I’ve heard the legend many times, how my mom and dad, now barely 21, loaded me and all of their earthly possessions into a dark green van in the August heat and drove west for 24 hours. It wasn’t a nice little minivan – no, it was one of those box-shaped vans that more closely resemble a tank. I’m not sure if it even had any real seats in it beside the driver and passenger seat.
There is a photo I’ve seen of me and mom and dad in the back of that van. My dad had long, blond hair and a mustache, and he looked determined and fiery. My mom was a tiny little thing with large, dark eyes and long, brown hair. She was a wisp, or a thought, something a strong breeze might just scoop up and carry away. She looked a bit sad, I think because she was leaving home for the first time.
I sat there between them, barely eight months old, like a fresh piece of fruit recently plucked.
The van apparently had no heat, and later, when they came back for Christmas break, they wrapped me in a handmade, brown blanket that we still have somewhere. A 40-year-old blanket. It’s torn and has lost most of its stuffing. But it was a good blanket, in its day. I should look for that. I should show it to you.
I wonder what they talked about on that drive west, if Dad was excited to be heading off to Bible college, if Mom stared out the side window and cried silent tears at all those passing mile markers. Did they worry about money, with Dad going to school and Mom staying home with me?
It is a long straight drive from Lancaster, PA, to Springfield, MO. I made a portion of that drive many times, once I met your mother. I would head west on the turnpike, through PA and into OH, counting down the hours, listening to Counting Crows or Toad the Wet Sprocket. I would arrive in Ohio and our young bodies would collide in a hug and a shower of sparks, the kind young love creates.
Your mother and I, we made out on the sofa in the living room long after everyone went to bed, and I was scared of two things: I was scared her parents would come out and find us, and I was scared her mom’s little Chihuahua-Dachshund mix, Sparky, would attack me. Mostly though, I got lost there in the best kind of ways. When I found your mother, I found myself floating in a new world, a world in which I was no longer the center.
But that comes later. For now, I am a baby in Springfield, Missouri, and your grandparents are the ones who are young and lost, innocent and finding their way.
December 20, 1976 was an important day in my history. It’s the day I was born, and it just so happened to be the last day of autumn. The smell of snow was in the air. Maybe this is why I’ve always had a preference for the crunching sound of leaves under my feet, or those frost-covered fall mornings. Maybe this is why fall has always felt like a rebirth to me.
Your grandmother felt sick when she woke up, wondering if perhaps she had overdone it on pizza and orange juice the night before when they were hanging out with some friends. It was her first pregnancy. But the sickness began to find rhythm and depth, and soon your grandfather was driving down Route 30, four-ways flashing, passing cars on the shoulder. I think he rather enjoyed himself.
At least until they got there. Just as I was about to make my grand entrance, the doctor clamped onto my head with a pair of forceps, and Dad started to feel light-headed.
“I think I’m going to faint,” he mumbled to a nurse as my mom bore down under the weight of a contraction. He stumbled toward a chair.
“Sit down, Mr. Smucker,” the nurse said. “Put your head between your knees and breathe.”
And so it was, that as my mother was pushing me into the world, the nurses were attending to my father in the corner. Both of our worlds were spinning. I arrived around 11:30 on that day, baptized by blood and water. I screamed my first song under the crying eyes of my mother, the pale smile of my recovering father.
Who could have imagined in that moment this life I would live, the places I would see, the dreams I would dream? Who could have imagined the quieter moments of my life that came later, fishing patiently on the banks of the Pequea Creek, or riding my bike down South New Holland Road, the walls of field corn towering up on both sides of me? Who could have named the far-off places I would visit: the bright, green Buckinghamshire countryside, the angry edge of the Indian Ocean on a Sri Lankan beach, the chaotic Turkish streets in Istanbul, or the jagged emerald coastline of Ireland?
Who can ever know what these untamed lives might hold for us?
We tell you your own birth stories every year on each of your birthdays because this is the miracle: You are here. You are You. You are among us.
