to be confused with the Ryan Gosling film of the same name.)
This bad boy came out in 1997, just before The Matrix really popularized "wire-fu." It co-stars Kadeem Hardison and Brittany Murphy (requiescat in pace), and it's a surprisingly genuinely funny and likable buddy flick on top of being, man—just the most mind-blowingly awesome martial arts movie. I'm still puzzled that no one ever seems to have heard of this one. I highly recommend it, but let me also add a caveat: there are two versions of it, one being the director's cut which is like 15, 20 minutes longer. I strongly advise not watching that version, because it's all sad backstory stuff and unnecessary side-character deaths that just detract from the levity which is one of the movie's real strengths. So! That said, may I offer you some Dacascos with your tea?
1: Basics. Ahhhhhh, dat's da stuff. The speed and accuracy, the sense of power and impact, it's just damn good fighting. Now, in case you were confused by the ending, let me explain that the bad guy has a bionic implant from an evil corporation, and when he's about to get his ass kicked (right about the 3 minute mark), they suddenly dial up the implants to maximum. That's why he suddenly perks up, and also why his thoracic cavity short-circuits.
2: Uniqueness. It's pretty much par for the course these days, but back in the '90s it was hard to find quality wire-work outside of Hong Kong. I was a huge fan of the wire-heavy Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, but even as a dewy-eyed high-schooler, I never thought the hyperbolic swing-for-the-rafters choreography was anything but goofy and fun. The sheer quality of execution here is what sets this scene apart.
3: Wisdom. I guess we're a little lacking in this particular department. At the very beginning, when Mark is getting his ass handed to him, he busts out his escrima skills with the broken broom handle, basically just to jump-start his mojo and re-convince his own brain that he's not outmatched. Once he sees that the guy's not invincible, he drops the stick and goes head-to-head. Not necessarily the brightest move, but fighter's pride is fighter's pride. And of course, at the end, evil is technically defeated by its own evilness, although that mostly manifests as luck rather than cleverness on Mark's end.
4: Context. Yeah, okay, this movie is definitely not Dostoevsky. The plot is very much a peg on which to hang the action scenes. Let's move along.
Now I have to bring in the blades. If you love the Iliad, you probably don't love the movie Troy. Nor should you. It doggedly expurgates every divine or supernatural element from the narrative, gutting the unearthly sublimity which is the power and point of humanity's first epic. BUT. When it comes to the Hector/Achilles fight. . . All must be forgiven. This is, quite simply, one of The Great Fights. Extreme respect to both Pitt and Bana, who actually did the whole fight themselves. (Pitt even injured his Achilles tendon during the filming, which—hoo boy, no one does Dad jokes like God the Father.)
1: Basics. Outstanding.
2: Uniqueness. You don't see much spear-fighting in movies, and I love the way they slowly shed weapons as the fight continues until they're more brawling than fencing. But on the whole, there's no gimmick in this fight. Just amazing sword-art.
3: Wisdom. Debatable. Achilles dominates from beginning to end, and never needs any kind of trick or device beyond being a master tactician and the ultimate swordsman. However, I would argue that this scene triumphs by reversing the usual trope, because the entire point of it is that Hector knows all along that he can't win. There's never any doubt in anyone's mind how it's going to turn out, and yet Hector goes out to fight anyway because he's a man of honor.
4: Context. Crucial moment for the plot as a whole, and for Achilles as a man. It's his lowest point, and the moment that will bring about his final decision as to whether to become a soulless bully or a true warrior when Priam comes to ask for the body of his son.
I know what you're gonna say. This next one isn't technically a fight scene, it's a chase scene. And that may be. But it's sure as hell an action sequence, and I think it contains enough fighting to qualify, if only just. This is from Casino Royale.
1. Basics. I believe the actor that Bond is chasing is one of the people who invented parkour. So presumably, the parkour basics are solid. They sure look cool.
2. Uniqueness. The contrast in their styles is so distinctive. It's awesome and also hilarious, and does a lot to characterize Bond (which we'll revisit in point #4). Parkour guy is constantly flipping and squeezing through stuff, while Bond just flops around and smashes through walls. It's a very memorable antithesis of opponents. Also, Bond catching the gun and throwing it back at the guy, nearly causing him to fall to his death, is one of my all-time favorite movie moments.
3. Wisdom. Lots of little things. Bond keeps seeing that parkour guy is faster and slipperier than he is, and using his environment to compensate. Running up the extending crane shaft, breaking the release valve on the hydraulic lift, jumping onto the back of the van, &c. Clever and tenacious.
4. Context. The scene definitely advances the plot, which is always good; but more importantly, as we noted earlier, it does a great deal to introduce us to the new 007. (Remember, this movie was Craig's inauguration to the role.) It tells us he's powerful and brutal and not too concerned about collateral damage, in sharp contrast to the slick, wise-cracking Bonds of the past.
Next up. There's a pretty universal consensus that the second two Matrix movies (or Matrices) were a bit scattered and incoherent. I don't dissent. But the trilogy concludes with what, to my mind, remains the best flying fight ever put to film. Doing Man of Steel right ten years before Man of Steel did Man of Steel wrong, and bringing us something so fantastically close to a live-action Dragonball Z that I seriously tensed up for a Kamehameha Wave when I saw it for the first time—I give you The Matrix: Revolutions.
1: Basics. Holy shit, dude. Keanu throws one of the most beautiful spin kicks I've ever seen. The meshing of anti-gravity effects with martial arts is just poetry to watch.
2: Uniqueness. Unique not only in the era-creating special effects but in the emotional intensity of the scene. The music, the build-up, the history between these enemies—right down to that profoundly satisfying call-back to the "bring it" gesture from their subway fight, it engages you from the brain to the heart to the guts. (Or as the Oracle might put it, "through and through: balls to bones.")
3: Wisdom. This one is cause for contention. It's clear that Neo defeats Smith by accepting his own death, and that's a major win in this category. But on the other hand, it's not at all clear exactly why, or how, Smith killing (?) or transforming (?) Neo causes all the Smiths to die (?) or de-transform (?), and that kind of robs the climax of some of its intensity. It's not a moment when you want your audience going, "Wait, what?"
