fiction

The Linden Letters: 2

I came to love, I came into my own*

Monumental linden tree (Photo Credit: Rbakovsky • CC BY-SA 4.0)

My Dear Phoebe,

Some people say Henry David Thoreau was a phony. I used to think so, too, until I realised that was an uninformed, revisionist perspective. For whatever his flaws, I think he made some good points. One of them was that most men live lives of quiet desperation. The full passage is instructive:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”⁰

Thoreau made a number of interesting statements. Here is another from the same work:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

(He also writes, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.”¹ This certainly applies to some other ideas we have talked about, and at times begins to evoke Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.²)

But this letter is not about Thoreau. My point is that many people do lead lives of quiet desperation. I sometimes thought of myself as one of them, until I decided to stop thinking that way. My solution was simple: one day, I decided to start telling the truth—or, more accurately, to start telling the truth more often, and in more depth.

Allow me to give you an example of what I mean.

You may recall the day I was telling you about dilapidated houses. The windows are broken, the yard is overgrown, and the roof is half-missing. Somebody comes along one day and says “you know, this house has good bones.” They get together with their buddies, and they invest some time and money. Before long, that old house is magnificent. And I looked you straight in the eye and said, “You are that house. You have good bones.” A lot of people might take that for an insult; but we understand each other. (Remember, this was the same conversation where you half-jokingly pointed out that, sometimes, the house is still a disaster, even after someone has tried to fix it up. Also true.)

You have good bones. I have good bones. Everyone is working on improving themselves, unless they have given up. We do this for our entire lives, and we die with some of our work undone.

I digress. The point I’m making is that that day, I decided to be a little more direct with you than I had been before. I had been growing bolder all along; but something changed in me that day, in part because I perceived that something had changed in you.

Do you remember when you first came back from living overseas, and we had not seen each other for almost a decade? It was as if you had never gone away, but we were also seeing each other with new eyes, as if for the very first time. We had seen one another “...through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”³ I had forgotten how similar we are, how everyone else is a foreign creature to us. When I told you that you were that dilapidated house with good bones, do you remember what happened? Instead of being insulted, you looked at me, and said, “I know.” Do you remember what you said next? You told me how you want to be loved: that you know you need someone to love you gently, and to guide and support you when you need it. So do I. We all need that, each in our own way. (Some people look for this for their entire lives.)

By the time we had that conversation, you already knew that I would never leave you. I had made that promise to you long ago, and to myself even before that; but I think you never truly believed me until that day—the day I said you were like an old house. You seemed like such a mess, but it turns out you mainly needed someone to recognise you for you—to love and support you, to give you a nudge, just enough for you to summon the courage to trust yourself and to work out your own salvation. Without being fully aware of it myself, I had been waiting to be that person for you, and for you to be that person for me; but it can take time for a person to trust someone, especially if they did not grow up with the same privileges some of us have had. Not everyone had parents who loved them, to begin with.

When we grow up with certain things missing, we tend to develop deficiencies of character; we nurture bad habits. We all have flaws. I have pointed out some of yours, as you have pointed out some of mine. But I never enjoy mentioning your faults, because I know they often come from having been hurt deeply. For example, I have caught you in a lie more than once. I have only rarely pointed it out, mainly because I know why you’re doing it; I know why you’re doing it, because I know why I used to do it. The last time I caught you in a lie—and I have never told you about this one—I intuitively knew you were trying to protect yourself. That doesn’t make lying OK, but I knew your intention was not to hurt me. I decided in that moment not to call you out in your lie, knowing the issue would come up later, organically. I found myself feeling sad, not because you had lied to me, but because you had felt like you needed to. I was sad for your having felt afraid. I knew, in that moment, how my parents must have felt when I used to lie.

This reminds me of another conversation. You remember my buddy Anselm? Yes, that’s his real name; his parents definitely have a sense of humor, or something. More accurately, I think they are devout, and that they somehow knew how he would turn out when they named him. Anyway, he’s the one who’s trying to get us to go back to church. Well, like his parents, Anselm also has a sense of humor. He told me the other day that going to church is an act “than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Of course, this is but a shameless, and funny, plagiarism of part of St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God,⁴ which I know I need not explain to you.

