“What would he have done with thirteen-year-olds?” I asked Tom.
“In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.”
I wrote this down and taped it to my wall, next to the pink card. Every parent who saw it laughed and felt better; nothing helps like letting your ugly common secrets out. And it came in handy during a recent fight.
I was driving Sam to his friend Anthony’s house, where he was going to spend the night. I would pick him up for church at ten-thirty the next morning. He was furious about having to go to church, although he has to go only every other week. The Visitor, Phil, had been with us all morning, petulant and put-upon—what we called “bratty” when I was young. When I’d asked Sam to wash his breakfast dishes, you’d have thought I had ordered him to give the kitty a flea dip.
I didn’t try to get him to want to come to church; I didn’t try to bribe him, or get him to like it—or me. I am not here to be his friend. He was awful in the car, mute and victimized.
It was one of those long ten-minute car rides. Living with a teenager can feel like living with an ex, or with a drug addict who has three days clean and sober. I tried to think about how nice it would be not to see Sam for twenty-four hours. We both sighed a lot. When I pulled up at Anthony’s house, Sam got out of the car, and without saying good-bye, slammed the door and walked away. And I blew up. This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
So I lost it, and I shouted for him to come back and get in the car. He couldn’t believe his ears. He gave me a withering look that turned to desperation. “No, no, please,” he begged.
“Get in the car,” I said. “You do not slam the door and walk away from me.”
I made him get in the car and close the door, and I drove away. He was furious, then teary. He tried begging for mercy. I hate that.
I parked where the road dead-ended near Anthony’s, and I got out. I said, “You will not treat me like shit. I’m going to sit by that log. When you’re ready to apologize with a contrite heart, you can get out of the car.”
I went and sat down against an ancient fallen log, and smoldered.
I did not look back at him, thirty feet away. I looked at the log instead. I caught my breath. I thought about what a piece of shit I am, and what a horrible, ruined child he is. I thought about grounding him all weekend, but of course, that meant I would have to spend time with him. I breathed, as it said on the pink card, and prayed, tried to be kind to my disastrous self, and wondered what it might mean in this situation to stop grabbing.
The log had a certain eminence, the majesty of age—there was rot, and hairy sprouts, the kind you see in a grandfather’s ears. It was furniture, a barrier, sculptural and grave, not the sort of thing you could argue with.
I could feel Sam’s eyes drilling into my head. I felt wrong, and wronged. My head was sticking up over the log, so he could have shot at me.
A few feet away was a rock that looked like an altar, a huge mottled stone head, like a happy Buddhist god with leprosy. It also looked like a lumpy manhole cover, put there to keep whoever’s inside from getting out. I tried to breathe beatifically. I thought of Tom, and wanted to ask, “What on earth did Mary do when Jesus was thirteen?”
Here’s what I think: She occasionally started gathering rocks.
If we take the incarnation seriously, then even good old Jesus was thirteen once, a human thirteen-year-old. He learned by doing, as we have to. He had to go through adolescence. It must have been awful sometimes. Do you know anyone for whom adolescence was consistently okay? But in his case, we don’t know for sure. We see him earlier, in the Bible, at twelve, when he’s speaking to the elders in the Temple. He’s great with the elders, just as Sam is always fabulous with other grown-ups. They can’t believe he’s such an easygoing kid, with such good manners. In the Temple, Jesus says things so profound that the elders are amazed. “Who’s this kid’s teacher?” they wonder. They don’t know that Jesus’ teacher was the Spirit.
But at the same time he’s blowing the elders away, how is Jesus treating his parents? I’ll tell you: He’s making them crazy. He’s ditched them. They can’t find him for three days. Some of you know what it’s like to not find your kid for three hours. You die. Mary and Joseph have looked everywhere, in the market, at the video arcade. Finally they find him, in the last place they thought to look—the Temple. And immediately, he mouths off: Oh, sorry, sorry, I was busy doing all this other stuff, my father’s work. Like, Joseph, you’re not my real father—you’re not the boss of me. I don’t even have to listen to you.
And what is Mary doing this whole time?
Mary’s got a rock in her hand.
I turned around. Sam sat grimly, and I fixed him with gimlet eyes, pinning him to the seat until he could see the error of his ways.
It seems idiotic for Sam to challenge me so often, since he has no income to speak of, and he can’t drive. I looked at the face in the altar, toothless and muckled, with its folded-over mouth. In the alder branches above me, a little gray bird flitted about, modest but melodious. The leaves of the alder quivered. I started to miss Sam. He’s every single good thing, including honest, and openly questioning, and angry, that I love so much. The other day he said, with enormous hostility, “We are the only family I know that doesn’t display its china.” I responded nicely that we don’t have any china, and he said, “That’s my point.”
The hills behind me were close, curvy and feminine. The quaking leaves of the alder sounded like rain against a skylight.
