On Animals (or, There Was This Apple, You See...)

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.

On Comedy (or, Even Shakespeare Did Fart Jokes)

Not one man who has ever lived, not even Our Lord Himself, got his first laugh from irony or word play. We all of us laugh at silly noises and funny faces as soon as we learn to focus our eyes, if not sooner. I don't clearly recall my own first laugh; prob'ly drunk at the time. But I bet it was at a fart noise. I have a wide array of preposterous facial expressions, and I'm very much looking forward to having a new audience for them. (My wife's sense of humor is a bit more sophisticated than our incoming baby's is likely to be.) What I'm kind of hoping is that the kid will keep finding them funny even when he or she gets old enough to appreciate subtlety and wit.

You probably remember the Lord's remark about entering the Kingdom: "Except ye be as little children," &c. And you may also remember St. Paul's countering observation about becoming a man and putting aside childish things. We all get the distinction between childish and childlike. The tricky thing is that when you're an actual child, you have a not unreasonable tendency to be both. I would hazard to opine that the crucial lesson to impart to a developing mind is simply that there is a time and a place. It is childlike to make faces at your baby to get a giggle; it's childish to do it in the middle of a board meeting.

Polonius was an idiot, but he got one thing right: Brevity is the soul of wit. Everyone sort of knows that timing is the key to comedy, but not everyone really gets that principle in practice. When a kid is about to cry, there's very often a poised, breathless moment in kairos time when you can still calm the tempest if you can find just the right thing to say or do. Might not always work to give him a funny face at that critical instant—and if it doesn't, persistence is unlikely to help once the wailing starts—but it might be precisely the shock of dumb he needs to distract him from his wise and Job-like woes.

Look at that thing. There's no possible theological question that the Three Persons of the Trinity were shaking the Throne of Heaven with laughter when this creature came into the world. It would take a mind grave enough to draw out Leviathan with a hook to ascend to such heights of goofiness. Sometimes we are asked to bear true sorrow and true anguish; other times, we're asked to put up with morning traffic or being out of coffee, and it's just too much of a trial for our souls. Moments like that, when we're really upset about something really trivial, might be the moments for which God gave us the platypus. It's His way of making funny faces at us. You hear the phrase "God's children" every day, "we're all God's children," and of course it's true. But sometimes it helps to remember that we're also His kids.

On Sehnsucht (or, Wolves Are Awesome)

My impending offspring: Father whom I love so dearly?
Me: Yes, onrushing son or daughter whom I love in turn?
My incoming loin-fruit: Has not my tiny brain achieved rectitude in thinking that wolves are simply the most perilous and lovely of creatures?
Me: Tiny? That brain's big enough to suck all the protein out of your poor mother. Also it can somehow pass notes between your transcendent spirit and earthly body, so—you know. Bonus points.
Offspringy McGee: Hey Dad.
Me: What, kid?
The kid: Wolves are cool, huh?
Me: Heck yeah they are.
Kid: How come they howl at the moon?
Me: Huh, that's funny, I was just about to write a blog post about that.

Not a wolf. That's our cat Felix trying to decide if he truly wants to pass through the door that he was just yowling to be let through. Once he gets outside, the most important thing for him to accomplish out there is usually getting back in again. I can't help thinking that if a wolf actually got to the moon, it would spend most of its time howling at the Earth. I mean, obviously it would freeze and suffocate, and possibly explode, but let's assume there's magic involved. How else would a wolf get to the moon in the first place.

I spend a lot of time thinking about, and yearning for, That Which Lies Beyond. C.S. Lewis calls it sehnsucht, the unsatisfied desire. Ever since we got a cat, it's been occurring to me on a daily basis that if They ever let me out into the Beyond, there's an above average chance that I would immediately turn around and start scrambling back toward the quotidian. Doesn't change the fact that everything I write is my way of pushing outwards to something I can't write about. And more importantly, since my wife is very similar to me in this regard (go figure), our kid is probably going to have quite the imagination. I expect to climb a fair number of trees in order to drag him or her inside for supper.

Like several things in this life, there will probably be a difficult balancing act involved here. Sure as hell don't want to squash the kid's imagination. Also, however, don't want the kid spending the kid's whole life gazing at the clouds and wasting the kid's potential. (I promise my syntax will get pithier once we find out the kid's gender and I can start using pronouns.) What I have to find a way to convey to our increasingly imminent infant is that life does in fact contain adventure and magic, except not exactly the way it looks in the storybooks.

Why are wolves so cool? People love cats and dogs and birds, but there aren't any myths about werecats or weredogs or werebirds. I mean there probably are, but none that are awesome. Why is the image of a howling wolf so iconic, so powerful? So ambiguous? We certainly don't want to encounter a hungry wolf alone in the starlit snow. And yet... don't we? Think about all the times that angels appear in the Bible—what's the first thing they always say? "Don't be afraid." Why are the most beautiful things also the most terrifying? I'll tell you one thing: I was afraid of falling in love with Ellie, and I'm afraid of this child we're about to have.

Okay fine, two things. Leave me alone.

On Good and Evil (or, Don't Touch the Howler Monkey)

Okay, this thing here is called a universe. It's a good place to poop in. Also there's tons of room to crawl around, and a lot of it can fit in your mouth. Not that, buddy, that's a tuna sandwich from last week. And that's an outlet! Those things are bad. What does "bad" mean? Well... lemme think.

I turned forty last week. It's an awfully big number, folks. Imagine carrying an Ark through an adder-haunted desert for forty years. Especially if you mixed up your Arks and brought along a giant boat. I also learned that my wife Ellen is pregnant with our first child! (Not on my birthday, which would have been cool, but a couple of weeks earlier, on Father's Day, which was actually even cooler.) I'm elated, terrified, puzzled, hopeful—all the things I gather it's usual to be.

Kids seem to like me for the most part. I assume it's because I have an attenuated sense of bodily dignity and no real problem with rolling around in the grass. And of course, as they're generally other people's kids, I can always toss the "better ask your mom" card on the table if they happen to ventilate a kerfuffling can of worms. But Ellie's not gonna let me get away with that when it comes to our own kid(s), nor ought she to. There's a whole cosmos of complicated things I need to figure out how to explain.

Axioms. Gotta give the kid some foundational understandings to act as premises going forward. God is good, A is A, existence exists, that kinda stuff. Should be easy, my kid's gonna be smart. And data: plenty of raw facts to furnish a context, to build a world out of all the tumbling world-bits. These are shoes. Those are pears. That's a howler monkey—which, contextually speaking, should not be in my kitchen. No, don't touch the howler monkey, those are bad. I mean like, not intrinsically bad, but for an infant—

Oh right, we were gonna talk about badness. How do I explain that? Not just the contingently bad use of good or neutral things, but actual personal Evil? No, buddy, there's no bug monster under your bed. But since you bring it up, there are much, much worse things dwelling on the doorstep of your mind, clawing and cajoling day after day for the chance to come inside. You should probably watch out for that.

Maybe we should start with goodness. I love you, buddy. And in so doing, I partake very slightly in the personal energy of a Person Who Is Love Itself. Also note that at this point, you haven't actually done anything to earn my love, apart from growing rapidly from a single cell to a barely noticeable bump in my lovely wife's belly and causing her to throw up all the time. On the other hand, what have I done to earn the love of Love, apart from drinking too much and writing dumb blog posts? But we love our kids, don't we. We smile when they smile and we laugh when they laugh. So just imagine how much... Well. You know.

Welcome to the war, kid.