One day, as I lay on my bed reading my Bible before going to bed, I glanced up at my bookshelf and saw a book onto the shelf. I'd been imagining such a book for a long time, and I spotted it at last--as if my looking put it there. Last summer I inherited it with a number of inspirational books when my grandpa died, but I've been in a 5-year reading funk lately, and hardly touched the books I got. This one, called "Alive for the first time" was instantly recognizable as the sort of book I've been needing. It addressed my ongoing sense of "there is much good in life... but I'm just not feeling it... and it's my fault...etc..." I'm not big into recommending books, as writing style, angle, and all can be very subjectively enjoyed. I'm just saying that the book has been great for me, speaking my language. Fudging the English language like I would, using images that I understand. Not sure I buy into every implication of the author's theology, but at the same time I'm deeply appreciating his explanations of concepts regarding redemption.
A week ago I experienced a poignant example of redemption...
17 years ago my family moved away from a 3-acre property along a country road. I spent the first 5 years of my consciousness there. I can't believe how little I must've been when I was climbing ladders in the barn...monkeying up and down trees... simply playing outdoors all the time.
But I did like big houses, and I was aware that ours was quite crowded & small. So when we were moving, I was all anticipation. When our house sold, Mom steadily packed boxes and we took them to the barn in a red wagon. To top it off, during the last part of the move, we got to stay at some friends' house in the town we were moving to.
But some weeks or months after the move, my seven-year-old self began to experience something totally unexpected. Sure, I liked the new place and met new neighbors, made new friends. But I found that I really wanted to see the old house again. Perhaps if I could have explained that I "needed" to see the old house again, my parents might've taken me out there. But I'm guessing, the sixth child of nine would be told a house is just a house. So the closest I came to going back was to sit there drawing pictures of the house from all sides, trying to take myself there... so I could cry. If I could make myself cry, it would bring a completion to my sadness. It didn't work. I didn't get myself to cry, the illusion wasn't good enough.
Over the following 17 years, I've been past the house 3 or 4 times. (But initially, not til at least 5 years later.) The memory of the place remained burned in my brain. I didn't consciously think about it all time, but various daily ideas and concepts, to this day, refer to my fundamental perceptions of "the world"--that 3-acre property, mainly.
Unfortunately, not so many years after we moved out, the house changed hands a time or two and ended up abandoned--a foreclosure, I think. The last time I saw it until last Sunday, my heart about broke at the sight: The house was surrounded by a sea of dead grass. I feared the faded barn would soon be one more tumble-down barn of the Midwest. The giant motherly willow had all its limbs sawed off---a maimed corpse standing in the yard, and I'd often played in the little room between its half-dozen trunks. Driving by, then trying to take my mind away from that sick feeling of watching something die slowly and doing nothing.
I now recognize how big of a role the early memories play in my way of thinking. Were somebody very curious about the way I think and behave, I have the odd believe that I could say, "Come with me and I will take you to visit my Id." and we'd go walk around that property. Playing means losing oneself in the oblivion of imagination, running from one hidy-place to another, touching the wood of the lilacs, pulling a strand off the willow. Digging in the sand pile, flattening grass tunnels in the tall grass. Always believing myself to be in a world much bigger and exciting than three acres.
And yet, that "Id" if I can call it that, was colored in the last few years by the superimposed, depressing image of neglect--hopeless, bankrupt abandonment. I was feeling just so in my soul a week ago Sunday, even as I've been searching for meaning in all I do. Searching for a meaning to pursue that can reflect my allegiance to Jesus Christ and give me a sense of worth in so doing.
I was at loose ends, with my car, with nobody expecting me home. All at once I decided to drive down to that house and tramp around the abandoned place. In growing excitement, I decided I would even see if I could get the door open on the house and walk around the abandoned rooms! And the barn--the barn. Were I to write an epic poem about this egocentric experience, I'd refer to the barn as my father and the house as my mother, teaching me how to interpret the world for all my days.
In growing excitement, almost weeping at the prospect of making a 17-year-old case of homesickness right, I drove toward the old place. I planned--I would weep for the willow tree that could no longer weep. I would look at everything--EVERYTHING and memorize it one last time, affirming the old memories, and saying goodbye. For that's what was wrong all those years ago--I left without saying goodbye. What does an abandoned house look like inside? What would I recognize in the ghost of a house? Would I hear the pitter patter of children chasing each other in circles? Would the stairs hold my weight? The prospect of a gloomy adventure became more and more appealing.
Getting into familiar territory, I noticed that not too much had changed since a few modular homes had gone in some years ago. The house had to be soon, though. That looked like--that WAS the barn. THE HOUSE HAD BEEN REPLACED. AAA!? I drove on by in shock. What? What? THe house, gone? replaced. Gone. Ok. Goodbye. The old termite-infested house laid to rest at last. Just as well. Rest in peace. Somebody had at least cleaned up the property and the barn was lookin' good.
I drove to the T and turned around slowly. Approached the property slowly. Began to suspect that the house was, to some extent, the original house after all. I pulled into the driveway. I saw that the house, though completely transformed, was still the old house. Re-sided, and the second floor quite changed. But the windows. The windows on the first floor were in the same places. The porch was the same porch. I went and knocked on the door. Seventeen years since I stood on this cement porch. Seventeen years ago it was a flaking blue-gray. And still today there are faint bits of blue-gray paint.
Sadly, nobody answered my knocks. But as I waited, I stood with trembling lip, drinking in the beauty of what I could see. This piece of land had been redeemed. The willow corpse, I say with relief, is gone, may it rest in peace... So is the pine tree, for good reasons I'm sure. But the faithful maples by the barn are still there, and the barn--why, the barn, repainted, looks exactly like it did before! No danger of tumbling down!
Every bit of the yard I could see--every undulation of the freshly-mowed lawn, the brief slope of the driveway--was so vividly a reincarnation of a long-dead part of me, that it was like time travel had been discovered, after all. The more I looked, the more I felt this is me. Somehow... this is almost literally me. A fundamental part of me. All was restored to a technicolor glow (the afternoon sun was particularly golden), and it was not easy to give up on getting permission to walk around. I drove away and cried, a silent scream that would've shredded my throat if it escaped. I've not spent all 17 years pining daily for the place, but like layers of leaf mold in a forest, its emotional impact seems deeply merged with my psyche!
My business there is not finished--I hope to go back and get that chance to walk all over, saying goodbye. But that Sunday, I got the lesson I needed. I saw redemption. I saw something hopelessly decrepit redeemed. But it wasn't just any something that I saw. It was something that I identify so closely with, that it's as if the abandonment, the bankruptcy, the march towards total decay, all happened not just to the property, but to me. But somebody bought the property. Stripped down the house to its essentials and remade it into something beautiful and new. Took away the garbage, the corpses of useless monuments. Painted the solid old barn that really was in no danger of falling in, but regained its dignity under an encouraging bath of paint. Somebody groomed and cared for the big lawn. Somebody bought the place and gave it a new beginning, a new life.
And by that real life parable, I've experienced a peace, a hope, and perhaps a better understanding of grace than I've known in a long time. I may even be remembering what it's like to have "faith as a little child."
f.n.,
t.a.
Sometimes it gives me deep satisfaction to sport a pen-ink tattoo on my arm. A whole sleeve, even. But I don't happen to want a permanent tattoo. Actually, impermanence is what I love about such "tattoos". And hair dye, too--eventually that goes away. Things like that. Today I have a long curly flame down my arm.