4: Context. Well. You don't get more definitive than this.
For our penultimate fight, we take a new and different turn. Like the Matrices, the Star Wars prequels are hotbeds of ambivalence in the fan base. All I can say is, it's gotta be difficult for anybody to do a follow-up to a trilogy that practically defined a generation. But let's put the live-action Star Wars aside, for today I bring you. . .
1: Basics. Yeah. Yeah, it's a cartoon. It's still bitchin', bro.
2: Uniqueness. Just a lot of nice little touches. The vine-swinging, the Force-pushing, the rapidly shifting backgrounds. I'm especially fond of the raindrops falling on the lightsabers.
3: Wisdom. Anakin doesn't exactly out-think Ventress, but he beats her by tapping into the Dark Side as well as the Light, so I guess you could say he out-feels her? That sounds weird.
4: Context. Definite win for character development. They're not really going for subtlety with the giant red moon overhead.
And finally. This is the fight scene upon which I predicated my fight scene criteria. This is the fight scene that brought wuxia to the West. This is the fight scene that shall never be surpassed among fight scenes. Ladies and gentlemen. I bring you Michelle Yeoh v. Zhang Ziyi: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
1: Basics. Unmatched. Period.
2: Uniqueness. The weapon-cutting! Yeoh goes through everything in the arsenal, only to have her armaments systematically severed by the Green Destiny. A singular motif indeed.
3: Wisdom. This is genius. Yeoh realizes that whatever weapon she picks up is going to get cut in half, and so she deliberately lets her final sword get split and uses that to get inside Zhang's guard. The older and wiser warrior prevails.
4: Context. Critical moment in their relationship. From here, everything spirals down to tragedy.
Well, folks, there it is. This has been a really fun post for me, and I surely hope you enjoyed it too. I wish you all a dolorous Advent, rife with fasts and ablutions. God bless, and I'll see you all next week. Peace!
St. Francis praised God for our Sister Death; yet Jesus Himself wept when He saw it. John Donne called Death a hateful slave, doomed to its own final death; yet the skull-tree of Golgotha became the great standing key to the Everlasting Mansions. Our dance with the scythe is ambivalent—cryptic, you might well say—but one of life's few bedrocks certitudes is that we'll dance that dance.
Ellie and I are preparing for a birth. Three more months. The kid will emerge from the safest, warmest place she'll ever know into a world of goblins, and then she'll live out her life and die. God willing, she'll bury the both of us first, and have kids of her own who will bury her and die. I know this all sounds horrifically morbid, but let's just look straight at it. Things are rough down here.
It's funny (ha) that we generally don't recall learning about death. There's a whole bit about that in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: "There must have been a moment in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering—stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. . . . We must be born with an intuition of mortality." I remember my first dead pet, Socks the gerbil; I remember my first dead relative, my God-father Bill, for whom I bore pall at the insufficient age of six. Requiescat in pace. But in neither case was I puzzled when told that they wouldn't be waking up. My awareness of the grave predates my memory of the alphabet or the praxis of tying my shoes.
Now, that might sound like some heavy shit for a little kid to be carrying around. But the truth is, as far back as I can recall, I've never been afraid of death. I assume it's because, praise God, I was taught from infancy to praise God. I've always known there's a better place I can get to when I die. (Note, can get to: not necessarily will. Gotta pick the right paths through the proving ground.) And it's not just that in Heaven you can have all the ice cream you want. It's that all the suffering, all the doubt and fear and misery and anguish and despair, will make sense there, will be explained and show their meaning and bear their fruit. Once there, we'll be able to look back and see that seventy years of wandering and toil were really all one great charge of wild horses and blazing swords. The last hacking breath of cancered lungs, the pain in the chest and the moment of dread, the asphalt hurtling up to meet us—whatever death we get, after we make it through, will reveal itself as the final battle in a long, long war. And then the revelry begins.
What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? It's an old riddle, apparently impossible to solve. And it is impossible to solve, for exactly the same reason that it's impossible to solve a wombat or conjugate an orangutan: because those combinations of words are meaningless. If an irresistible force exists, anywhere in Creation, then by definition there is no such thing as an immovable object. The "riddle" boils down to, what would happen if A was not A? That isn't a question, it's noise masquerading as English. And nobody does that to my language. Nobody.
Dost thou feel Puckish, lunk?
The more pernicious example, which everyone has heard, is the question, "Can God make a rock so big He can't lift it?" If He can, then there's something He can't lift, and if He can't, then there something He can't make. Oh no, it looks like He loses either way: so much for God's vaunted omnipotence! Except, again, the question is actually, "Is God more powerful than God," or in other words, "Is A not A?" The real answer is neither yes nor no. The real answer is, "Shut your trap, ya doofus."
God can do any Thing. Creating four beans out of nothingness is a thing, and therefore He can do that. Causing two beans plus two beans to equal five beans is not a thing. It's gibberish. He "can't" do that, because there's nothing there to do. Chesterton argues in Orthodoxy that you can easily tell whether a thing is possible (if only for God) by applying the test of imagination. You can imagine four beans suddenly coming into existence, but you can't imagine two and two not making four. That's because our minds are made in the image of God, and we share in the Fire of Divine Reason.
Sooner or later, my soon-to-be-born daughter is bound to ask me how a loving God can allow people to go to Hell. I'll have to have some kind of response ready, in small person language, to explain the darkest of all mysteries. By that time, her capacious brain should already encompass the business of A being A, so we'll start there. Heaven means freely chosen unity with God—therefore He can't force anyone to go to Heaven. And the alternative to everlasting love and joy is, you know, the lack of those things. It sounds almost ludicrously obvious.