I looked over at my bad boy. He was staring out the window with resigned misery, as if he were on his way to the dentist. I thought about stoning him. Jesus would have said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, and tax collectors, and thirteen-year-olds,” which means, “You are totally pissing me off.” And he’d have said this right before he picked up a rock.
I bet he had a good arm, being a carpenter and all. I bet he could take a kid out at 150 yards. I thought of Sam’s most infuriating habits; how snotty he can act, how entitled, his clothes and towels always dropped on the floor; the way he answers the phone, sounding like Henry Kissinger and only pretending to take down messages.
What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic. You don’t get far through grinding your teeth and heavy breathing. You noodle around, to warm up, and you meander, to find out if there are any improvisations that call to you. In this case, that meant for me to get up and move around.
I decided to get out from under the weight of his gaze and discomfort, and so I lay down beside the log. There were small, antic wildflowers in the grass beside me. I closed my eyes and listened to the little birds, to the alders and the grass. I breathed in the hay smell of the grass, toasty, with the hint of distant forest fires, and lots of sweetness, like clean laundry.
I was still and attentive and I prayed, and eventually some of my anger dissipated. After a while, I heard the car door open. It was as if, once things were more peaceful in me, the deer or the bobcat could come out of the thicket to case the joint. I heard his footsteps approach, and I sat up. When he came over, he was both, deer and bobcat, tentative, dangerous, and teary. He stood a few feet away, looking back at the car.
He sighed and began to speak. “I’m sorry I was such an asshole,” he said.
I’d sort of been hoping he’d say something I could report back to my pastor, but I saw how bad he felt, how lonely.
“Okay?” he said.
I shook my head and sighed. “I’m sorry I was such an asshole, too.”
He sat down in the dirt, and we talked in a stilted, unhappy way. I practiced being right for a
while, and he was sullen; then I practiced being kind. Things improved a bit. My friend Mark, who works with church youth groups, reminded me recently that Sam doesn’t need me to correct his feelings. He needs me to listen, to be clear and fair and parental. But most of all he needs me to be alive in a way that makes him feel he will be able to bear adulthood, because he is terrified of death, and that includes growing up to be one of the stressed-out, gray-faced adults he sees rushing around him.
“Now can we go back to Anthony’s?” he asked, petulantly. We got up and walked to the car. I draped my arm around his shoulders like a sweater.
eight
sincere meditations
Sometimes, if you are lucky and brave, you can watch someone who’s met with serious illness or loss do the kind of restoration that I suspect we are here on earth to do. If you’ve ever seen David Roche, the monologist and pastor of the Church of 80% Sincerity, you may have already witnessed this process.
David and I met years ago through a friend we had in common. The first time we spoke was on the phone, and we talked about God for half an hour. David mentioned that he had a facial deformity, and I thought, Well, whatever, and we talked some more. Then he came to my church, and it turned out he had one of the most severe facial deformities I’d ever seen.
He was born with a huge benign tumor on the bottom left side of his face; surgeons tried to remove it when he was very young. In the process, they removed his lower lip, and then gave him such extensive radiation that the lower part of his face stopped growing, and he was covered with plum-colored burns.
David is fifty-five now, with silvery hair and bright blue eyes.
I first saw him perform at a local community center, at a benefit for refugees in Kosovo. He was wearing a plum-purple dress shirt, which exemplifies the tender and jaunty bravery I have come to associate with him. He stepped out onstage before a hundred grown-ups and a dozen children, and stood smiling while people got a good look. Then he suggested we ask him, in a conversational tone and in unison, “David, what happened to your face?” When we did, he explained about the tumor, the surgery, and all those radiation burns.
He told of wanting to form a gang of the coolest disfigured people in the world, like the Phantom of the Opera, the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Jackson. They’d go places as a group—bowling, or to a makeover counter at Macy’s.
“People assume I had an awful childhood,” he continued. “But I didn’t. I was loved and esteemed by my parents. My face may be unique, but my experiences aren’t. I believe they are universal.”
Wouldn’t you think that having a face like his totally messed with his adolescent sex life? Of course it did, he said. And he was stocky, too, a chubby little disfigured guy. But these things were not nearly as detrimental as having been raised Catholic, having been, as he put it, an incense survivor.
As he told his stories through a crazy mouth, a jumble of teeth, only one lip, and a too-large tongue, David’s voice sounded not garbled but strangely like a burr, that of a Scottish person who’d just had a shot of novocaine.
“We with facial deformities are children of the dark,” he said. “Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: we can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society, and even to God.
“All those years, I kept my bad stories in the dark, but not anymore. Now I am stepping out into the light. And this face has turned out to be an elaborately disguised gift from God.”
David spoke of the hidden scary scarred parts inside us all, the soul disfigurement, the fear deep within us that we’re unacceptable; and while he spoke, his hands moved fluidly in expressions that his face can’t make. His hands are beautiful, fair, light as air, light as a ballet dancer’s.