The point here is that our Anselm is concerned not only for our salvation, but also for our human happiness and growth. Just as God is concerned for everyone, so Anselm is concerned for us, and I for you.

He and I recently got to talking, too, about the very real privilege it is to have had parents who—as I have come to think of it—have executed their duties to a “minimum or better” threshold. We concluded that he and I were more blessed than many, in the sense that our parents far exceeded that “minimum or better” threshold. While all of us may have the human experience of being apparently imperfect, those of us whose parents love us through action—and who clearly strive to do so in a way which seeks to mirror God’s love—have done us a service which we can not only never repay, but which in a very practical sense gives us tools for living which we would not otherwise have. It is a real head start in life, even taking into account whatever the flaws of our human parents may be.

Thinking further on this idea: in theory, parents who may be quite flawed—not being fully engaged, moderate addictions, etc.—nevertheless often manage to achieve at least a sufficient baseline of care, such that at least their children know they are loved and are taught a minimum level of life lessons—morals and basic life skills. For those whose parents did not even meet that minimum threshold, many of them are seemingly very broken. Such people can and sometimes do figure things out; but they are starting off at a considerable disadvantage compared to people like Anselm and me.

Anselm and I shared these ideas with our own parents, one of whom made the observation: “Functional, loving parents are a very real blessing, albeit often not fully appreciated while they are with us. The children who have had such a blessing have the responsibility to build on it by using their gift most effectively.” Anselm noted that this is a sort of restating of “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.”⁵

It is a great privilege when situations present themselves, such that we are able to share some of our own experience with others who did not have the same advantages, in ways which help them to discover, then act upon, their own potential. I think of you often in this way; I know you understand the spirit in which I mean this.

My belovèd, there are so many wonderful people and resources and ways to accomplish things, that when you begin to get a glimpse into some of it, it’s almost unbelievable. It’s a matter of figuring out how to navigate the waters. One of the challenges with anything in life is that there are things you know, and things you don’t know. Sometimes, there are other things you don’t even know you don’t know—and there’s no obvious starting place to know what questions you should ask.

When you begin talking to people who had better circumstances and opportunities in their lives than you did, you begin to notice they have better tools at their disposal. That is not their “fault,” just like it’s not your fault that you did not receive those same opportunities. It has long fascinated me that some of these people—the ones who had better opportunities and circumstances than you—can find other people who had even better circumstances or opportunities than they did! There are many different levels: what types of families people are born into, what happens in their lives, what their parents are like, how they do in school, etc. It becomes a weird soup of where you started off in life, and your own choices, and the actions of the people close to you while you were growing up, and the actions and thoughts of the people with whom you choose to surround yourself as an adult.

I know you understand what I mean when I explain these things. You always receive ideas with grace and gratitude. I recognise so much in you that is good. I see qualities in you which are a reflection of God’s qualities; some of them are, naturally, similar to my own. We all need help, at times, so that we can work on suppressing some of our not-so-good qualities—the ones which can actively prevent us from fully expressing our purpose.

You must not forget what I spoke of when we reconnected, after you had returned from being abroad: God put us in each other’s lives. I already know your faith is greater than mine; that is one quality I see in you and admire, partly because I am trying to grow more in your direction. There are other traits you see in me, which you admire because you are trying to grow more in my direction. I believe one of them is my ability to stay calm and take action during moments when everything around me is in chaos. Sometimes, being still, and knowing a situation will unfold in its own way, is key.

I think in your heart you know exactly what is going on here. So do I. That’s why you don’t have to worry about me ever going anywhere.

We have talked about building a life together, but that is not the most important point. It remains to be seen whether this will happen, or when. It doesn’t matter. In the end, you will end up living at your father’s house. I mean this metaphorically, though not in precisely the way it is meant by Jesus. “In my father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”⁶ What does this mean? Its meaning from a Christian perspective is well-debated; I do not mean to delve into that here. I cite it only to suggest that, while we do not know the exact details of whatever is to come, it is self-evident that there is a place for you, and a place for me; and there is no doubt about our eternal oneness—whatever specific form that may take.

This letter has gone on far too long. I will leave you with a final idea: perhaps, part of what it means for me to attempt to love you the way God does is to help you to unharden your heart. How can I figure out the best way to do that? It is a question I ask myself daily.

You have my heart,

Ronan