Except it doesn't really satisfy the heart, does it. Here's a simple equation for why your fellow man will suffer for all of eternity, now let's go have lunch. I think we forget that omnipotence means God can do anything, but doesn't necessarily mean He can do anything easily. Remember that He had to rest after making the Earth. And He had to become Sin and actually go to Hell in order to give us the opportunity of entering the Kingdom. He not only endured the anguish and misery of every sufferer, He also endured the ugliness and filth of every causer of suffering. Just to give us the option. If He could have removed the alternative by any conceivable means, isn't it clear that He would have? But He couldn't, and He can't. Giving us the freedom to enter Heaven without the freedom to enter Hell is simply not a Thing.
An architect once gave Pope John XXIII (now St. John XXIII) his plans for a new building on the Vatican grounds. The Pope returned them with the words Non sumus angeli, "We are not angels," written in the margin. It seems the good architect had forgotten to include bathrooms.
I love that story. Partly because it's a Papal poop joke, and we just don't have enough of those for my money. But also because it puts a pontifical finger on the core divide between us and our winged kin. Angel and Man are both God's kids, and we're both spiritual beings—but you and I are animals as well. Souls in bodies, fire in dust. And if the Ascension and the Assumption teach us anything, it's that we'll always be corporeal creatures. We'll never be angels, and there are starry mansions worth of wisdom that we'll have to apprehend before we can even speak with them as peers.
Which is fine. God didn't stuff our spirits into flesh because He misread the directions on the box. Clearly, He wanted there to be different types of intelligence operating in the universe: one Church, many parts. (Or as Morgan Freeman put it in Robin Hood, "Allah loves wondrous variety.") I expect there are positively scads of angels out there working on stuff that has precious little to do with Earth and human beings; but just as we have a common Father, so too we all have a common Enemy. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities, against the rulers of this world of darkness and the spirits of the world above" (Eph. 6:12).
That being the case, I am deeply heartened to know that Our Lord has already assigned one of His angels to tend my unborn child. When Sonya Mags asks me about the powerful immortal that smolders watchfully at her side, I think I'll tell her about the vision that came to Tolkien as he prayed before the Blessed Sacrament. He reported to his son Christopher that he saw the love of God descending upon the children of men and taking shape as persons of pure Charity, just as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the love between Father and Son. And the person who proceeds from, or rather is, His love for each human being, is each human being's guardian angel.
Now, my understanding is that this belief is what's called a theologoumenon: a belief that does not contravene Church teaching but that also has not (yet) been doctrinally approved. It's certainly possible that there's simply a class of angels that specialize in guarding humans, and they have a sort of duty roster that rotates them to a newborn person when their previous guardee dies—but Tolkien's vision has an elegance which, to me, rings of truth.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Liza Khokhlakov tells Alyosha about a recurring dream of hers. In the dream, she's alone in her room at night and she becomes aware of demons skulking in the corners and overhangs. Slowly, they close in around her and stretch out their claws to take possession of her body. Then she makes the Sign of the Cross and they scatter back into the shadows—but right away she has the urge to curse God, and the demons start to come back. Then she makes the Sign of the Cross once again, and once again they scatter. "It's great fun, and awfully exciting," she says. Alyosha reveals that he's had the same dream.
I've had that dream as well. I've always been more interested in Evil than is good for me. Over time I've come to know when I'm looking too closely at the Enemy, even from ostensibly constructive motives: I start shying away from virtuous thoughts. If I'm following some mean or shameful train of thought and a chance word or image calls to mind (say) the Blessed Virgin, I'll find myself quelling the association. And that's when I need to cut the train of thought, say a Hail Mary, and find something else to think about. Wouldn't it be lovely if I always did that.
But the forbidden is enticing. The extreme banality of that sentence is evidence enough of its truth; almost nothing is better known to us than the allure of the locked door. Even before Original Sin had bent us, we gravitated towards the one thing we were told to stay away from: how much more so, now? "There can be no good without evil": the daylong refrain and refuge of puddle-deep philosophies. Nor then can there be flesh without leprosy. True enough, the freedom to choose garbage and poison must exist if one is to come freely to the banquet; but, definitionally, no one ever needs to choose the Ugly Path. But of course it's great fun, and awfully exciting.
God is Triune, and IS Triune from all of eternity. He begets Persons through Love. The human family is patterned on the Holy Trinity, creating through mutual self-giving. It took me a long time to understand why masturbation is a mortal sin. It's because it's patterned on Satan. The Enemy isn't triune, isn't in union with any other person, but he still seeks the power of God without participating in the nature of God, the gifting of God, the self-sacrifice of God. Masturbation is a gash in the soul from that cataclysmic effort to rip the power of Creation out of the hands of Love.
I can't give a ready definition of Art. It's something like participation in the Divine quest to bring forth beauty and truth, but of course that's superlatively nebulous. Still, like everyone, I have a reasonable sense of what is and isn't Art, in practice. In the same way, I don't have an objective, universal definition of Pornography; but someone on the internet once rather insightfully defined it as anything in which you lose interest immediately after masturbating. What makes porn porn is that the enticement to Satanic self-love is the dominant or sole purpose of the image. And now here's the terrifying part:
We're all responsible for each other. The man who sells pornography, who furnishes me with temptation, bears a part in my punishment (woe to him by whom offenses come); but, also, I bear a part in his punishment because if I hadn't yielded to the temptation he offered, his own suffering in Purgatory would be less. Our sins couple and yield putrid fruit. And the woman in the image—already victimized by the seller and dehumanized by the buyer—will also suffer in the scourging of all this Purgatorial remorse. That woman, who is someone's daughter. Who could someday be my daughter. I would kill everyone to keep that from happening to Sonya, but she'll be just as free as I am to perpetuate the cycle of the Enemy.
And that's what Porn is now. My daughter's face, defiled. My daughter's face in Hell.
El and I are both writers and singers; it'll be odd if our kid isn't at least a little artistic. It shouldn't be too taxing for her to learn how the creative act is a reflection of God's creativity through the Word—Fiat Lux and all that sort of thing, don't you know. The hard part will be watching her learn that the world doesn't care about her artistic endeavors. Whatever her vocation turns out to be, at some point she will exsanguinate her soul into some great undertaking, offer her absolute self to the collective perusal, and bang her skull on the vast indifference of the throng. Probably. It's conceivable that she'll A. achieve instant fame as a genius or B. have no artistic inclinations whatsoever. But let us deal in likelihoods.
