Wild Beasts and Serpents
On a Life of Darkness & Chaos
My first-born daughter just turned two years old.
Reflecting on two years of being a father brings an immediate descent of embittered sorrow, and it ignites an inner turmoil within the deepest, hidden caverns of my soul. I love my daughter. She’s my little fireball: full of emotion and possessing a profound capacity for immense love, joy, and tenderness, and she brings so much life into my home and my family. So much laughter. Everyday. And yet, the two years I’ve spent fathering this light-bearing human has left me overwhelmed by darkness.
My mind remembers the many moments of gladness (and I give thanks for these); how could I not? So many of them are unforgettable, and even now as I write they shed blessed light on me in my sorrow. And so, my mind is bound by the storehouse of my memories and accedes to the cognitive obligation it imposes on me to be glad. I will to be glad. I want to be glad. I long to be glad; and I ought to be. Yet, my soul is not glad. My soul remembers only loss, and the incessant immediacy of my grief rises up like a weed, choking out each glad memory one by one (and with it my will to be glad).
I’ve lost a lot since becoming a father. (Cry me a river, right? Isn’t this to be expected?) I don’t mean the loss of personal preferences like when I get to wake up, how much free time I have, or what I can do with my money. I’ve lost everything in my life that had previously kept vice at bay and fostered holiness and virtue. Without these, darkness has reigned, and in the the chaotic deluge that my life has become, both outwardly and inwardly, I’ve struggled to stay afloat (have I stayed afloat?). Despair, loneliness, and depression have been my most loyal companions, the absence of which is now more odd and unfamiliar to me than their presence. And tears? If only they too could have been by my side, but what tears have I had to shed? Like dry heaving, my soul has suffered the need to expel its pain in a cry to heaven — I feel it like a visceral compulsion — but how can you expel nothingness? How can you regurgitate emptiness — the absence of gladness and light? Nothing comes out: no vomit, and no tears. What remains instead is more pain; the longing to be full and satiated for once, to eat, drink, and be drunk with love1 (if for no other reason, to at least have tears to cry again). I long for the chaos to stop.
But chaos fosters steadfastness (at least that’s what St. James says). And this chaos-induced steadfastness makes me whole. It beautifies my soul through the abundance of virtue and the fruit of good works so that I may ultimately have need of nothing. That is, nothing but my Lord. So, I guess only fools would want the chaos to stop. I guess I’m a fool.
I remember Augustus in the film The Fault in Our Stars making use of a provocative metaphor: holding an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Having been in an enduring dual with an aggressive cancer, the cigarette in his mouth gives the appearance of idiocy, a death-wish, really. But the willful restraint to light it turns the apparent death-wish into an unceasing act of virtue and thus of life-giving power. The difference is razor thin, and shifting even one millimeter may be the difference between remission or addiction. Another day of life or sudden death. And that’s our lot in life: walking a razor’s edge between humanity and savagery, virtue and vice, bound by the curse(?) of spiritual fire as homo adorans which can either be our salvation or our destruction.2 At least St. Augustine seems to think so:
The soul that dies by craving lives by avoiding what is craved. Restrain yourselves from the monstrous savagery of pride, from the luxurious inertia of self-indulgence, and from sham pretension to knowledge, so that wild beasts may become gentle, domestic animals responsive and snakes harmless. These animals symbolize the impulses of the soul; but arrogant self-importance and wallowing in lust and poisonous curiosity are the impulses of a soul that is dead…
Through [God’s] fount of life [i.e. Christ] the land can produce a living being…The wild beasts will thus become good and gentle in their conduct, as you have commanded us to be: Be gentle in all you do, and you will be loved by everyone. The domestic animals will be good too, discovering that when they have eaten they do not suffer from excess, and when they have not eaten they feel none the worse. The snakes will be good, not dangerous and liable to hurt people but astute and wary.3
So, I must accept this hellish task to tame wild beasts and serpents, and I must do so by striving to continue onward despite the chaos and ensuing darkness. Show up to church. Go to confession. Pray my daily rosary. Even if I don’t give a d—. Even if I can’t cry. And one day, a light from on high shall shine upon me and come to me on fiery clouds with outstretched arms — ecce, Agnus Dei — and enlightening this valley of death, my mourning shall turn into laughter.
Maybe that light has already come to me in the form of a babe: my little fireball (after all, is Christ not present to us through the presence of the least of these?). Maybe I just can’t perceive it yet; maybe she’s capacitating me to see it. To see him. Maybe my little fireball is teaching my soul how to laugh again…like when I was a child. When I was a child and could see the Kingdom of Heaven.
Maybe it’s time for me to pick up Acedia & Me.
See Song of Songs 5:1 (ESV)
See “Avatar: The Last Airbender. Episode 16: ‘The Deserter,’ Netflix video, 0:00. 2005, URL Link.” The world of The Last Airbender (ATLA) has long been a source of contemplation for me, particularly the spirituality present therein. In this case, I find words to adequately express my soul-wrenching experience from the words of Jeong Jeong, a fire-bending master. (The tradition of fire-bending has a kind of scarlet chord that weaves it almost seamlessly with Christian theology and spirituality regarding vice and virtue.) “You have healing abilities. The great benders of the Water Tribe sometimes have this ability. I've always wished I were blessed like you - free from this burning curse…Water brings healing and life. But fire brings only destruction and pain. It forces those of us burdened with its care to walk a razor's edge between humanity and savagery. Eventually, we are torn apart.”
St. Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016). Book XIII. Chapter xxi.
Your honesty here encourages me to embrace fatherhood for all it will be. Thank you, Agustín.