So my sixteen year-old son, Evan, and I had a conversation a
while ago about “his relationship with God” and what such a statement might
mean. For those of you who don’t know Evan, he’s a great kid—you’d really like
him. Since Evan is a student at the diminutive
public school at which I teach, most of my colleagues have told me more than a
couple “Evan stories” that recount his in-classroom, larger-than-typical
discussion responses and involvement in whatever is going on in class. Evan is
clever, witty, and usually wanting to know how he can engage and apply. A broad
path of personality that runs smack down the middle of his persona-mapping is
the tendency to tell you exactly what he thinks. This is refreshing in some
situations, but as you can imagine can also be a personality point that results
in many moments of unseasoned comments which produce wringing of parental hands
and patriarchal wailing and gnashing of teeth. Especially if Evan knows you well,
rest assured that you will get exactly
what he means.
“I don’t
know if I really love God, Dad.” The statement fell flat in his bedroom.
Sixteen years of careful (and conservative) Christian education, replete with
twelve years of ABeka-anchored elementary homeschooling, obligatory Sunday
school attendance, and fairly consistent daily mealtime devotions slowly drained
from the room. He continued, “I mean, how can you truly love someone that you never have really met—someone who has never
made it beyond something-that-you-study or read stories about?” I resisted the
slight father-vertigo feeling to engage him in the memory of the “day he
invited Jesus into his heart,” and let his statement stand.
I even
conceded his question with a paternally-thoughtful nod, a murmured, “Hm. I see”
or something, and we followed an unmemorable decline into some other course of
discussion. The dwindling conversation wasn’t because I was scared of talking
honestly with my kid; I have (mostly) enjoyed the candor with which my kids and
I can step into the untouchable topics that make some parents queasy.
No, the
blank wall that Evan’s admission created was a wall that I have sensed many
times before in my own heart. I think it’s because so much of my own spiritual
journey has been rather textbooked, Sunday-schooled, evangelicalized, that my
relationship with God is mostly made
up of what I believe about God. If
you’re really talking about relationship, such a realization is really a big
problem. So much of what I see about the “spirituality” of my own life and the
lives of most of my close friends, is really only about precept and concept.
Sure, there’s a personalized twist to some of my more sophisticated religious
meanderings and discussions with companions, but at the end of the day, God
often remains a biblical abstract, relegated to a deity defined by old Semetic oral
traditions that generally contradict a lot of increasingly-impalatable, 1st-century
Pauline ecclesiastic admonitions. Lots
of the praise songs in church insist that God is “my all in all,” or that “He
means everything to me.” Those are pretty big claims. In many ways, Evan’s
complaint that it’s hard to love a Someone-Intangible is my own, and is only a
small step away from refusing to believe in a Someone-Imaginary. It takes somebody
with my son’s relational verve to just out-and-out state the fact.
I have this
retreat, a sanctuary to which I retire (daily) where I read Scripture, pray,
and write (to God), but it’s also a place I go when I need a to do a bit of
complaining, wondering, meditative wrangling, even emotional and spiritual wound-licking,
a place that has changed locationally
throughout the years. Back when I was a tougher dude, it was mostly outside in
our back woods or up-and-down our street. The car headlights of my
early-morning-commuter neighbors would often pick me out as I tramped along
Coventry Drive during snow, wind, or whatever freezing-pelt a New Hampshire
early morning could produce. Now, I’m much more mature, uh—contemplative, I
guess—so a cushy chair by the woodstove usually will suffice. It’s a place I’ve
often told God to meet me. I fancy, like Moses’ Tent of Meeting, or the Hebrew
tabernacle of old, that it has switched around from place to place through my
forty years or so of spiritual/theological wilderness wandering.
Early the
next morning, I entered my sanctuary and put Evan’s question out there. “So how
does my son get to know you? Where are you, God, in the midst of his 21st
century millennialistic, postmodern-restructuralist mindset? How will Evan ever
come to know You? He’s sixteen, and hasn’t seen or heard anything from You.
It’s all been about what he’s been told. What in his life shows that You
care—or much more, desire some love
relationship with him? What in his life even proves that You exist?”
“You.”
It’s the
word that my hand kinda-sorta automatically wrote in my spiral notebook.
And then I
thought back over the (especially last few) years regarding my own doctrinal
strayings, my rejections of denominationalisms, my private failures and
half-lived determinations. Through all the chaos of unwillingness to have God
as “He has always been,” I could see very easily in my metaphysic efforts that
all-important thread to be alive, challenged, fully invested as one who pursues
The Voice.
I looked
outside the window to where the flaming foliage began to coalesce into predawn
light. Trees, woods, a half-light, that has seen me these many years, pursuing
my life within so that I might live
and love a significant life without.
The memories, the notebooks, the margins of my Bible littered with decades-long
annotations—struggles and triumphs.
And then,
with Evan: the living-room talks, the backpacking, the Santa excitements, the
fort building, the costume closets, the silly songs, the wood cutting, the
sledding and snowshoeing, the thousands of photographs, the laughter, the
determined resolve, the arguing and wrangling, the shouted anger against
fraternal betrayal, hours of family videos that show a life filled of a dad
loving his “rollicking rooster of a boy.”
“He knows you, Tom,” I wrote.
“You have
become Me because I have tabernacled with you.”
“You, most-beloved son, have become
Evan’s Emmanuel.”
--“Dad, how
can I love someone I’ve never met?”
The Word became
flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the
one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
…and
now this mystery of Christ dwells within you….
And so the design, the blueprint, of
Who It Is I Am Becoming, slowly merged from the basement darkness into the
early morning light, casting familiar features from around the room. I looked
again to what I had written in my spiral: “You, most-beloved son, have become Evan’s Emmanuel.”
“You can know God, Evan, because you
know me”: It’s what I wish I had said.
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