At the end of Fahrenheit 451 (spoilers, I suppose), the ex-book-burner Montag joins a band of literate exiles in the wilderness, each of whom has committed some great book to memory. "Guard your health," he's told. "If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastes." There are works of art that weather the crash of dynasties and the long slow grind of aeons: works that men will kill and die to keep alive. I myself would bayonet a blackguard in the lungs for bringing flame near the last surviving copy of Hamlet or Macbeth. I do not, however, entertain the fancy that future generations will be stabbing each other over dog-eared printouts of this blog. Many people write; few people write immortal works. Any artist of any caliber eventually needs to accept that.
Hamlet, of course, gets its plot from folklore and other Elizabethan dramas, like almost all of Shakespeare's plays—but the folklore and the other dramas are now remembered only as scholarly appendices to Hamlet. In the same way, droves of harrumphing Englishmen were writing comic operettas in the days of Gilbert and Sullivan; flocks of overwrought Russians were writing harrowing novels in the days of Dostoevsky; gaggles of maiden aunts were writing clever mysteries in the days of Agatha Christie. What seems original to us now was usually a drop in a sea of contemporaries, surviving because it was simply the best of its kind. The better a book is, the better its chances. But who knows what was lost in the Library of Alexandria? Beowulf survived in the form of a single manuscript, stuck in a trunk in a farmhouse in Iceland, for eight hundred years, before it was discovered and given back to Europe. Sometimes a work of art endures because Providence has use for it.
But there's a deeper truth: no book is immortal. The race will die, the earth will die, the sun will die. Every symphony and painting, every lyric verse, each statue and basilica brought forth by Man the Maker—all will burn and freeze. And yet, another truth is deeper still: everything's immortal. A sonnet might be remembered for a week or a century on Earth; in Heaven, as a small but real part of the soul that loved it into existence, it will dwell in the Mind of God and the Heart of the Church Triumphant. Not immediately comforting to a neglected sonneteer, but a reason to keep on going. The sooner Kid Toner and her dad get that into their heads, the better—for us and for the whole onward-toiling Body of Christ. You never know what chance phrase from your pen might strengthen a wavering soul.
My yet-unborn daughter: Father whom I love?
Me: What's up, Sonya Rosa?
Sonya: Am I correct in understanding that I shall be forced to learn martial arts whether I would or no?
Me: Entirely rectitudinous, dear love. Also, you shall eat your vegetables and learn your Catechism, and I believe your mother will be teaching you to play some manner of woodwind.
Sonya: The mastication of fauna, Father, I heartily accept, forasmuch as I know it to be a most beneficent undertaking for my body, blessed sister of my soul. And of course I will toil with assiduous delight to master the doctrines of our Holy Mother Church. Further, I perceive the utility of learning the basics of music—as you, most honored patriarch, have sadly failed to do—irrespective of whether I choose in my eventual womanhood to pursue the arts of Euterpe.
Me: All is then well.
Sonya: Well-a-day, not so.
Me: Alas and alack!
Sonya: Alas in a lackadaisical fashion.
Me: Okay, I actually don't have any idea what we're talking about right now. One of us has been into the bourbon. Have you been into the bourbon?
Sonya: Not unless Mom has. Kidding aside, why do I have to study martial arts?
Me: Well, for one thing, you never know when some maniac might jump on the hood of your car.
Sonya: That's not the hood, it's the windshield.
Me: Oh what do you know, you won't even see daylight for months. But fine, let's be serious. Training in the arts will give you physical strength and grace, emotional confidence, and psychological discipline. It'll make you a less probable target for muggers and rapists, who often tend to choose timid-looking victims. It'll give you an edge in a world where it's never too early to start punching bullies. And if you're anywhere near as lucky as I was, it will give you a second family that'll have your back no matter where you go.
Sonya: So it's not just because you think it would be cool to have a ninja daughter.
Me: Goodness, that would be cool, but I'm afraid I don't know Ninjutsu. From me you get Shaolin Kenpo and Brazilian Jiu-Jutsu. That should get you through high school. After that, you can choose your own path as a martial artist, or never throw a kick again if that's what you want. But the arts will always be a part of who you are. My job is to give you the best formation that I can, and this is a big part of it.
Sonya: Knowing how to throw a kick isn't going to help me if I'm drugged. Or attacked by a dozen men. Or shot.
Me: I know that, sweetheart. But I don't get to keep you inside for the rest of your life. In the end, none of us survive this world. But at the very least, you and I will both know that you have the tools you need to be a fighter, whatever might happen in the fight. The rest is up to God.
Sonya: I love you, Dad.
Me: I hope that is still your reaction when you start writing your own dialogue. And I love you too, Sonya Magdalena Rose.
A little while back, I reread Oedipus Rex for the first time since high school. I sympathized with Mr. Oed a lot less than I expected to. He really was a wiener. But let's forget for now the hubris and the creepy mom stuff—which—seriously, dude, if you're that concerned about the prophecy, then how about just don't marry anyone older than you. We have a saying in America: Duh. But again, let's set that aside for the nonce. I want to talk about the other half of the Oedipal curse.
Freud, of course, argued that on some level, all children have this urge. I can't from personal experience speak to the inner lives of all children, but I can surely think of times when I wanted to kill my dad. He's a good father and a good man, and we get on quite well now, thank God; but we had some stony and tenebrous moments in the elder days. I fear that, shy of both of us immediately dying and going straight to Heaven when she's born, my kid and I will pass through a shadowed vale or two of our own before the end.
C.S. Lewis says somewhere that Nature compels us to invent giants: the mountains and the storms and the sea, and all the vastness and wildness that lurk beyond our walls. And he's not wrong, but it seems belated. Long before we have any sense of Nature, we're all surrounded by giants. Long before we have the words to encapsulate size and proportion, we know that Mama and Dada are bigger, titanically bigger than us. And the giants have absolute power over every tiny aspect of our existence. We eat what they give us, we sleep when they say, we wear what they put on our backs; we go to the schools and read the books and do the chores they choose for us. Granted that we would suffer a millionfold demise long before pubescence if it weren't for the giants. But they're still giants, and we're still swordless little Jacks.
