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.

Walk into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They don’t fuss with their appearance — but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. If God gives such attention to the wildflowers, most of them never even seen, don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? [Luke 12: 27-28]

I used to work in midtown Manhattan at Saint Bartholomew’s Church. New Yorkers speak not of four seasons but of five. Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, and August which they call — I’m not making this up — “the season of weird smells.” All her asphalt collects the summer’s heat so that by August anybody who works in New York learns to walk on the concrete and not on the subway grates lest you get a pungent whiff of what bakes below. It can take your breath away.

August is quiet time in Washington. For me it’s not quiet, not now anyway. I’ve got a lot to do and a lot on my mind, not the least of it being that Gillian is soon leaving home for college. So I am arrested by this passage of scripture this morning. Jesus is whispering something about the lilies of the field, how they neither toil nor spin, and it is one of the hardest of his sayings. The least harsh or vatic — one of the most watercolor of all Jesus’s utterances — turns out to be one of the most radical and hard to swallow.

I had a dream last night, the kind I have rarely, that’s less a dream than a memory. Gabriel was two in the dream as in the memory. We were lying in bed. He was wearing swim goggles and twirling his hair. I was reading a story to him that he was eager to get to the end of not because he was disinterested but because he wanted to know how it would finish. He kept asking me to “Turn the page!” before I could complete the page we were on. Again and again he kept saying punctiliously “Turn the page!” until finally I asked him, “How do you know that the page we’re on is not the most important of them all?”

The Road goes ever on and on 
Down from the door where it began. 
Now far ahead the Road has gone, 
And I must follow, if I can, 
Pursuing it with eager feet, 
Until it joins some larger way 
Where many paths and errands meet. 
And whither then? I cannot say.

— Bilbo in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

It’s on DVD now, the 8mm home movie clip of my sister Vicki and me on Christmas Day in Okinawa in 1963. We are on the porch in front of our house, the door wrapped like a gift in silver foil, a big red ribbon on it cruciform and tied up in a bow. I am wearing my new holster and my six-shooters, my leather vest and cowboy hat, and she’s decked out in her new white dress and her new Mary Janes. Her hands adorned by her new white gloves she’s slapping me about the face and I’ve got my guns in my hands applying the butt-ends of those pistols to the top of her head which is coiffed appropriately for the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Then the silver door opens. And there is our mother in her cat eye glasses, lipstick and Christmas dress. She bends over and, pointing to the camera, says something to us — this was 8 millimeter film so there’s no audio. It’s evident she’s saying that Daddy is capturing all this on film, for we look both of us in the direction of the camera and quick as Jesse James I put my pistols in their holsters the way the gunslingers do, Vicki adjusts her dress while our mother fixes her hair, and the two of us put our arms about each other just so and walk arms around each other down the sidewalk to the car, the picture of two loving, happy, camera-fearing children.

What were we fighting about? We had come to blows over my sister’s anger at my having lost the key to her brand new roller skates. So we were not fighting over nothing.

Ten years later, a door opened to the Chapel of the post where we lived, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. It was held open by the invitation of a friend, and under the auspices of the chaplain at the time, an Episcopal priest. The girl who went through it is not the same girl who came out. Vicki started to recognize that her life was lived under a beneficent eye, and not just the eye of her father looking through a camera. She began to live Coram Deo, as the monks use to say, before the face of God.

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.

Gabriel ‘skyped’ us this morning from the Kazuaki and Tomoyo Meiri home where he’s living this summer in Yokohama. [Follow his blog.] Behind that video chat there’s a story to tell.

My Japanese grandfather lived in New York City in the twenties. When I was at Saint Bartholomew’s in New York, I used to look out the window of my study onto Park Avenue and through a gimlet eye imagine my ojiisan standing there on the corner of Park and Fiftieth. Chances are good that he came into Saint Bart’s. It would have been one of the most physically imposing buildings on the Avenue back then. And he was a religious man. Later in life, he taught Bible studies in Yokohama.

He was a bespectacled and bookish linguist and something of an eccentric. Every morning he would pick up his violin at precisely seven o’clock, play it for fifteen minutes, not a minute more nor a minute less, and put it down whereupon my grandmother would hand him the lunch she’d made for him and send him out the door. He kept an English dictionary in the breast pocket of his coat, and every day on the train to work he would take the dictionary out of his pocket and read it. He was already fluent in English; he liked words is all. When my mother Akiko speaks to my children about her father, she always tells them, “Your father is just like him.”

His name was Yoshiharu Tamaoki. Born in Tokyo, he came to America to study first at Berkeley and then in the City of New York, a city he would always love. That doesn’t surprise me. New York, to those who love it, is like malaria. If it gets in your blood it stays there the rest of your life.

