Merry Christmas

"The condition of mass disintegration seemingly intensifies human guilt. One way in which it does this is by depriving people of traditional and accepted patterns of life. Established wisdom and forms have lost much of their authority. In many matters once regulated by prescription there is no received way of acting. One is left to design and create his own life.

This means freedom and an opportunity for originality; but the strain and disorganization which it involves are necessarily very great, and many are bound to commit wrongs from which they would have been saved by a firmer and more commanding order of society.

An example of this situation is the raising of children in America. Customary forms of child-training have been partially discredited by an optimistic, permissive psychology, and the result is that American parents are not for the most part conscious of there being a particular way in which children are best disciplined and taught. Often parents are left only with a few notions vaguely based upon the hypotheses of unknown, and frequently philosophically ignorant, psychologists.

This of course constitutes an opportunity for a very creative kind of parenthood. But to have to train children and, in addition, to determine the final ends and the methods of such training is about as difficult a responsibility as a human being could assume. Parents who accept this responsibility are required, implicitly, to choose among competing philosophies of man, the world, and civilization; furthermore, they have to do this when they are young and inexperienced and must, on the validity of their choices, stake in some measure the lives and happiness of their children.

Never can it have been more true than today that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children."

― Glenn Tinder, "The Crisis of Political Imagination" (1964)

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Dear Kate,

I guess I answered my own question this Christmas morning.

At 5:30 I woke up to a nightmare, the worst in my life I could remember, wailed myself out of it.

It was like this, I was with my father, who was about to go up on the roof with me to fix leaks.  I know he doesn't know how to fix a leaking roof.  I am not sure if he actually knows how to fix anything at all.  I was there, fathering him, yet acknowledging he is my father, my leader, my guide.  He had a manual on his hands, reading it.  I didn't know there's a user manual for my roof.  I wondered how helpful it is.  Water moves.

Then I saw a small pool of water, a little puddle on the floor, at a very specific corner of my kitchen, and I knew what it meant.  I looked up and sure enough, a leak up high, dripping, patiently to test my patience, see if I would be broken apart by something so insignificant.

I was calm.  I passed the test.  I got myself a towel (my father still reading the manual), and placed it where the puddle was.  Yet by then I could see the puddle was but a small manifestation of God's grand design, which would involve gushes running across my ceiling that He could contain but wouldn't, wall paint disintegrating faster than my soul, my will to stay standing.  This time He went for the kills.  No mercy.  No more child's play.

I kneeled and pleaded, long, sustained wailing out of me, a voice I loved when I heard its longing last night―

Fall on your knees, oh, hear, hear the Angels' voices

Oh, night divine, yeah, oh, night when Christ was born

a great voice I didn't know I had.  It was in me all along then, this beautiful singing voice, unfaltering, unflagging, concerned and discerning of my place in humanity.

God, where are you?  Do you still care?  Syllables protracted like in an opera, the kind that my kids would call cringey.  Tears unleashed, the type that my son despises, any type out of this father.

I woke.  Thank God, I guess.

Merry Christmas.

Yours, Alex