Remember this, my children: everyone begins as a baby. People who take what is not theirs, people who abuse the vulnerable, terrorists, war-worshipers: even they were babies once, held close by their mothers, blinking in the light, innocent and smiling for the first time. Always remember that. Even your worst enemy was once a helpless, delicious smelling infant.
That was my beginning, in that hospital in Lancaster County, PA. That was my entrance into this “one wild and precious life.”
To read this series of posts from the beginning, click HERE.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver
I’ve felt a strange urgency lately to write this down for the five (almost six) of you. I don’t know why. Maybe because this is my fortieth year and I’m seeing story lines appear around my eyes and at the corners of my mouth, lines with beginnings too many years ago to remember. You won’t truly understand that feeling for a long time, the feeling that your life is slipping away silently behind you, the good with the bad. That feeling when you look in the mirror and wonder who it is you’re looking at because that older person in the mirror is definitely not you.
But getting older is a beautiful thing, if you can dig down to the heart of it, down where most of the important things are buried. One of my most earnest prayers is that you will see your fortieth year, and your fiftieth, and many more beyond that. Life is good, even when it is hard, even when it is passing. This is difficult to believe when the smoke is blowing from some recent thing brought to ruins, but there is beauty even in the ashes of life.
I don’t expect you to have much interest in my stories right now, but maybe someday, when you have children of your own or are visiting a faraway country, doing fabulous things, there will come a quiet moment. Maybe you’ll stand under a street light in the Far East, or you’ll sit at a desk looking out over Central Park, or you’ll take a black cab from Victoria Station to Chelsea. Maybe it will happen when you’re on a beach looking out over the Indian Ocean or praying as the oxygen masks drop down from the ceiling of your plane. Maybe you’ll be sitting on a damp rock in Ireland or watching dust blow through a border town. And in that moment, you’ll think of me, your dear old dad, and you’ll wonder.
Then again, maybe you’ll be living a simple life. Perhaps you’ll have come back here, or never left, this place where our ancestors have lived for the last three hundred years or so. There’s nothing wrong with that either. There’s nothing wrong with living a simple life, loving your friends and family, knowing each curve in every road by heart, watching out for your neighbors, going to work every day and doing a fine job before going home and propping up your feet. If that’s where this life leads you, right back to where you started, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. The best roads usually bring you back home.
Cherish it, whatever you do. Cherish this life.
Some of these things I will tell you spring up out of nothing more than images: an unpainted fence at the corner of the driveway; an old attic door that would never quite close; a used brown bike with rusting spokes; the glimmer of monkey’s gold in a church parking lot. Sometimes the image will have to be the story.
Even the stories will not always be correct – I’ve written enough personal histories to know that when you pull on strands of facts that have become tangled up in the years, the facts start to fray at the ends. There may be things I get wrong, but this, this is the important thing to remember: the Truth is still there, hidden among the cloudy ends.
There is, of course, the chance that you will never read this. Many things could conspire to bring that about. For this reason, I suppose it is good that I have always been an optimist, always willing to write down the truth, roll it up in a tight scroll, slip it into a bottle, and cast it out onto the water.
Keep your eyes open, my children, and perhaps these small scrolls will wash up on your shore when you need them the most.
Last week I was working. I had my laptop with me in bed, I was wearing my sweatpants, a hoodie, and I was obsessing over whether or not a publisher is going to pick up The Day the Angels Fell (commercial break – you can purchase it for your Kindle right now for only $2.99). I am terrible at…I have always struggled with…I am working on my ability to wait. Learning how to wait isn’t fun. It takes time.
There are plenty of areas of my life that aren’t exactly where I want them to be right now. There are many things I would wish into my present, if I could: a little more money, a few more projects, kids that all sleep through the night and don’t end up on your floor at various nope-o’clock hours. A box of Lucky Charms and a gallon of whole milk all to myself.
The temptation for me while waiting, with my personality and background and temperament, is to make drastic changes, either in an attempt to rush things or to so drastically change the game itself that what I was waiting for no longer applies. We’ll move! I’ll get a job! I’ll sleep all day! I’d rather blow up this beautiful life I’m living than sit around and wait.
