From the family diary of 1997 —

Aaron loves big work trucks of all sorts, just as Evan did. His favorite is a backhoe. This fall he asked Victoria, “Where is God?” She answered, “In the sacrament, in our hearts, in good fun, in church, in heaven.” He countered, “He is on a backhoe, a cement truck, a bulldozer!”

At St. Bartholomew’s [in midtown Manhattan, my first cure], worried at the communion rail that the priest with the paten was passing him by, Aaron asserted in an uppercase voice, “I WANT THE CHRIST! I WANT THE CHRIST!”

At Christmastide he confided, “I want to go to church to see Joseph, Frankenstein, and Mary!” glossing thus the holy family, the gifts of the magi, and Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.

One of the books I read again and again is Kenneth Grahame’s *The Wind in the Willows*. Here Grahame gives us the scene wherein Rat and Mole find at last the fat little otter child Portly sleeping peacefully at the feet of the great Pan himself. There is elsewhere beautiful writing to be found among children’s classics. There is no writing more beautiful than this.

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible color, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”

12 December 1991 — Evan entered kindergarten this fall, so one day early in September I found myself rubbing my eyes at a dizzying array of grade school backpacks — fluorescent green and pink, periwinkle and lavender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bags, all of them trying hard to look enticing but all of them shining on my retinae as the price to be paid for growing up. My son, they tell me, needed something to carry his papers in, so it fell to me to get him a backpack, the harbinger and first installment of that baggage for which children are so famous and beautiful for not wearing. By dint of will I chose one, a black one — the zipper, the straps, all of it is black — the good reason being that it would be easy to spot amid the neon, the real reason being that when you consider what it is a child leaves behind to go to school his outfit ought to be funereal.

I’m shamelessly overprotective. I know. I am a sissy. But Lord, What am I doing? seems a fair question to ask when you look into your child’s eyes and see not only tears but terror.

A couple of weeks ago we were lying in bed and Evan asked me, “Daddy, who came first, the Indians or God?” I started to say God but not wanting to have gone to school for nothing I thought to tell him that God came first except that God doesn’t have a beginning the way people do, that time and space are beneath God, God being above and beyond it and all that. I didn’t expect him to understand this any more than I myself understand it, so I just said, “God did.”

But God isn’t above and beyond it. Not anymore. Think of it. The message of Christmas is news that whereas from eternity he was timeless now, over there in Mary’s womb, God hunkers down in time. The Unconditioned Being becomes conditioned. The Infinite who could have said humbug to our flesh and our finitude tries it on for size. He takes on baggage he’s supposed to be famous and beautiful for not wearing. Unless it were true it would make no sense at all.

23 June ‘93 — We took the train to Boston today to meet Joel [a brother-in-law] and Joshua [a nephew] at the New England Aquarium. On the way home, Gabriel and Evan were sitting on opposite sides of the aisle in front of Victoria and me. At one stop as some passengers got off, we noticed that Gabriel was patting people on their arms as they passed by him. Victoria leaned forward and whispered, “Gabriel. What are you doing?”

“I’M PETTING THEM, MOM,” he matter-of-factly replied.

“What!? [incredulously] Gabey, you shouldn’t do that, son.”

“I’M ONLY PETTING THEM, MOM,” he explained.

We overheard Evan telling Gabriel to go pet someone in the car behind us, the purser whom Gabriel mistook for the conductor.

“Go pet him!” Evan urged.

“NO,” Gabe said. “I DON’T PET ABDUCTORS [sic].”

Then a big ruddy Norwegian came up the aisle. Gabriel saw him approaching and didn’t pat him as he walked past. Evan asked Gabriel, “Why didn’t you pet him?”

“BECAUSE I DON’T PET THE ONES WITH RED BEARDS.”

Aaron and I are fans of the Red Wings and Tigers, so imagine our vexation last Saturday. Both teams were playing on television at the same time. My father is with us. He’s not into hockey. He wanted us to stick with the baseball game in Camden Yards. Aaron and I preferred the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals from Joe Louis Arena. We figured that behind their ace Justin Verlander, the Tigers would end the O’s five-game win streak. They did, 6 – 3.

I enjoy the story my father tells of the time a Latino player stepped into the batter’s box and crossed himself, as ball players are wont to do, and the Yankees’ catcher Yogi Berra tapped the guy’s knee with his mitt and said to him, “Whaddya say we just let God watch this game!”

That story has to do with why I don’t want my children to have values. That and some notes written by a soldier in a foxhole. Let me explain.

During World War I, a young Austrian soldier — an aristocratic Jew who was said to have fought with “reckless bravery” — used his time in a foxhole and in prison to jot down his thoughts on logic and ethics. After the defeat of Germany and Austria, these thoughts were published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an almost impenetrably complex landmark work on the relationship between language and thought. The soldier’s name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He published only this single book in his lifetime.

He was an intellectual high-watt bulb, Wittgenstein, especially on the subject of “language games.” We play games, he observed. So do languages. When we reach for words, especially technical words, to apprehend and articulate reality, we do well to note what language game they belong to.

The language of values, like the language of ‘fastballs’ ‘bunts’ and ‘sacrifice flies’, belongs to a game with its own grammar or rules. Whereas values assume a closed system — more about which in a moment — baseball assumes an open one. Baseball’s played in a paradise whose only canopy is the heavens. This is the world a baseball player inhabits and late-night talk show hosts do not. The baseball player thanks God, or the Big Guy Upstairs, for his success. The late show hosts, Leno O’Brien or Letterman, make him the butt of jokes for it. As if God cares, they say. As if God has any interest in a game.

