It doesn’t require an earthquake or a meteor strike. The solid ground beneath us moves, much like the ocean, and we can see it if we have patience, if we know how to look long enough. Watch the frost heaves carry stones from deep below New England, every spring the bane of farmers and others who would dig or play in the dirt. Or give the earthworms forty thousand years to do their tilling work and they will move the earth up and down by feet at time. Streams and glaciers cut through hardest stone, changing the planetary face. Yes, we can see it if we know how to look long enough. Yes, even the solid earth moves.
Change and flux rule, and in their wake all mighty truths proclaimed by women and men fall by the wayside, slip into the open spaces left by rising stones in winter, slide into the soft earth loosened by the passing of 1,000 worms, sink below the surface of rivers that were once mere streams.
So much passes away. So little remains. We know this to be the way of the world, and yet still we long for something permanent. Still we long to endure. Still we wish to leave legacies for generations to come. Still we love our children—we love all children— and we work to see them survive and flourish in a future we know we cannot possibly predict. Still we conduct our lives as if the ground beneath is solid and reliable and unchanging.
Perhaps this is the nature of faith—to long for permanence, to love children, to trust the ground even though we know it moves. May we always strive for such faith. May it bring meaning to our lives. May it make us whole. Amen and Blessed be.
by Bradley Earle Hoge
The most trouble I ever got into was
breaking flagstones
with my father’s new golden putter.
They led from the front yard
around the side of the house to the back
through a gate in the fence.
We rented the house. They weren’t our flagstones,
and my punishment was to apologize to the landlord,
our next-door neighbor, and pay for the damage
by doing extra chores.
I enjoyed watching the flagstones break.
Each one produced a different pattern.
It was hypnotic and addictive, and
there is only one other place I have seen those
patterns—
under the microscope in small grains of quartz
that have been shocked and cracked
by the collision of a meteorite with the earth
over sixty million years ago.
Some say that is what drove the dinosaurs extinct.
A random act of extraterrestrial violence.
No motive, no malice—
like a child’s destructive curiosity.
I am no longer sorry that I broke flagstones,
and if my child does something like it,
something random and destructive, innocent and Zen
I hope that I can continue to learn.
The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
Father’s Day, June 18th, 2006
Over the past few months, when it hasn’t been raining, Mason (my four-year old) and I have been using our driveway as a vast chalkboard on which we draw, literally, a city. Actually, I do the drawing. Mason tells me what to draw. And as I draw, he rides his bright red Radio Flyer tricycle from place to place. We’ve been drawing new cities every time the sun comes out after the rain. Each city we draw is more complex than the last. What used to be single lines for streets now come with median strips, stop lights, and cross-walks. I am always intrigued at the things Mason wants me to draw. His design decisions come primarily from the places we go together and the activities we do together. Thus, I also see these cities as a way of gaining insight into the life of postmodern dad and, I suppose, postmodern kid. Some of it I find very hopeful and compelling. Some of it gives me pause for concern.
When we first started drawing cities, Mason would ask me to draw a video store and a Barnes and Noble. What does that say? The first two locations on Mason’s mind in those early days of drawing cities were entertainment-related, which is easily explained by the fact that he’s four years old. But there are different kinds of entertainment. He didn’t ask me to draw the circus or the amusement park or the theater or a concert—somewhere where you go to experience entertainment as part of a larger community—and he has been to those places. He asked me to draw stores where you go to purchase or rent videos, books, music, and computer games and bring them home to enjoy privately.
There is something very sweet about what we call Family Movie Night at our house, which takes any Friday evening I have free. We watch a movie together. It’s quality, family time. We enjoy the various rituals leading up to the movie, like getting in our pajamas and popping the popcorn, as much as we enjoy the movie itself. I think this is the primary association Mason has with the video store. But I’m reminded that less than a generation ago there were no video stores. There were no VCRs, no DVDs, no home computers. I hear stories from decades past about families sitting around the television or the radio and watching or listening to a special show or a presidential fireside chat. This is similar to Family Movie Night, but at least then you knew there were many other people across the country watching or listening to the same program. There was still some sense of community, some sense of a collective or a common activity. When we rent a video, we may be the only ones taking that video home to watch. Our neighbors are watching a different video. Nothing connects us at that point. We don’t travel to some special destination to be entertained in community. We travel to a store; we purchase our entertainment; and we take it to our home to experience it privately. There’s something isolating about the postmodern condition. Many observers of postmodernity point to the way developments in technology have led us away from community. And there it is acted out in my child’s play.