This is a strange and scary concept I only just realized about myself as I typed that last sentence. I would rather change everything than keep waiting. See? Writing IS free therapy!
But instead of blowing things up and starting over again, I have to remind myself of what got me into this life, one that I honestly, truthfully, cross-my-heart really do love.
Trusting that God has this whole mess completely under control.
Consistently showing up and doing the work I can do (which for me looks like 1,000 words a day).
Choose hope (go on a jog or take the kids to the park).
Continue to believe in the necessity and power of shitty first drafts (thanks, Anne Lamott).
Embracing silence and releasing worry (don’t forget to breathe).
These are not concepts that apply only to writing. Maybe you’re a mom and the monotony or the schedule or the lack of adult conversation is killing you – keep showing up. Maybe you’re a business person writing your 100th business plan – choose hope. Maybe you’re trying yet another new idea – get that terrible first draft finished and behind you. Maybe you’re a pastor starting a new church and you don’t where the money will come from – release your worry.
But always remember – and this is coming from someone who’s been through quite a few of these waiting periods in my life – if all else fails, Lucky Charms will probably help, at least a little bit.
Have you wandered?
I have.
I have wandered to the uneven edges,
to the place the straight rows break apart,
the Negev
and the Jordan. I have listened
for heartbeats that never came
for laughter that bubbled up in the spring.
Have you wandered?
I think if I could tell my son any-
thing, I would sit him down, place
my hands on his thin, widening shoulders
and tell him it is no sin
to be innocent. It is no wonderful thing
to rush into the knowledge of good
and evil. It is quite fine, in fact, to decide
to go on playing with toy cars
long after your friends, or to sit
with your baby brother and watch
the trolley move in its halting fashion
all the way to the Land of Make Believe.
This is what I would tell my son if I could.
But these are not the kinds of things you can
simply say. Words can never dry the river
while it’s running.
The only thing that can do that is the first
trusting step over the bank’s edge. Did those priests
carrying the Ark close their eyes? Did they hold their breath? Or
did they stare into the white water, determined
to see the hand of God as it worked?
I have wandered all the way to the uneven
edge, eyes closed, waiting for the courage to take
that first step into the white water.
I wanted to write a rant. Instead, I’ll start with a story.
* * * * *
I grew up in a quiet, farming community. The first four or five years of my life were spent dashing from here to there around the country as my father chased a Bible degree and, later, a church to pastor. Springfield, Missouri. Laredo, Texas. Mesquite, Texas. In 1982, when I was five years old, we moved back to Lancaster County, PA, back to my twenty-some aunts and uncles and my thirty-plus cousins, back to the place where every generation before me has grown up, at least for the last 200 years or so. Though I had no memories to pull from at the age of five, coming back to Lancaster still felt like moving home. It was as if my DNA had a homing device on the location of my birth.
The place I grew up was decidedly white and conservative, unswervingly Republican. Lest you think this is an anti-Republican rant, let me say this: the community I grew up in was loving, cared for the poor, and taught me what true Christianity looks like. We were not perfect, not in any sense of the word, but it was a community full of really good people trying to make the world a better place.
My earliest political memories are not laced with dogma or disagreement. No, they are the simple recollections of a boy growing up in the middle of farmers’ fields. My parents rarely talked about politics. I remember January 28th, 1986, the day the Challenger space shuttle exploded. I’m not sure why I was home from school on that Tuesday – maybe I was sick. Maybe school was closed. Whatever the reason, I remember watching that explosion take place on my parents’ small television. I don’t know if I saw it happen live or not, but I remember the trailing tail of smoke, the emptiness in the sky, the queasy sense that something had gone horribly wrong.
That became a political memory for me because I would always remember the speech Ronald Reagan gave soon after. I was nine years old, and it was the first time I saw a President visibly upset, perhaps the first time I listened to a President speak, and it had a profound impact on me.
Another early political memory came in January of 1991. I was 14 years old. We arrived home from church one night to discover that the Persian Gulf War had begun. We watched the television as cameras captured the nighttime battle, the distant explosions. I was 14.