He described his first game of spin-the-bottle, when the girl who was chosen to kiss him recoiled in horror, and he said to her, debonairly, “You know you want me.” Then he admitted sheepishly that he didn’t actually say that for twenty years; but in soul time, it’s never too late. He told of loving a teenage girl named Carol, of how it took months to ask her out, and that when he did, she accepted. They went to the movies and afterward sat on his front porch; he kept trying to put his arm around her but couldn’t quite do it, so they talked and talked and talked. He wanted to kiss her but was too shy to ask; he was afraid it was like asking her to kiss a monster. Finally she said, “I need to go home now,” and he said, “Carol, I want to kiss you,” and she said, “David, I thought you’d never ask.”
That was a moment of true grace, and from this experience, he built a church inside himself. There is no physical church, but his own life: both his performances and his work teaching people to tell their stories, their marvelous, screwed-up, and often hilarious resurrection stories. Voilà: a church.
“We in the Church of Eighty Percent Sincerity do not believe in miracles,” he said. “But we do believe that you have to stay alert, because good things happen. When God opens the door, you’ve got to put your foot in.
“Eighty percent sincerity is about as good as it’s going to get. So is eighty percent compassion. Eighty percent celibacy. So twenty percent of the time, you just get to be yourself.”
It’s such subversive material, so contrary to everything society leads us to believe—that if you look good, you’ll be happy, and have it all together, and you’ll be successful and nothing will go wrong and you won’t have to die, and the rot won’t get in.
In the Church of 80% Sincerity, you definitely don’t have to look good, but you are supposed to meditate. According to David’s instructions, you sit quietly with your eyes closed and you follow your breath in and out of your body, gently watching your mind. Your mantra should go like this: “Why am I doing this? This is such a waste! I have so much to do! My butt itches. . . .” And if you stick to it, he promised, from time to time calm and peace of mind will intrude. After some practice with this basic meditation, you will be able to graduate to panic meditations, and then sex fantasy meditations. And meditations on what to do when you win the lotto.
When David insists you are fine exactly the way you are, you find yourself almost believing him. When he talks about unconditional love, he gives you a new lease on life, because the way he explains it, you may, for the first time, believe that even you could taste of this. As he explains it, in the Church of 80% Sincerity, everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with a shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. Instead of beating yourself up because you feel it only fleetingly, you should savor those moments when it appears. As David puts it, “We might say to our beloved, ‘Honey, I’ve been having these feelings of unconditional love for you for the last eight to ten seconds.’ Or ‘Darling, I’ll love you till the very end of dinner.’ ”
David has been married to a beautiful woman named Marlena for the last few years. After listening to his lovely words, his magic, this doesn’t seem at all strange. There he is, standing in front of a crowd, and everyone can see that just about the worst thing that could happen to a person physically has happened to him. Yet he’s enjoying himself immensely, talking about the ten seconds of grace he felt here, the ten seconds he felt there, how those moments filled him and how he makes them last a little longer. Everyone watching gets happy because he’s giving instruction on how this could happen for them, too, this militant self-acceptance. He lost the great big outward thing, the good-looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brilliant mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue eyes, those beautiful hands.
The children, sitting in the front rows, get him right away. Maybe they don’t have so many overlays yet, of armor and prejudice, so Spirit can reach out and grab them faster. Maybe it’s partly that they’re sitting so close, but whatever the reason, they g
aze up at him as if he were a rock star. “I look different to you now, right?” he asked the kids that first time I saw him, when he was almost finished, and they nodded, especially the teenagers. To be in adolescence is, for most of us, to be facially deformed. David makes you want to help him build a fort under the table with blankets, because it looks like such fun when he does it. He builds the fort, and then lets you lift the blankets and peek in, at him and at you. You laugh with recognition, with relief that your baggage and flaws are not vile, unmentionable. It’s like soul aerobics.
“I’ve been forced to find my inner beauty,” he said in closing. “Doing that gave me a deep faith in myself. Eighty percent of the time. And that faith has been a window, so I can see the beauty in you, too. The light in your eyes. Your warmth. So thank you.”
There was thunderous applause, and he bowed shyly, ducking his head and then looking up, beaming at us all. He held his palms up as if about to give a benediction. His hands caught the light like those of the youngest child there.
nine
heat
I need to put in a quick disclaimer so that when I say what I’m about to say, you will know that the truest thing in the world is that I love my son more than life itself. I would rather be with him, talk to him, and watch him grow than do anything else on earth. Okay?
So: I woke up one morning not long ago and lay in bed trying to remember whether, the night before, I had actually threatened to have his pets put to sleep, or whether I had only insinuated that I would no longer intercede to keep them alive when, because of his neglect, they began starving to death.
I’m pretty sure I only threatened not to intercede. But there have been other nights when I’ve made worse threats, thrown toys off the deck into the street, and slammed the door to his room so hard that things fell off his bookshelf. I have screamed at him with such rage for ignoring me that you would have thought he’d tried to set my bed on fire.