The thing about being a parent is that sometimes you're going to be wrong. Depending on your efforts and proclivities, you may even often be wrong. And as a general rule, the child has no higher authority that he can appeal to. If you've promised him that he can, say, watch a particular movie, but discovered too late that it's about the exploits of a space pirate who does explicit things with a dozen different space women, then he has no recourse but to accept the breaking of your promise. He's too small to fight you, he's too poor to run, he has no grown-up words to argue his case. He can sit in his room and stew. And nothing breeds hatred like impotence. Glance through the imprecatory Psalms—137:9, for example—and you'll get a sense of how I sometimes felt about my perceived injustices.
Not getting to watch one movie is at worst an annoyance to an adult; but by definition, a child doesn't see the larger picture in which that annoyance is a tiny blip. Your sense of proportion is only as large as your experience of the world, and your capacity for suffering fills up a lot faster when you're very, very small. I surely don't want Sonya feeling murderous feelings towards me any more often than I can help; and if she does, I'd like her to be able to look back at them when she gets older and at least grant that for all my mistakes, I was doing the best I could.
I have to keep in the forefront of my mind that her reality is real to her, no matter how little it seems to me. If I'm forty years old and someone takes away a blanket that I like, then, well—darn. But if I'm three years old and this blanket has been a part of my waking and dreaming life for as long as I can possibly remember, if I can't exactly drive to the store and buy another one, if I've never seen pictures of Hiroshima and the Holocaust because I'm a freaking three-year-old, then in my pea-sized world, it's a big, big deal. So if grown-up me is going to take away a blanket that mini-me loves and cherishes, then I'd better have a damned good reason for it. I guess, at the end of the day, that's the best I can really hope to do.
Apparently there's a village in the Dominican Republic where it's totally normal for boys to be born outwardly indistinguishable from girls and to manifest their boy-parts at puberty. They're called guevedoces, which literally translates as "penis at twelve."
Ellie and I just had our second ultrasound and discovered our five-month-old womb-farer is a girl, whom we shall call Sonya Magdalena Rose. Interestingly, young Sonya has already produced something on the order of 7,000,000 oocytes, or basic egg cells—which means that when Ella was the age that Sonya is now, she was already harboring the egg that would become one half of her eventual daughter. If Sonya were a boy in the hidden hamlet of Las Salinas, she might look exactly the same as she does now. But she'd be clandestinely producing testosterone instead of oocytes, because deep down, she wouldn't be the same. Sometimes Nature gets the wires crossed and the outside doesn't seem to match—but that doesn't mean the inside doesn't matter.
I hope Maggie Rose does not suffer from gender confusion. I hope she's not bipolar, or deaf, or left-handed. (Kidding, I'm a leftie.) If any of those difficulties should transpire, I will surely not love her any less, and I will spend my last breath striving and yearning to make her happy and whole. If she should happen to be gay or to feel that she ought to be a man, then we'll work together and try to figure things out. Even if she comes out absolutely "perfect," in this or that or anybody's sense of the term, we'll still have to piece together how the hell she's going to fit into a bent and fractured universe.
But here it is. . .
I won't be helping her if she suffers some fundamental confusion and I pretend she doesn't. If my girl decides that she's a wolf, she might need a bit of support in accepting the truth. If she decides that she is actually a boy, then it's a lot more complicated; but it's still a problem, and it can't be fixed by throwing out her skirts and playing along.There just isn't a way to say this without sounding dogmatic, but there's such a thing as things. There's such a thing as truth, and things being what they are.
Sonya's a girl. I'm extremely excited to have a little girl, and I will teach her all about sports and trucks and martial arts as well as music and cooking and whatever little girls might stereotypically enjoy, if she enjoys them. El and I both have jobs, and we both do the chores; I'm not that concerned about Leave It To Beaver gender roles. I am concerned that Sonya Rosa should have a sense of empathy and nurture, and feel happy and proud to be a woman. The other day, I felt my daughter kicking in my wife's stomach for the very first time, and I do have a bit of envy for Ellen's power to carry and grow an actual person inside of her. Mind you, I'm also glad that I have a stronger upper body and can more effectively punch anyone who might try and steal her purse while she's busy carting around embryonic people in her torso. But I have no illusions about my gender being superior to hers. It seems—
God
—just so, so obvious that we need each other, that each gender pines for the other, that we're both here because we're neither of us complete without the other. I don't wish to seem disingenuous, but I'm a white guy and can't become a Polynesian female merely by wanting to be. Nor could our Magda become a man, or an Egyptian, or a hippogriff, however desperately she might wish it.
I deeply believe that, for all the moral advantages the Greatest Generation may have had over us, we're far better off in that we tend to talk about our feelings. If my daughter felt that she was my son, I certainly wouldn't try to sweep it under the rug and forget about it, as our grandparents might have done. My God, I don't want my child, my love, to think she's unloved if she feels she ought to be a man. We'll do all we can to help her understand and cope with those feelings. But the fact is, the truth is, that she isn't. She's a woman, and if she feels otherwise then there's something wrong that needs to be talked about. No matter how tolerant, how understanding, I wish to be, I cannot help her by pretending that A is not A.
When Dad was working on the car, he didn't really need a hyper-distractable, poorly-coordinated ragamuffin clattering through the garage. Without me knocking over oil cans and mixing up the ratchet sizes, he could certainly have finished his labors more quickly and with less exasperation. But because he's my dad and he wanted to give me a part in the work, he let me fetch the tools while he handled the parts that I couldn't understand.
When God wants to create an everlasting soul, He doesn't need our help. He made the angels; He made Adam and Eve; and He made the Word Made Flesh with only half of our usual involvement. But He's our dad and He wants us to be a part of the process.