I realize that a closer inspection of history will always reveal the blemishes. I didn’t understand things like the Iran-Contra affair. I had no understanding of the policy that led to the Persian Gulf War, what our soldiers would experience, or its long-term implications on the Middle East. I’m not here to argue about trickle-down economics. I was 14. To me the Republicans represented a group of people who would at least try to do what was best for our country, encourage economic growth, and be our collective, public face in times of sorrow and heartache.
Oh, the innocence of youth. I was mostly unconcerned about federal policy. I was Republican because everyone I knew and loved was Republican. My friends parents joked and ranted and complained about the Democrats, and my childhood self categorized it the same way you categorize the hometown sport’s team. It’s who everyone likes. It’s who everyone follows. Get in line.
When Bill Clinton was elected, you would have thought someone beloved in our community had died. It was the end of a 12-year Republican rule, and now the world would surely fall apart. Actually, I kind of believed that it might. A Democrat had never been President, not in my memory.
* * * * *
During the last four or five years I’ve felt drawn ever closer to the life of a contemplative Christian, a life modeled first by Jesus and then by people like Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, and Brennan Manning. Theirs is a kindness and a gentleness that is, paradoxically, powerful and world-changing. I’ve tried, through the practice of silence and solitude, to better align my spirit with the grace these men have exemplified. I’ve tried, and I’ve failed often.
This has, so far, tempered my response to Donald Trump. I have come to recognize that my reactions to the evil I see in the world are rarely in the proper proportion, are rarely aimed in the right direction. Too often, I wield my righteous indignation like a toddler driving a tractor that’s pulling a plow through a field ready for harvest, destroying the fruit and the weeds alike. I want to be less ruinous. I want to cultivate more.
Yet how can someone remain silent in the face of someone like Donald Trump, someone who leaves a wake of damaged humanity behind him, who inspires his followers to violence and fear? What can silence and kindness do in the face of such noise?
I’ve watched the rise of Donald Trump with a sort of fascinated horror. His campaign is the train wreck we cannot look away from, an over-used cliche, but it has never been such a perfect metaphor. I think about who he has shown himself to be during the last six months.
A bully who makes fun of women and encourages his supporters to rough up people they disagree with, leading to THIS (a protester being sucker punched) and THIS (a girl being harassed) and many things like THIS.
“There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience,” Trump warned people at a rally in Iowa last month. “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”
A man who actually said these sentences: “I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words.”
This is the Republican front runner. This is the person the Republican party will most likely nominate as their most qualified to lead the United States of America. What can silence, kindness, and gentleness do in the face of such belligerent power?
* * * * *
Still, silence continues to be a willing teacher, if I will only listen. Silence is trying to teach me that it is possible to resist the evil in the world while still somehow loving those who unwittingly usher that very evil in. Silence is showing me how to be patient. Silence is trying to teach me how to speak in the right way.
* * * * *
I’ve actually been registered Independent for some time – I’m not sure that Christ or Christianity is served in any way by my affiliation with a particular political party, and the increasingly dogmatic approach of the Republican Party has not represented me or my concerns. But this is the year the Republican Party lost me for good. I’m sure it’s of no great concern to them, although I doubt I’m alone in this sentiment.
Our country is divided, that much is certain. This November we will decide if we are prepared to further that divide. Look no further than Donald Trump’s recent rallies, and especially his response to them, and you will find a man who has no concern with unity, no concern with bringing people together. It’s his way or the highway. Anyone in the way gets punched in the mouth.
As a nation, this November we will decide to act either out of our fears or our hopes, two things which are often hard to discern between, at least when we’re saturated by the noise of this world. Do we fear our neighbors to the south? Do we fear immigrants? Do we fear Muslims? Or can we find a logical way, a sensible way forward that isn’t rooted in fear, violence, and retribution?
We will have a new president in November. The peaceful passing of power is one of the most beautiful, poignant, and important parts of our democracy. No matter who takes the oath, I expect there will be a greater need than ever for truth-tellers, for kindness, for gentleness, and even for silence practiced in the right way, and at the right times.