Athletes make easy targets. They want to believe — they believe inveterately — that God cares about what they’re doing and wishes them well, a notion quaint these days. Such a thought is incongruous in a world where our lives entire, not merely our sporting lives, are no longer seriously imagined as beheld by divinity. The reason we doubt God watches baseball is not that we think sport trivial but that we think God is. We lack the moral imagination the ancients had, or John Donne or Jane Austen. Most of us who have fiber-optic TV and 457 channels no longer imagine God watches anything. We are Nietzsche’s “last man.”

It was Nietzsche who made this values language up. He argued that whatever the rules of the game concerning our behavior shall be, they can only be rules we make up or choose for ourselves. A nihilist, he defined reality in terms of negation, negating that particular and strange history of the Jews. No more “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” and the Ten Commandments and so on. The ancient Hebrew and Christian notion that the grammar of our lives is in league with a particular history involving Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Hannah, and David; the claim that our story is somehow part of the story of Israel and her children; the hope that we inhabit that story and are headed somewhere, all this belonged to another day. That day, Nietzsche said, and his values language assumes, is gone.

This is the language game of values, a language that presupposes God is not watching us any longer because there is no God to do the watching.

If values are what people are supposed to have instead of God — and I’ve just made the case that they are — why would I want my kids to have them? I’d rather they have virtues, especially those with narrative entailments. I’d rather they have the ancient sense that their lives are beheld by divinity, watched and worried after by the God of the Exodus and Mt. Sinai, the Lord who hung the stars in the heavens and raised Jesus from the dead. I want my children to live in a universe that is more like Camden Yards or Comerica Park than Mellon Arena or the venerable Joe. And I want the Wings to win the Cup.

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, is a book about a group of small, vocal animals who lived once upon a time on the banks of the stripling Thames in Oxfordshire. There is one rather famous chapter in the book called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” and the way the chapter begins is roughly this. A family of otters discovers that a small, fat, otter child named Portly is missing. Rat, who is a water rat, and Mole, who is a mole, decide to go search for him in Rat’s boat, and off they go one morning just before daybreak.

Strange things begin to happen. Rat suddenly hears a scrap of music such as he has never heard before, and then before he knows it, it’s gone. “So beautiful and strange and new,” Rat sings (and since these are British animals you have to imagine the British accent). Rat also has a rather flowery way of expressing himself. “Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever.”

At first his friend Mole can’t hear anything — “only the wind playing in the weeds and rushes,” he says — but then when it comes again, he does hear it; and then, as Grahame writes, “breathless and transfixed, he stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on Rat’s cheeks, and bowed his head and understood.”

Religion is listening the way Rat and Mole listened — which is listening with more than just your ears, of course, which is listening with your hearts, with your intuition, with whatever is that part of you that longs, like a castaway, to hear news from across the seas. Worship is a response to that news, hearing it even in the ancient words of our forbears who themselves were listeners, who heard and then spoke of what they heard — Shema ’Yisrael, adonai Elohenu, adonai echad. Ecce agnus Dei qui tollit peccatum mundi.

Maybe it’s misleading to speak of religion as listening to something, maybe listening through would be more accurate — listening through the silence, through the prayer, through the music, through the sound of the wind in the rushes or through the sound of your own life, for whatever is to be heard through these things. It is listening the way a child listens or the way an animal listens for all I know, without any presuppositions about what you are going to hear or what you are not going to hear.

When you hear something like what Rat and Mole heard, what do you call it? Rat called it music that struck him dumb with joy and at the same time sent tears running down his cheeks. As for me, I would call it the sense that not the world certainly, not existence, but whatever it is that existence itself comes from, the power and ground out of which our lives spring, wishes us well, you and me, wishes to restore us to itself and to each other. It is the power that ultimately all theology is about. It is the power that stirs inside us at those rare moments when we make the effort of real speech with each other, and with it.

When I was eight, my best friend was Brian Bennett. Brian and I enjoyed the same games. We laughed at the same nonsense, the same elementary school jokes. We played so hard together my father says that when he tucked me into bed at night I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. It was 1967.

Brian’s mom and mine often took us to the library there in Fort Bliss, Texas. That year, he and I read one hundred books a piece, recording each title and author on a certificate I still have in my scrapbook. We enjoyed sports, and books involving sports. I remember Matt Christopher’s Too Hot to Handle. A boy named David Kroft loves baseball — his father and big brother were really good at baseball — but David is a slowpoke and thinks he makes too many errors. How will he handle the pressure of living up to the family name?

Brian got sick. He had a brain tumor. I didn’t know what a tumor was. He was at William Beaumont Hospital up the hill from our house on Field Road. I was born in that hospital. My mom and dad had both gone there for surgeries. I thought Brian would get better.

They didn’t let kids visit patients in hospitals back then. One night, I woke up in my father’s arms. He was holding me tight. His chest was heaving. His tears were falling on my face. He rocked me back and forth as if I were a baby. And he told me that Brian died.

I was confused. Why couldn’t I have gone to the hospital to tell Brian to get better? Why didn’t he come home? At the funeral, on a sunny day, I watched Sgt. Major and Mrs. Bennett crying. I watched the casket being lowered into the ground. I rubbed my eyes with two questions. Why did Brian die? What will I do without him?

We didn’t go to church when I was growing up. We went on Christmas and Easter, I’m told, but I have only vague memories of that. My first vivid memory of church is of being in the Fort Bliss main chapel for Brian’s funeral. I became aware of something that day, something that I would appreciate only later; that Church was like my mother. She was where you could go when you couldn’t cope; the one whose skirt you could hold on to when it was time to say goodbye. And she was better than the hospital. She let you in.

The cemetery where Brian was buried we could see from our house. It was down the hill, beyond the other end of Field Road. My mother says that every day for months she could see Iris Bennett, Brian’s mother, walking back and forth at the grave.