He lived in New York for more than five years. He never would have left it, my mother says, except for a telegram that came one day from Japan.  MOTHER DYING. STOP. MUST COME HOME. STOP. Where he lived in the city, the life he left, what ship he boarded: we don’t know any of these things. His papers about these years were lost in the war. But that message — words — changed his life. He dropped what he was doing, gathered a few things, not least himself, and exchanged virtually everything he had for passage home.

What he discovered when he got there was that his mother was fine. The telegram was a ruse made up by the family. They figured it was the only way sure to bring him home. Unless loneliness for her son can be counted as illness, his mother hadn’t been sick at all.

Yoshiharu didn’t return to America. He settled down. He married Kura, my grandmother, a country girl from Nagano. They began a family. Nobumasa. Kimiko. Akiko. Yoshiko. Eichi.

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States of America. My mother remembers how that news rushed to her house. When the story broke neighbors and colleagues of my grandfather descended on the Tamaoki home because everyone who knew him wanted to know what Yoshiharu-san thought. “He was reading the newspaper. He looked up from his newspaper and he said to them, ‘We will never win this war,’” my mother remembers. “There was a lot of excitement in the room, everybody was excited but not my father. He was so serious,” she says. Some thought he was being a pessimist. “No. I’ve lived in America. I’ve seen America. I know America. If you could know what I know, you would understand. We will never win this war.”

As he pointed out to me the other day, Billy Shand and my mother have something in common. Each of them has had an ancestral home destroyed by the United States government. Billy’s great great grandfather, The Rev. Peter Johnson Shand, was the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Columbia, South Carolina from 1833 to 1886. When Sherman burned Columbia in 1865, Trinity Church was spared but the rectory was burned to the ground. Eighty years later, Yokohama was made a moonscape by a high-altitude B-29 bombing on May 29, 1945. The Tamaoki family had already evacuated to the country. Yoshiharu had stayed behind. When he woke up on the 29th he felt sick. He didn’t have to go to work that day. But he went anyway. A man of discipline and routine, I imagine what happened. He picked up his violin at 7 o’clock, played it for fifteen minutes, set it down and thought, “I might as well go to work.” That’s where he was when the daylight bombs started falling on Yokohama.

When the bombing was over, he patted his chest to make sure he was all there. He still had his life and his dictionary. It took him days to find his house, not an easy thing to find when all the landmarks are gone. And finally when he did find it he found that all that was left of it was a pile of rubble in the middle of which was a bomb. It hadn’t exploded but it brought the house down.

So as I said, Gabriel ‘skyped’ us this morning from the Meiri home in Yokohama. He’s living with the Kazuaki and Tomoyo Meiri family while he continues Japanese language studies at the IUC. Tomoyo’s mother is my Aunt Kimiko.

One of the more memorable prayers I ever heard was one of Gillian’s. We were living in Scarsdale at the time. It was 17 July 1995. We’d asked her to say grace. This is what she said.

“Dear God, thank you for this Sloppy Joe; but I am not going to thank you for these carrots and I am not going to thank you for this salad. Amen.”

No pretense. No pulled punches. One thinks of Edgar and the penultimate lines of King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

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.”

Thanks to a friend, Victoria and I have heard a number of writers read from their works. Several years ago we heard Christopher Buckley read AC in DC, a comic short story he’d written about the advent of air-conditioning in Washington. With Laurel and Hadi Bahar at this year’s literacy event, I noticed that Buckley had written a memoir and I asked Laurel what she knew of the book. Her brow furrowed. “He airs dirty linen,” she said, disapprobationary.

I google Losing Mum and Pup this morning and find Growing Up Buckley wherein Chris begins by describing his mother’s death in the hospital. Coming to the end of that description, he writes:

Soon after, a doctor came in to remove the respirator. It was quiet and peaceful in the room, just pings and blips from the monitor. I stroked her hair and said, the words coming out of nowhere, surprising me, “I forgive you.”

Not often do the words “I forgive you” cause a priest of the church to utter fecal indictments. My parents are both living. Their home is on Lake Gogebic in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but they are with us now, here at the ready for the high school commencements of Gillian (Friday morning at the National Cathedral) and my nephew Sean Jr. (Friday night, in West Chester, PA). Dear reader: If ever I write a word about my mother’s deficiencies or my father’s, please. Come over to my house. There is a baseball bat in the carport shed. Get it. Find me. And knock my brains out.

