oedipus wrecks

Every day I see hurting people. They are dangerously close to me. First of all, I am hurt. Be honest with me, reader, and think about how you are hurt; because you are.

My family has discovered the bloggosphere, and we are using it to uncover ourselves before the world. What’s even more cataclysmic is that we’re using it to uncover ourselves to each other. All the uncovering reveals a generational rift to which we all, at one point or another, believed our family to be immune.

It is tempting to envy my brother-in-law for his formerly alcoholic father. His family has manifestly traveled from darkness into light. Relationships have improved. But I don’t envy him, not simply because of the light my family has enjoyed all along, but because the darkness in relationships is something that all families share. I neither envy nor despise another person’s doom, for I cannot understand it.

The truth is that we all travel through darkness and light. Our family’s younger generation is dismayed at the darkness in our family’s history, but our dismay reveals more about our expectations than it does about the darkness itself. It is no special darkness. Neither was our light particularly special either, although we children devoutly believed it was. We grew up among Christians who believed “This Thing We’re In” was God’s Special Deal for 20th century America. Revival would soon sweep the nation, if only every other kind of Christian would believe Our Report. It’s difficult to parse the light and darkness even today as adults. As children, we just simply didn’t manage it at all. We counted white to be light and black to be darkness, and were too young to recognize that something painted white in a dim room could be very black inside. Later we struggled (and still struggle) to comprehend how something very black inside could have patches of glorious light secreted away with itself. Even as a broken clock is right twice a day, so we children often respected the right things for the wrong reasons, and respected the wrong things for the noblest of reasons.

And I imagine that our parents failed to teach us to see clearly in a dim world because they have to work at seeing the light amid the darkness too. I’m sure I’m right; now that I am a parent myself, I can see that they themselves respected many right things for the wrong reasons. And they sometimes respected the wrong things for the noblest of reasons.

So the outrage of my generation reveals the persistence of our childish vision, and our childish expectations. If we are angry at our fathers, it is because we are still children. As children discovering our parents’ darkness, we see them as fallen angels, perverse beings who could have and should have walked in the perfect light of the noonday sun. Surely they rejected the light, and, cursing it, plunged themselves and their little ones into darkness.

Have you remembered how you are hurt? If so, you have understood what it means to be a child. Now think of another person feeling what you feel. If you can do that you have moved to a middle stage between childhood and adulthood. But there is yet another stage: imagine that another person you love feels the hurt you feel, and imagine that you were the one to cause that pain. If you can do this final thing, and if it causes you to feel any amount of distress, then you have understood what it means to be a parent.

As middle-stage adolescents we start to form theories about why our parents walk in darkness. We look for mitigating factors in their childhoods; peering back two generations to see if Special Darkness lurks in our grandfathers’ gloom. And it is tempting to accept whatever darkness we can find there as the fountainhead of the darkness we suffer today. We count ourselves generous to be so understanding of our parents’ darkness.

But we don’t know anything about our parents until we get a glimpse of the source of their biggest pain; to be the instrument of darkness wielded against their own children. This is Adam’s legacy. Each new generation rises up against the tide of darkness, unfurling new flags, wielding new weapons, marching with new tactics. But the darkness takes down generation after generation after generation. And the worst wounds of the fighters are not the wounds of the dark horde of imps descending upon them, nor the wounds of their dearest friends, nor even the reproach of their own children. The worst wound of all is seeing, despite their best efforts, that the darkness came through them to afflict their children. That is the doom of all of us. Neither envy it nor despise it.