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t rent videos or buy books and CDs at Barnes and Noble, or that somehow postmodern dad is failing in his responsibilities when he does these things with his children. I’m saying the challenge for postmodern dad, for postmodern families, for postmodern child-rearing is to be aware of the ways our culture and its supportive technologies lead us further and further away from each other. Family Movie Night is a wonderful thing. Computer games have their therapeutic uses. Privacy and solitude are not problematic values; they play a very important role in our spiritual lives. But let us strive for balance. We ought to be able to answer both these questions: What did you do in the privacy of your own home this week? What did you do in community this week? As we tend more and more neglect that part of ourselves that needs community, these questions seem critical to me.
“What else should we draw, Mason? “We need a dump.” This warms my heart. We have a lot of fun at the real dump. Mason loves throwing garbage and recycling into the big bins. The dump is also fun to draw. You have to make it big enough so that a four-year old can pull his bright red Radio Flyer tricycle all the way in, park, and unload his garbage and recycling. We’ve had long talks about recycling, and although I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what you’re supposed to recycle and what you have to throw away, I’m glad he knows that one recycles. In his mind, this isn’t something some people do and some don’t. In his mind this is part of being human. You recycle. He ties his bright red Radio Flyer wagon to the back of his bright red Radio Flyer tricycle, loads it up with all sorts of junk, and brings it to the dump. He asks the attendant (that’s me) for a receipt and then unloads his junk in the various bins that I’ve drawn. Of course, when I first started drawing the bins, they weren’t to his specifications. He wanted to see them actually crushing the recycled materials into pulp. That’s hard to draw with driveway chalk.
Recycling has always been part of the human experience. Modern waste management techniques that have de-emphasized the need for recycling are much more the historical exception than the rule. It has only been within the last 100 years with the rise of consumer economies in industrialized nations that convenience and disposability have become deeply ingrained human values. I’m glad to see these values have not become second nature to my son. And I suspect he is well-prepared for a near future in which recycling will not just be something environmentally conscious people do. It will be the law, because the earth cannot continue to sustain the massive amounts of unnecessary waste we generate. Mason doesn’t know this. Recycling is not a moral principle for him. It’s deeper than that. Again, it’s part of being human. We eat, drink, sleep, poop, recycle. Postmodern dad tries to embrace this, and in doing so emphasizes to his children our interdependence with all life.
One of my favorite things to draw in our city is the Oak Grove Nature Center. This is a quiet little nature preserve in Southeast Manchester, managed by the Lutz Children’s Museum. Mason and I hike there. He wanted to hike in his city, so he had me draw the Oak Grove Nature Center. He rides his bright red Radio Flyer tricycle up to the parking lot, parks, gets out, stretches, and then asks to see the map.
“What map?” I ask.
“The map at the Oak Grove Nature Center!” He’s right. There’s a large wooden map of the hiking trails in the parking lot at Oak Grove. Whenever we go there we stop at the map to trace our route before we hike. He wanted me to draw a little map on our driveway, which we would look at before hiking on our driveway. And his hikes at the chalk Oak Grove Nature Center are very much like his hikes at the real Oak Grove Nature Center. We stop to look at birds, bugs, turtles, chipmunks and interesting trees.
Once gave some of stuffed animals chalk homes all around the Oak Grove Nature Center. This became a problem for them when real water from our sprinkler started running down the driveway into the animals’ chalk homes. Mason got very upset about this. I asked him what he wanted to do about it. He wanted me to turn the sprinkler off. I said I meant in his city—what did he want to do about this flood? What could he do to help the animals?” He said we could take them to the Lutz Children’s Museum. “OK,” I said, “We don’t have a Lutz Children’s Museum.” “We could draw one,” he said. So, I quickly drew the Lutz Children’s Museum, proud of my son for recognizing a valuable community resource. Now, being on the board of the Lutz Children’s Museum, I wasn’t sure we were ready to receive all these homeless animals. On the other hand, I had to remind myself we were talking about the recently drawn Lutz Children’s Museum in our driveway, not the actual museum on whose board I serve. Mason’s bright red Radio Flyer tricycle was quickly transformed into a three-wheeled all-terrain animal rescue vehicle, and the animals were taken to the Lutz, as well as to the Bronx Zoo and the local elementary school which we had drawn at other locations around town; and we dropped a monkey off at the park so he could swing on the trees.