Being a Christian, I stand under the authority of the divine law that enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers. That is now an oddity, sheer mindlessness in this era of overweening self-analysis which eagerly and remorselessly begins by rooting one’s own problems in one’s parents’ shortcomings, thereby dismantling any honor supposed to attach to them. But for any serious Jew or Christian, a most solemn interdict lies across this path. “Honor,” the commandment says, and our Lord Jesus affirms, “honor thy father and mother.” And Jesus, quoting from Exodus 21:17, adds something not taught in Sunday Schools. “He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die,” (Matthew 15).

What does this mean? It means this: Whoever it may be who bears the responsibility for pointing out to others a mother’s faults it is not her son.

Writing about my Great Aunt Mena recently, I used a biblical figure of speech, “singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land”. That phrase is used in Psalm 137, a prayer in a collection of prayers that, like the Bible, wasn’t written for children:

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, ”Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

C. S. Lewis says this about Psalm 137. “I know things in the inner world which are like babies; the infantile beginnings of small indulgences, small resentments, which may one day become dipsomania or settled hatred but which woo us and wheedle us with special pleadings and seem so tiny, so helpless that in resisting them we feel we are being cruel to animals. They begin whimpering to us ‘I don’t ask much, but’, or ‘I had at least hoped’, or ‘you owe yourself some consideration’. Against all such pretty infants (the dears have such winning ways) the advice of the Psalm is the best. Knock the little bastards’ brains out. And ‘blessed’ is he who can, for it’s easier said than done.”

He was born 22 May 1986. Technical difficulties prevent my posting the oldest and first photo of Evan, an ultrasound polaroid taken in October, 1985. The next post [above] is the counterfactual, the most recent photograph we have of him. There he is in Fort Knox, Kentucky, making sure a .50 caliber machine gun isn’t suffering technical difficulties.

I spent the first hour of the morning looking at his baby pictures. Pondering him, thinking of what an outstanding young man he is, I remembered something else delivered in May, 1986: a commencement address given by David McCullough. That fine historian and wise man encouraged the graduates of Middlebury College to travel internationally — to go to places like Florence and Edinburgh — “because I think afterward you will see and understand your own country more clearly.” He then encouraged them to travel across this country, and he named many places, some of them — Monticello, Illinois, Kentucky, Antietam, and the Brooklyn Bridge — places where Evan has had his “boots on the ground”. “Look at people when you travel,” McCullough said. “Talk to people and listen to what they have to say. Learn to listen. So few ever learn to listen,” he told them. “Patriotism, love of country. Imagine a man who professes over and over his unending love for a woman but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents were or where she went to school or what her life had been until he came along and furthermore, doesn’t care to learn. What would you think of such a person? Yet we appear to have an unending supply of patriots who know nothing of the history of this country, nor are they interested.” And he concluded, “Try not to waste too much of your time chasing after success. Success is fickle and very perishable and largely beyond your control. Attainment — excellence — is the thing to strive for, believe me. It will belong to you. Choose your work carefully. It will shape you, it is what you will become. Take your work seriously, but not yourselves. Go with confidence. Prize tolerance and horse sense. And some time, somewhere along the way, do something for your country.”

Evan is to that speech a beau ideal. Twenty-three years ago they were delivered, a coincidence of their similitude. My son is a man cut to the measure of good words spoken among the granite of Vermont.

Almighty God, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

When my son Evan took a course at Wheaton called “Classics of Western Literature” he asked me what I thought of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I said I had met Beatrice, actually, and it turns out that her name is Victoria. The way he and his roommate kept their room, I added, would remind his mother of Dante’s description of hell. He smiled and changed the subject, saying he had also read again Augustine’s Confessions — he’d read it in high school — a book which he knows to bring up is to get me started.

We live in confessional times. Secrets once deliberated behind closed doors, sins once examined between priest and penitent, crimes once addressed by blind justice — all have become fodder for newspaper features, radio shows and TV news and programming. Victim and offender alike think nothing of appearing together on Dr. Phil or Oprah or 60 Minutes.

The guiding premise seems to be that if people tell their story — with enough anger, passion and candid details — they forget the past; they will have justified themselves before and/or absolved themselves of whatever burden they’ve laid at the public’s feet. Even a Christian is encouraged, above everything else, to tell his or her own story, as if its very uniqueness commands priority over the story of the faith.

By its very title, St. Augustine’s Confessions ought to attract a wide audience, promising as it does to be a tell-all book of the same genre as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Many of us who opened it first as adolescents scanned through it quickly in hopes of discovering salacious revelations and lurid stories of low life in pagan antiquity. Little did we realize how much we mirrored the young Augustine by these very expectations!

