The other morning while mentally reviewing my newest resolves and
resolutions is when I discovered, since a child, I've always wanted to be good boy, do
the right thing, and be an upright kind of guy.
Of course, I admit to testing boundaries tightly drawn around dad and
mom’s definitions of good and bad. I pushed, as well, at the boundaries presented by many of my teachers. There is still a resistance to adhering to the lines drawn of churches' condemned, and censored activities. As I ruminate, I realize, I have not always lining up with those oft-voiced thoughts of being good. How
is it that somehow this didn’t seem to enter into my childhood account of virtue, I'll never know?
I really did want to be good! I think, good in a manner far beyond dad and mom,
my teachers, and my church (though I seemed more eager to please the later than
the former). Looking back, it was being good in a way that altogether
overwhelmed the inane legalisms and relative pieties I found surrounding me. I
remember, I was nine when Good, in the Way of salvation, somehow reached my heart.
It was Plato who famously argued that one should struggle out of
the dark caves of ordinary human existence and towards the eternal forms—of
which the supreme is the Form of good - all of goodness was for me the first
step toward the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (whose very name indicates the
first step was not my own). As a teenager I remember the times I desperately
longed to be good, to know Good, to somehow become united with It. Yet, unfortunately,
when climbing out of dark caves, churchly regulations and narcissistic
perfectionisms looked much like the thing I thought I was seeking, and the terrifying God who demands perfection seemed the terrible schoolmaster who was
not to have it any other way. No matter how much grounding by parents, how many good grades my adolescent
efforts were able to manufacture, no matter the good deeds and attending Sunday school, church services, the attention to ethics in history and in school, God seemed a
teacher I could not please.
My pursuit of the Good no sooner became an impossible undertaking than
it became my most devout undertaking. The God I followed through high school
and college was one I feared, though at the time it was not the kind fear that
comes from the force of great beauty, but more the terror of insatiable
expectation. I did not have the knowledge of or yet have the words to voice
what C.S. Lewis’s Orual managed in Till We Have Faces, when she finally had
her chance to state her case against the gods. And yet, the first time I heard
her words I knew they were my own: “That
there should be gods at all, there’s our misery and bitter wrong. There’s no
room for you and us in the same world. You’re a tree in whose shadow we can’t
thrive.”
I remember the night in Marshalltown Iowa that I resigned myself to
this God nonetheless. Whether I saw myself more as the wry opportunist keeping
one’s enemies close or the sad duckling eating out of the hand of the one who
plucked all her feathers, in those days God was never far from my mind. I still
wanted to be good, I wanted to please, I wanted to meet God’s approval, I
wanted to be united with it. I knew I was failing, but new formulas for
success, much like the latest self-help books piling up on my shelf, appeared
as often as I needed them. Until finally, I resigned myself to failure.
It was in the throes of giving up my defeated attempts to please this
divine terror and pursue his Good that his face began to change. I married
Bettyann. Images of good kings, gentle fathers, and untamed lions, childhood
hopes and fairytales long forgotten, began to appear in thoughts and dreams.
Some one or some thing seemed to be on my trail, and I found myself suddenly
startled by the troubling idea that I was angry—not because I couldn’t reach
the higher good myself, nor at the ravenous headmaster who demanded it. No, I
was maddened at the thought that the Father who demands perfection could be
good and kind Himself. Michelle was born. Goodness had so long seemed
unattainable that I willed the Source had to be evil or only a myth. I was
angry at the possibility of a good God’s mere existence. Amy was
born. Suddenly my personal quest for
perfection seemed disconcertingly not about me, but about a God who might well
be both good and true. The idea of following God because of some good this
following would afford me, the idea of following God out of fear, dread,
legality, or even hatred—this somehow made sense to me. But the idea of
following God because the story was true, because a good God was really there,
because Christ indeed was who He said He was—this had never entered my mind.
What if it was all true? Since, my spiritual life has changed and matured immensely.
It meant entertaining a new starting point; it meant admitting that I
might not have been seeing with all the facts in the first place. It meant that
God was there all along during those first twenty eight years of life.
Father, Sovereign God, You have remained with me through every moment of these seventy four years. I glorify Your amazing
presence! Amen