If I were to die today, I imagine the eulogy written for me would be conflicted. What a tragedy.
“Yeah, Dad… I knew he loved me, but he had a temper.”
“My husband was gentle and sweet… like a hurricane.”
In a recent general audience, Pope Francis spoke about wrath.
It was an engrossing read for me, as it often is when another individual speaks directly to a point which I consider a dominant defect of mine.
Wrath is no friend of fatherhood, and is often the preceding vice to my customary utterance of “nunc coepi.” I have to be careful not to resign myself to it, to say, “such is my character. I’m an angry guy.”
That’d be a lukewarm response to my vocation as a dad – a vocation which demands the best of me. If I’m willing to say, “it’s just who I am,” then I must also be willing to say, “Sorry kids, this is as good as it gets for me. That means it might be as good as it gets for you.” The snowball rolls quickly downhill from here.
The Heat of Saint Pete
I’ve been saving this one for a future blog post, but I’ll get some preliminary thoughts down here.
Saint Pete, like myself, was accustomed to outbursts. Picture Peter’s flush face as he rebukes our Lord when he says the Son of Man must be handed over to death. Rebuking! Consider his growing impatience when he lets loose on those who accuse him of being with Jesus at his trial. How about when, just prior to this, he cuts off a guy’s ear? Not even I have done that!
When I find that I’ve lost my cool and berated someone one-third my size over a trivial matter, I sometimes think of Saint Peter. I know he’s probably in Heaven shaking his head – not in disgust, but in understanding. He gets it. So do a lot of saints, I imagine.
But to think Jesus wasn’t aware of Peter’s stunted fuse would be folly. He knew what he was doing putting the hothead in charge of things. He may have even thought, “Yeah… John’s nice and all, but like Jim Carrey will say in The Mask 2000 years from now: Nice guys finish last.” Coincidentally, and I’m going off memory here, John lived the longest of all the original apostles. Perhaps something to that one.
Regardless, Peter’s passion was likely a prerequisite for the job of guiding the early Church. In a world openly hostile to early Christians, passivity wouldn’t do. Those early believers needed more: holy indignation, as Pope Francis called it in his general audience.
Forget your job. What’s your vocation?
I’m raising children into adults in the midst of a world gone mad. I must stamp out every character defect which presents itself, else my children will grow into another statistic. Statistics. This is a word which took on new meaning last night as I sat in our living room reflecting on the day’s tribulations.
Being a parent is not a difficult job – it is a difficult vocation. Jobs, unlike vocations, can be abandoned. I could quit my position at NASA tomorrow and with any luck pick up a new position within the month. There would be a slight disruption of service and some extra scrimping on the finances, but by-and-large, my family would be unaffected.
To quit my vocation, however, would spell catastrophe in both the short- and long-term. The damage done to my children would be irreversible. Years of counseling and mountains of debt paying for it wouldn’t heal those wounds properly. Scars would run deep and would be painfully visible.
My wife, too, would be devastated. She who hung the remainder of her time on Earth on me who turned out to be an abject failure – not because I tried and came up short, but because I outright quit.
We all have an underlying beckoning. Many of us catch only glimpses of it throughout our lives. Sometimes we feel it in the strangest of places or the most peculiar of moments, and then it’s gone, and we’re left wondering – what was that? I want more of it, but how do I find it?
Since the birth of our first child, I have known that fatherhood would be my greatest accomplishment. Even if we only had Lillian.
That sure hasn’t stopped me from seeking fulfillment elsewhere. Personal recognition and increased cash flow. Even starting this blog in an effort to establish my own little corner of the internet, or to just get my thoughts out of my head.
So as I sat pondering that word – statistic – I began to apply it to my children. What kind of statistic would they be? As a fabulously imperfect human being, I immediately assumed the worst. My heart sank. My evening crumbled. It stunk. There’s nothing like picturing the end of something beautiful to bring some lucidity back into your life.
Pondering the Death of Many (Don’t Make Me Choose)
I returned to this idea of a eulogy, but not my own. How would I describe my children if they were to die in this moment? “What a terrible thought!” I understand, but hear me out. Death comes for us all. Us and our kids alike. Hopefully I go first, but God didn’t make such a promise when I became a father.
And here is where things began to finally click into place. I am called to a supernatural outlook on life: am I storing up heavenly treasure, or earthly? Consider the wealthy landowner who spent his whole life accumulating wealth and stuffing it into a barn, only to find out that God would demand his life of him once he hit his ideal quiescent state. Tough stuff.
For a parent, our treasure is the here-and-now. Look – to sugar-coat this stuff would be an injustice. My kids need me to be like Saint Pete. We’re dealing with the eternal souls of the ones entrusted to us, and if I abdicate my vocation to guide them through stormy seas like a confident captain, I risk infinitely more than some emotional scars here on earth. I risk their eternities, and for what? Maybe my own convenience or personal gain? Or perhaps because one night I was just too tired to call, do a puzzle, play a game, have a talk, share a late-night snack, what-have-you.
If my kid needs me, what am I to do? I know what God the Father would do for me: turn and face me, and make it clear that I was the only person in that moment.
Drowning Evil
Herein lies my own ultimate test: what am I really doing to combat the evil I bring into this world? The gospel recently told us that it’s not the thirty-two strips of bacon that I put into my stomach which defile me: those just exit by the normal means into the latrine.
It’s what I spew into the world which defiles me. Not only does it defile me, but it defiles my wife and children. That hair-trigger tongue needs a well-developed safety, and the only way I can do that is with practice and prayer. When I curse: it’s 10 “put-ups.” That is, the offended party (usually everyone) gets ten things from me. It doesn’t have to be ten quarters in a swear jar to be paid out at the end of the month in the form of a family night out (though I’m sure some of us men could really treat our families based on the nonsense we say in any given month).
Nah. Ten acts of kindness, of devoted listening and dedicated attention, of genuine quality time. Drown that derision in an abundance of praise. And look, I get it: sometimes it feels good to be angry. Get over it, Jonathon. Swallow that stupid pride of yours, accept that you’re wrong (because winning an argument is always a loss anyway), and offer some serious reparations. Show your kids you’re struggling to put yourself on the Cross daily. You don’t need to be over the top about it, as we call to mind our patron Saint Joseph who was the quintessential strong, suffering servant. Rather, just do it.
Evil will always exist, but we can bury it so deeply that its effects on us (and more importantly our family) are dampened. We can make our homes bright and cheerful by doing the exactly what society says we shouldn’t do: embrace suffering. Only when I can willingly give up the thing I want for someone else am I truly free.
Not today, Satan.