The Confessions ought to be a handbook for the would-be storyteller, but it isn’t. Not that there isn’t a story contained therein: Precocious army brat from a small town, gifted student with a penchant for public speaking, academic forever exploring different life-styles. But given the stories that now assault us, Augustine’s is pretty mild stuff regarded simply as story. The stolen pears pitched at pigs, his fondness for Latin literature, even his mistress (more like a common-law wife) from whom he parts — these hardly seem to us the black-as-night sins which Augustine depicts them to be. Comparatively, the outlines of Augustine’s story differ not all that much from those of many a clever graduate student pursuing a tenured-track job at a small college.

But Augustine’s purpose in sitting down in 397 A. D. to pen his Confessions was not primarily to confess his story — at least not to start, not at the beginning of the Confessions Book One wherein our hero is introduced. We need to flip ahead to Book 10, the point past which most bookmarks never venture. Read quickly, Book 10 offers us a dry, philosophical tract on human memory. Studied closely, it provides us with the wondrous key by which to comprehend Augustine’s overall purpose.

For Augustine, memory is much more than the simple ability to recount past events. Memory is best pictured by several different metaphors: the abyss of human consciousness, a vast warehouse from which we can call up a variety of past impressions, even the stomach of the mind. Augustine tells us, “I find in memory what I have to say and produce it from that source.” Memory is a land to be entered, explored and inhabited.

But, most important, memory provides Augustine with a ladder and road to God. In exploring the mystery of what we remember, Augustine exclaims, “As I raise above memory, where am I to find you? My true good and gentle source of reassurance, where shall I find you? If I find you outside my memory, I am not mindful of you. And how shall I find you if I am not mindful of you?”

As Augustine recounts his story, what is most significant are not his individual, sinful deeds, as important as these may be. What is most significant is that these deeds come to assume a shape in the telling. And this very shape comes to witness to God’s gracious existence. God may not be contained in his memory but, by reviewing his memory and rehearsing his life, Augustine discovers himself moving toward the mystery of God.

What is radical, then, about Augustine’s Confessions is not the story he confesses. Augustine did not write to catalogue his sins; that is, to tell all. Others in Late Antiquity wrote “confessions” — life stories about their moral progress from Point A to B to C. They were often more graphic in their depictions of sin than Augustine. What gives the Confessions its radical power is that Augustine is concerned not to move neatly from Point A to Point B, from tempestuous sin to placid redemption; instead he rejoices to remember everything, to remember correctly before God’s eye. Light and darkness, sin and redemption, immortality and corruption become wondrously juxtaposed before God’s gaze. Thus, Augustine can immediately follow a vivid account of his mother’s almost beatific vision at Ostia with a dark account of her stroke and death. The woman whose mind was lifted to the very frontiers of heaven is the very same woman who “explained her thoughts in such words as she could speak, then fell silent as the pain of her sickness became worse.” His writing that recounts her dying and death give us some of the most heartbreaking sentences in any literature.

The Confessions is not a seamy exposé addressed to a prurient audience; from beginning to end, it is a prayer addressed to God — a prayer for the Holy Spirit. And in being found by the Holy Spirit, Augustine discovers a truth at which every saint seems finally to arrive: Unlike the New Age pabulum which passes for spirituality, the Christian life is not a matter of forgetting, of moving smoothly onward and upward, of letting the inner child blurt out past mistakes in order to become the master of your own story. The Christian life is a matter of being able to discover and confess, confess to God, that in Christ we are enabled to remember all things; and that all things, good and bad, come to possess, through Christ, their glorious unity, even a sacrifice of praise offered to the Most High.

19 September 1993 — This morning at St. John’s, New Haven, the children’s lesson was from Acts 2: 42 (“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers.”) The teacher, Kathy Rodgers, asked, “What do Christians devote themselves to?” Gabriel raised his hand.

“THE FOLLOWSHIP! [sic]” he came back, glossing the answer and — just so — getting it better than just right.

I have three sons. They used to say to me whilst at the supper table, “Dad,” they’d say, “you spoil Gillian.” I don’t hear those words much any more. I miss them. Evan has married. Gabriel is away at school. Aaron will make an occasional attempt, but his heart’s not in it. He’s alone, Ionian. The lyric’s choral.

What other fathers do when their sons tell them they’re spoiling the daughter, I don’t know. I know what I did. ”Thank you,” I said without fail. “I need every assurance I can get. I worry I’ve not been doing that.”

Gillian would smile. Her mother would smile. Her brothers would smile. It became a ritual as regular if not as frequent as saying grace. What can I say? We’re Episcopalians.

She came home from high school for the last time today.