Gratitude on the battlefield

It's positive, I swear.

“What are you thankful for?”

Did anyone have to struggle with that at the Thanksgiving table this year? Undoubtedly many did. A few million Americans (at least) probably had nothing like a Thanksgiving table with loved ones to celebrate…

And there I go, bypassing the premise and diving right into whataboutery. Typical. I take aim for the good but then shift my body until the reticle is on one of the many exceptions.

Let me start again…

I reached out to an author I’ve admired for a very long time. I asked a mutual friend if he knew the guy. He did, and he agreed to pass on a note from me. I’d read something he’d recently wrote on a topic currently of GREAT INTEREST to me, a personal struggle of his, and because it hit so hard I wanted to thank him for saying what he said out loud and within earshot of the whole world.

To my great surprise, the author wrote back. And he gave me a personal novella. I was touched and mortified because he noticed me.

Yeah, even now, on the doorstep of 50-years-old, I’m still fan-girling over celebrities.

Anyway, he mentioned something about his own struggle. Close friends who know his story ask him how he’s still standing. He notes that if it wasn’t for radical reliance on Christ, he wouldn’t be.

I’m familiar with this place.

People have been asking me the same thing during this, the longest year of my life. In subjective time, with The Situation, this year has felt like a decade. 

I think back to some of the inciting events that led to the present struggles, and they have the same sepia-toned tinge that my childhood memories do. Some of the supporting characters in the story have little handlebar mustaches and wear pin-striped suits, and I think, “That can’t be right.” The events I’m thinking about happened in March. That was only seven months ago.

I always joke (“joke”) with the guys about how men yearn for a great battle to fight, but are shocked when they get it. They—we—long for a character-defining struggle to validate the Crusader ambitions of our masculine hearts. But if you’ve ever sparred with a weak man in the ring or, if you’re part of the genus Dorkus-Dramaticus, and bludgeoned each other outside of the high school theater department with PVC pipes wrapped in pipe insulation and duct tape, you know how fast simulated combat can turn into the real thing. We men always want a heroic battle to fight until the first hit lands or when real, actual blood is drawn. 

Brotherhoods are forged or lost in those playground battlefields.

I got my great battle this year. I nearly lost everything that was important to me, but more importantly, I lost more of what was killing me. 

That’s what I’m thankful for. 

I also thank God that we didn’t go around the Thanksgiving table yesterday sharing what we were most thankful for. It would have been awkward, peopled as the table was with a random selection of travelers, fugue-staters and pilgrims. If we’d done that ritual, I might have shared the things we all endure, one way or another, but aren’t supposed to talk about. Without a doubt, I would have said some things in such a way that, to me, seem perfectly frank and fraternal, but would in actuality make people uncomfortable. It’s my superpower.

I’d practiced for the “What are you thankful for” eventuality. I would have said, “I’m thankful for the enduring mercy of God,” and I’d hoped I’d mean it.

I am grateful, though. I have much to be grateful for and I know it. This isn’t a positive-vibes type of cope. 

There are these two young men about whom I was worried were drifting away. I still worry about it, but I have reason to believe that the great uncertainty imposed on this delicate time of their lives hasn’t compelled them to close up and close off. The oldest, the one who early on staked out his independence by declaring that he was no longer to be called, “Joe-Joe,” turned back to me with lots of questions about life and business. He’s even starting to throw some rhetorical jabs at his old man. It perforates my traditional father persona, but hey, if he feels comfortable with it, great.

His younger brother, a young man whose emotional cup runneth over, has difficulty suppressing his smiles when I joke with him. It’s as though he dare not reveal something to the world, to his own father. I worry about him. He’s an ongoing, barely contained detonation whose purpose is either constructive or destructive. We’ll find out soon enough. All I know is that he’s the first to hug when we greet each other, and his ferocious hugs are urgent and raw. I thank God for them.

Then there are these two little girls. They’re only a year apart, but there’s an elastic bond between them that stretches and contracts with every passing day. One day they are My Girls, a homogeneous mass of blond hair, unicorn drawings, squees of delight over new, made-up words like, “hilarfimous,” “narp,” and “zonk.” (They’d never heard the term “zonked out” until last Friday, for some reason. Learning it was an occasion of squeals.) They love and fight and vacillate between friends and frenemies.

But then the oldest of the two drew close to me the other night and asked if just she and I could take the monastery boat out on the pond for just she-and-Daddy-time. There’s nothing I would like to do less than go out on a boat, at night, in water that would definitely be hypothermic if we capsized, but I could see something in her eyes. “Of course,” I said.

I met someone new that night. The big-little sister, the #3 of Crowd, had morphed into a young lady with young lady questions about life, love and everything. The wholeness and energy of this young lady mitigated the heartbreak of the departure of she who used to be “Baby Girl.” She snuggled close to me for warmth and comfort amidst unarticulated fears about the stability of her world. She looked up and asked about the stars, and I saw, on the shoreline across the flat slate of the water, a smiling little girl waving goodbye between the rising tendrils of the mist. 

The last one, the one who has been with us for a decade, still demands to be held and cradled like an infant. She’s just too long for that, but do you think that matters? Oh no.

This pre-pre-teen is all about dragons and unicorns and princesses. She intensely loves all creatures, and will, if not explicitly instructed otherwise fifty times, bring any of them into the home, no matter how many lefts they have. 

The other day, a couple of Georgians visiting for the bishop’s visit came down to the pond to fish. Baby Girl #2 immediately forgot her shyness and asked if she could fish with them, and she was fascinated by the huge haul they pulled from the water. Initially, she mourned the undignified end of the catfish in the bucket, but an hour later she was up to their elbows in their guts.

I’m thankful for all of it; all of these changes and this unexpected twists and turns, especially in light of something I heard Fr. Josiah Trenham say in a podcast I listened to during the epicenter of this summer’s upheaval:

“Do you know if you look at an icon of Christ, He’s always looking right at you? His hand is here between him and you. And what that’s saying is; Number One, he sees you. Number Two, everything that comes from him is going to come through those fingers as a blessing. So nothing in your life is an accident. Nothing is disconnected from Jesus’s personal choice of what you need. And it is a blessing. In Saint Pauls words, all things work together for the good who love God and are called according to his purposes. 

So whatever the trial is, a Christian says, ‘I know this is from God.’ In your case, maybe he wants you to treasure people because of their absence; treasure them more and more in a way you would never be able to otherwise…”

I am grateful.

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