Adam was given only two commands, one negative and one positive. Don't eat that fruit—and go have tons of sex. Because fruitfulness and multiplication allow us to play a part in bringing forth actual people, actual souls, sex is the greatest of all creative endeavors and thus one of the greatest of all pleasures. In the exact etymological sense, it is ecstatic: it calls us out of ourselves. Even in the most corrupt and twisted of cultures, even in the uttermost chasms of nihilism, nearly every human alive still wants sex. That's how much radiance glimmers through, no matter what landfills of muck we heap on top of that ancient and luminous gift.
At some point, the micro-Toner is bound to want to know where she came from and how. I guess the easiest way to address the issue without having to use any variation of the word "loins" is to say that a piece of Ellie and a piece of me get mixed together to make a body, and the Holy Spirit gives it a soul. On reflection, I'm not sure that (apart from a whole passel of details) theology and medical science together can provide any more accurate description of the process.
And now I want to see if I can address one of the most delicate of all subjects without appearing to occupy any manner of pulpit (especially since I can assure you that I personally hold no moral high ground whatsoever). As Catholics, we shall certainly raise our kid Catholic, and that will mean teaching her that she oughtn't have sex with anyone except her lawful spouse. I do think that, maybe more than any other single thing, this is the teaching that makes people angry with the Church, and I hope to be able to explain it adequately to my offspring. Remember that the Church only has the authority to teach the Truth, not to make it or to change it; she doesn't impose the laws upon us, but only tries to help us follow the laws that are intrinsic to our nature. So: why is it that Ellie and I, who were already lovingly committed to each other, had to mouth a lot of old formulas in a big stone building and have a bachelor in a robe mumble Latin and throw water at us before we could make love?
Well—why did Jesus, Omnipotence Itself, have to spit in the dirt and rub mud on the blind man's eyes in order to cure him? He healed the centurion's servant without even entering under his roof. But maybe for something so fundamental as a missing sense, He felt the need to give a special benediction, involving body and spirit both. The whole point of the Sacraments, of course, is to bless the soul in a visible way; but in marriage especially, there really is a missing sense that's being mended. From the moment I gave my vow, I became a recovering cyclops, very slowly beginning to see our world through our eyes, the eyes of our marriage, rather than just my own. My perspective (again, very slowly) began to turn stereoscopic, and another mind and soul became a part of my every consideration. And Matrimony, alone among the Sacraments, is not administered through the powers of a priest, but given to the couple by one another. That makes it hard to see how it could be right for us to give ourselves in love to anyone else.
Kid in womb: Father whom I love so dearly?
Me: Yes, my tomato-sized amniotic mariner of a child?
Kid: Why am I here?
Me: Oh! Uh... Well, you see, when a bird and a bee love each other very, very much...
Kid: No, I mean teleologically speaking.
Me: Ohhh, like what's your purpose. Well, the Catechism says our purpose is to know, love, and serve God in this world and be happy with Him forever in the next.
Kid: Huh. I didn't expect it to be that simple.
Me: Give it a minute.
Kid: Waaaaaait.....
Me: There it is.
Kid: How, specifically, am I supposed to—
Me: That, my friend, is The Question. Sadly, neither I nor any other mortal can tell you how best to serve God in this world. Part of your task is figuring out what your task is. I have often reflected that the destiny of man is like unto that of a Special Forces operative who parachuted in behind enemy lines, hit his head, and forgot his mission.
Kid: That is not helpful.
Me: 'Swhat I got, kid. Good luck.
"Parenting fail, bro."
The Brits used to spell "cooperate" with a hyphen (or even, sometimes, an umlaut). I kind of like that spelling because it emphasizes the idea of operating, in the sense of taking action. The idea of cooperation seems to connote a passive element these days: if I cooperate with you, I go along with your suggestions, whatever they might be. But when we speak of co-operating with Divine Grace, it really should be hyphenated. God can't operate in me unless I operate through Him, with Him, and in Him.
No two people are more different than two saints. A saint is a being who has finally and ultimately become a person, a soul that is finished and real. We are all of us potential persons here on Earth, hopefully working with God to scuff away the accretions of meanness on our hearts and hone our spirits into actuality. If we get to Heaven, God willing (and He does), it will mean that we've become not only what He meant us to be, but what we have meant ourselves to be. "For it seemeth good to the Holy Spirit and to us" (Acts 15:28). Every sin, redeemed, becomes the specific grace that heals that specific sin. A man of sloth, redeemed, becomes a man of zeal. So out of all our choices, even sinful ones, God (if we work with Him) brings virtues that are infinitely particular to each of us. God doesn't need me to be St. Francis of Assisi. He's already got one of those. He needs me to be St. James Blaise Toner.
The intersection of Time and Eternity is now. I can't escape from Time, from being confined to a single facet of me-ness instead of fully being all of the me that I have it in me to be, except by co-operating with Grace right now, at this particular moment. If I do that at each moment, through all of the moments, then all of those moments become infused and united by that Grace, and I become a whole and integrated soul, and thus I become eternal. And what that so often boils down to, in practice, is: shall I do this tiny little duty, or shall I say the hell with it? Do I help my kid with her homework, or have another beer and tell her to Google it? And even more terrifying than my responsibility for my own soul is this: how responsible am I for her soul, if she should learn irresponsibility from me? St. Augustine became St. Augustine because of the Grace of God and the choices of St. Augustine, but also because of the prayers of his mother, St. Monica. I've got to keep working on becoming St. Me, so that my kid has the best possible chance of becoming St. My Kid.
I was homeless for a lot of years. In January of 2011 I was living on the street in Wheeling, West Virginia. That was a bitter winter. A labor pool across the river in Steubenville had gotten me a temp job at a factory in Wheeling: one week on the 4pm to 2am shift, feeding huge metal sheets into huge metal sheet-folding machines. That week, my only desire in this world was to save up enough for a bus ticket to someplace warm.