Although the actual flood waters had come literally from our sprinkler, the source of the flood in relation to suburban sprawl in our chalk city was suspicious. You see, earlier that day, some neighbor kids whom Mason adores had stopped by to play in the city. One, a ten-year old boy, wanted to be able to rent kayaks on the lake. He got busy drawing a kayak rental pavilion. He also drew more parking spaces at the supermarket, since Mason had been complaining there wasn’t enough room to park there. The other kid, a twelve-year old girl, wasn’t satisfied at all with the various shops and amenities in our city. She wanted a mall. And the only space left in which it was possible to develop a mall in our chalk city was upstream from the Oak Grove Nature Center. Mason’s response was, “OK.” He enjoys going to the mall. And I thought to myself, “he’s not really doing an adequate job with planning and zoning here; this is going to destroy the downtown shops. And the community will probably want a hearing and an environmental impact assessment; a verbal “OK” is not the same thing as a building permit, and doesn’t this girl understand that? Given all the corruption scandals in Connecticut, shouldn’t these kids be more sensitive to even the appearance of impropriety?” You see, part of the postmodern condition is the experience of a blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, and postmodern dad can get carried away sometimes.
Like when I couldn’t help insisting that we only provide rail access to the mall so people would be forced to use public transportation. The twelve year old didn’t care how these imaginary people would get there; she just wanted to draw her mall. She grabbed the chalk and started drawing all her favorite stores. She knew how to spell “The Gap” and “The Limited II” and “Uno’s.” I was alarmed when she asked me how to spell Hooters. The ten year old boy smiled knowingly, without indicating whether he approved of the proposed mall tenant. I said we would not be building a Hooters in our city. She said we already have one. I asked where. She said, “over by the mall.” I said, “You mean at the real mall. I’m talking about our chalk mall.” She asked, “Isn’t the chalk mall supposed to be like the real mall?” I said, “I don’t know anymore, but I do know we will not be building a Hooters in our driveway.” “Why not?” she asked. “I know,” said the ten year old. “They have owls at the Lutz Children Museum too,” said Mason. “Different hooters,” said the twelve year old. “Can we go kayaking now?” asked the ten year old.
This young girl is pretty willful. She was not to be deterred. She drew her chalk Hooters at her chalk mall accessible only by chalk rail in our chalk city on our asphalt driveway, but she spelled it wrong, which was at least a minor victory for me. And how strangely realistic, and tragic, that the development of a chalk mall in a chalk city overlooking a chalk nature center without the proper chalk permit or chalk environmental impact assessment would coincide later that afternoon with flood waters raging through the nature center and displacing its non-human, stuffed animal inhabitants. Very suspicious—until I remind myself that those flood waters were, in fact, real water from our sprinkler. And these feisty urban planners were, actually, children.
Perhaps the most challenging premise of postmodern thought is the notion of relativity. There is no universal truth. What is true in one context is false in another. What one person regards as true is merely their perspective, shaped by family, culture, religion, gender, race, class and so on. What one religion regards as truth is bounded by historical circumstance and authorized by institutional power. There is no inherent meaning. Humans construct meaning. Things and events don’t have meaning in and of themselves; they only have meaning relative to other things. Relativity. Change and flux rule. The ground on which we stand is not as solid as we assume.
As Mason and I sit on the bench in our kitchen, looking out the window at our driveway, watching the grey spring rain wash away these wonderful cities we’ve created, he learns a hard lesson about transience, about the fleeting quality of our human endeavors. He resists this washing away. He yells at the rain. “Stop rain.” He whines. He cries a little. He demands permanence and reliability. I ask him to breathe, and we watch a little longer as the city melts into black, wet pavement, the universal truths of our day vanishing before our eyes. I put my arm around him to comfort him. I promise we will draw another city the next time the sun comes out and the driveway dries. Transience is a hard lesson for a four year old to learn, though my instincts tell me it’s best he learn it now, in this way, and not at the time of some greater tragedy.
But then I wonder: this child yelling at the rain, demanding that our creations stand for eternity—perhaps this is more than a childish misapprehension of the way the world works. Maybe he’s got a point. After all, they’ve been making bright red Radio Flyers since 1917, and they still make ‘em like they used to. And the patterns in flagstones broken by a golf club look very much like the patterns in sixty million year old quartz smashed by meteors. Perhaps this longing for permanence is what makes us human. This child’s faith that the ground just might be solid, that there are reliable truths to be discovered—perhaps this is what endures and makes our lives meaningful, and we are too quick to teach it away. Perhaps this longing, this faith so fragile in the face of life’s change and flux is a river flowin’ in our souls, borne by the spirit of life, and visible to the naked eye and the open heart as a father plays with his child in their driveway on a sunny spring day after the rain has dried. Good luck postmodern Dad. Happy Father’s Day.
Amen and Blessed Be.