So one morning I was in the nearest Catholic church, I forget the name of the place, using their bathroom because it was warm and low-traffic. I brushed my teeth and washed my armpits in the sink, and I was just changing into some fresh socks when this old man walked in. Not a priest or a janitor, just some random parishioner in a ball cap. And he saw me sitting on the floor tying my shoes—saw my duffel bag and my three coats and my two weeks worth of stubble—and he said, "Where you workin'?" And because I was taken off-guard and I felt like I'd somehow done something wrong, I said, "Factory up the street." And that was the whole conversation. He stood there looking down at me and I got up and walked past him and left. I don't know why he said that. I don't know what was in his heart. But my heart heard him saying, "Lazy no-good bum oughtta get hisself a job like the rest of us decent God-fearin' folk." What I can say for sure is that he did not turn as I left and say, "Hey, kid—you need any help?"
It's sorrowful to think of my mom lying awake scathed with worry for me. It's terrifying to think of my child walking a path like mine. But I guess at the end of the day I'd rather see her a derelict with charity in her heart than a safe and successful woman who looks down on those around her.
Humility isn't only a virtue, it's also a recognition of facts. We're none of us self-created or self-sustaining. We didn't earn our conception or oversee our births, we don't weave the oxygen or stoke the sunfire. A man who rises in his profession has no doubt worked hard and seized his opportunities, and that's cause to hold his head up; but he's also been so fortunate as not to suffer from cerebral palsy, not to have been hit by a truck or knifed by a mugger, not to have grown up in a country where his only professional options are begging or eking in the mud. Nothing engenders the absurd illusion of superiority like the absurd illusion of security.
But here's the thing. In denouncing pride in others, note what I'm indulging in myself. In looking up from the floor at someone whom I judge to be prideful, I'm looking down my nose at a man whose inner mortifications are hidden from me. In the very moment of taking gratification in my own humility, I destroy it.
While we stand on a spinning orb, there's no respite from the tendency to bend back in on ourselves. After Purgatory, a straight line upwards; for now, at best, rising spirals. Prayer and mental habit and constant vigilance can keep us turning towards humility, but every turn will mean a fresh impetus towards pride. The good news is, He knows we're trying. And who can say?—maybe we're doing better than we think.
The kid in the womb: Father whom I love so dearly?
Me: What is it, kid.
The kid: ...You don't sound glad to hear from me today.
Me: Yeah, sorry. It's just—your mother's been very sick lately.
Kid: Because of me?
Me: Well, yes. But it's not your fault.
Kid: Do you ever wish you weren't having me?
Me: No, we always wanted you. We spent a year and a half praying for you. You were not easy to conceive. But hyperemesis gravidarum is no fun for anyone involved. Probably not even for you.
Kid: I am often reminded of the tempests upon the Sea of Galilee.
Me: Quit showing off, that's my job.
Kid: Heh.
Me: Heh.
Kid: Really, though—won't you miss your independence? All the fun you had when it was just you and Mom and Felix?
Me: Sure I will. I miss my twenties too. But you know, I had my twenties. I'm glad for the experience and the memories, but that time is past. That's how it works, kid, you'll see. Choosing anything means rejecting everything else, and one phase of your life has to die for the next one to be born.
Kid: It is Margaret you mourn for.
Me: Seriously, quit it. Although—nice one.
Kid: Thanks, Dad.
Me: Good talk.
Kid: ...Dad?
Me: What's up, kid?
Kid: Am I killing a happy phase in your life?
Me: Nope. It's been a very happy phase, but we spent a lot of it missing you. You know how the idiot—I mean, you know, Felix—tends to yowl at the door and then dither about actually going outside once it's open? People are the same way. We were often upset about not having a kid, and now we're sometimes upset about having one. But in the end, we wouldn't not have you for anything in the world.
Kid: Everything's gonna change when I come.
Me: Believe me, I know. Luckily, the good Lord gives us nine months to get ready for that. Everything changed when we got married, too, after all. Everything's always changing. But also, the important things don't. We love you. That won't change. It's not a bad bedrock to stand on.
Kid: I know you meant, "on which to stand."
Me: Oh, put a sock in it.
They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the crossroads.
- Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
When our little micro-Toner emerges from the long and restless slumber of the womb, he will find both a cosmos and a chaos awaiting him. As a middle-class(ish) 21st-century American, he'll be free to do damn near anything in the world. He could be a teacher, a doctor, a soldier, a priest—he could dive for pearls in the South Sea or ride with the tribesmen of Mongolia, live on the streets or join strange cults, create more efficient explosives or more insightful literary genres—even move to the suburbs and have a nice clean wife and lawn. Many things will weigh his choices, from physical health and economic circumstance to the grace of God and the depredations of the Tempter, to say nothing of whatever success or failure Ellie and I have in raising him to be more or less psychologically sound; but ultimately he'll find himself at crossroads after crossroads, and he will choose one road or another. (The paradox of freedom being, of course, that even the refusal to choose is actually a choice.) If, God forbid, he should come to disbelieve in free will, he'll find himself standing in front of the closet for a long, long time each morning before genetic programming relieves him of deciding what shirt he should wear today.
No, he'll make some choice about what to do with his life. It may disappoint or traumatize his parents, or possibly make us radiant with joy; but in the end, it'll be his choice, and his alone. My job as his father will be shaping his mind and preparing his soul as best I can to make a wise and virtuous choice. And the thing I'm most concerned about imparting to him from the outset is that there's never going to be only one Right choice.
Let me qualify that: in deciding between whether to perform or not perform a wicked act, obviously there's only one right choice. Should I or shouldn't I steal this candy bar? I should not. But the point is, supposing that I have the twenty-five dollars I need to buy a candy bar (I'm adjusting for inflation here): shall I buy a Snickers or a Milky Way? Perhaps a Twix? What about a Payday? And supposing I have the hundred and fifty million dollars to afford a college education: shall I major in English or Math or Political Science or what? Supposing I want to move to a new city? There are several of them in the United States alone. It's easy to be paralyzed by the multiplicity of options—but it can be just as easy to be paralyzed by a single one, if you're terrified of missing what you think is the one and only path.
I don't want the kid standing at the doors of a seminary (or wherever), wracked with the certainty that this alone is the path that God has set forth for his life. I don't think God does that. I'm pretty sure God throws open the gates of the world and tells us to go nuts. If the kid truly wants to go to seminary, great! Fine! I've got six Toner nephews, the family line will continue. But no one should enter the seminary with the feeling that it's not what he wants, "but it's what God wants." My spiritual director Fr. LaValley (who I'm convinced will be St. LaValley before the coroner even gets the tag on his toe) once told me that there's always a few seminarians who feel that way, and that he always discourages them as strongly as he can from becoming priests. A true vocation should fill a man with joy and certitude and a sense of completion. Not just for the priesthood, mind you, but for every vocation. As scared as I was when I saw Ellie walking down the aisle toward me, I also knew I was finally coming home.
Whatever this kid decides to do, it'll be something that no one else can do. Just as Ellie and I have been chosen to bring a soul into the world that no other two people in all of time and space, in all of Eternity, could bring forth. He probably won't cure cancer or start a colony on Mars, although—you know—who knows? But he'll reflect the Power and the Glory in a way that absolutely no one else has ever done or ever will, and that will be his destiny. For that purpose he was chosen, and for that purpose he will soon be born. I'm excited to see what it will be.
My brother Pat used to say that he wanted his kid's first word to be "epistemology." I don't remember what Ben's first word actually was, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it. Being part Pat, he probably went with some obscure math term just to be exasperating.
Most of us begin our speaking careers with a word like "mama" or "dada." For one thing, it's physically easy to make those sounds, especially with our parents cooing them at us all the time. It's almost inevitable to associate a face you keep seeing with a sound you keep hearing. But for another thing, Mom and Dad are concrete things. You can touch them, smell them, burp up formula on their shirts. Nobody learns to talk and think by looking at pictures of Justice or Beauty or Freedom; first, we must fully comprehend The Nose and The Chin.
Now here's the interesting part. It turns out that even as we grow older and start learning about abstractions and spiritual realities, they can still only be expressed in terms of noses and chins. Every term describing a mental event, if you look closely, is a purely physical metaphor. When you experience an impulse, you're not literally being pushed. When you see someone's point, you're not literally looking at a pointed object. When you feel despair, you're not actually descending from a location called hope, and when you feel hope, you're not actually boiling or emitting smoke. What we mean by "spirit" is something totally different from the act of respiration, but the word itself simply means "breath." Look up the etymology of any abstract word you can think of, and in just a couple of steps it'll trace back to a root word referring to some everyday physical activity. It's actually kinda fun if you're into that sort of thing.
And why is this? Better question: why was it the Son, rather than the Holy Spirit or even the Father, who took flesh in the Incarnation? Because the Son is the Word, and incarnating is what words do. You have an idea. It exists inside your mind, in the realm of pure spirit, and it creates the will to act. That idea represents the Father. Then you speak the idea, you enflesh it in words, and that represents the Son. And if the words are close enough to the idea, if the Son does the will of the Father, if the love between word and idea is true, then it radiates understanding like the Spirit. Every act of speaking is fundamentally Trinitarian. And if your idea was "I'd like a ham sandwich" and the waiter brings you a ham sandwich, then your idea has gone forth into the world and borne fruit. Rejoice!
Granted, all this might be a teeny bit advanced for a toddler. But it's good to have the end game in mind.
My son or daughter who is apparently the size of a lime this week: Father whom I love so dearly?
Me: Yes, my unborn but already English-speaking child?
My enwombed little Toner-in-training: Is not our cat Felix the most adorable and affectionate of beasts?
Me: Often, yes.
The kid: Why then do you and my beloved mother so rarely speak of him by his given name, instead referring to him as "the idiot"?
Me: Okay, first of all, just wait till you have siblings. And second, he sleeps in our mail.
We peak early—as newborns, we're the smartest we'll ever be in our lives. Inside those pointy, Winston Churchill-looking heads, our brains are making neural connections so fast that we can actually learn a language without already knowing one. Damn good thing too, since we sure can't fall back on our instincts like the other animals. Partly, of course, that's because "we" in the sense of "people who read and write blogs" weren't raised in the sort of wild environment that would give us cause to develop those instincts; but even so, a horse can pop out of his horse mother and start walking around on his horse legs in a matter of minutes. How is that fair? If Prometheus didn't exist, he'd have to be invented.
Our God-daughter Amy, who's just barely starting to take a wobbly step or two at a time, thinks Felix is wonderful. Whenever she comes over to visit, the sight of him makes her absolutely squeal with glee. (He hasn't let her touch him yet, but we'll get there.) I don't know if a brain-studier (or whatever they're called) would agree with this, but I feel like by the age of one or so, we have a sense that the animals, while kindred, are different from us in some important way. As an expectant dad with a cat, I'd like to have some kind of basic explanation ready for when the kid wants to know why her fluff-clad compatriot isn't coming to church with us.
We see a lot of ugly things in nature. A wolf pack will start eating a deer while it's alive and bleating, grizzly bears casually devour their own children, and there is a thing called a hairworm that enters the brains of crickets and literally makes them kill themselves. Partly, of course, all this is simply because these creatures are natural as opposed to supernatural, and therefore amoral: they're not cruel, they're just hungry. But, also, there's an Enemy roaming the Earth. God always gives us hints of what's coming, and Adam prefigured Christ in a way—a spirit becoming a beast in order (among other things) to raise them up and make them better, to govern them justly and teach them compassion. I don't have a theory on how Adam and Eve would have gotten the carnivores to be nicer to the prey animals, but the Fall put an end to whatever they might have been planning.
But! After the Resurrection at the End of Days, there won't only be a new Heaven. There will be a new Earth, and the animals too will be redeemed and glorified in some way, commensurate with their stature. So when the kid asks me if Felix gets to go to Heaven when he dies, I'm not gonna tell her no. I'm not exactly gonna say yes either, because I think that might be heresy?—although I also think it might be one of those questions that the Church clears her throat and shuffles her feet about. (I'll see your Thomas of Aquino and raise you a Francis of Assisi!) But I will tell her that Felix is, at the very least, a representation of some kind of Ultimate Cat that awaits us in the New Jerusalem, and that Cat will definitely curl up in my kid's lap and purr.
