Mama Monday #50

 

We Know The Ache

We are all familiar with the searching and the longing. All of us.

-Winn Collier 

“Mary in Rocker,” William Schickel The Revolution’s new ideologies left Olga Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s mother-in-law, hollow and cold. The regime insisted they were freeing the masses from superstition and religion. Enlightened humans didn’t need God anymore. But weathered Olga knew something different; she felt the fire fading. The ancient stirring called to her, and Olga returned to her Orthodox faith. Stalin and the other adults in the family were bemused by her simpleton ways. They allowed a decrepit old woman in her dying years the quaint comfort of her naive ideas and fairy tales. But the grandchildren mocked her. “Tell us, Babushka? Where is your soul? Show us where your soul is.” Once, Olga answered quietly: “I can’t show you your soul, but you will know it when it aches.” When our boys were young, there was a common ethos suggesting it was backwards, maybe even oppressive, to actively nurture our kids in our faith, to teach them the Jesus stories were actually true. Children must think for themselves, so the thinking went. It’s stifling to push your own values on your kids and squelch their autonomy. Habituating our sons within Christian faith reflected vestiges of an old crudeness, a dark age when parents dispensed discipline with switches and everyone knew the earth was flat. People often broadcast these ideas with condescension or moral certainty (which is ironic, if you think about it). It was generally acceptable to hint toward some vague spirituality: to suggest our kids be kind to other children, to teach then breathing exercises and read Rilke to them at bedtime. Even telling Jesus stories was fine so long as it stayed in the realm of Aesop’s Fables. The rationale was ludicrous to me. People would have considered us derelict if in other areas we’d raised our young sons with this same shrug of the shoulders. Mathematics and science?…meh. Justice, honesty, care for our planet?…some say it’s important, some don’t—we leave that to you to figure out. Somebody would have called Child Protective Services if they saw us pointing our boys to the roof and saying: we tend to think gravity’s real, but go jump off and discover for yourselves. Nobody complained when we insisted—with no equivocation—our boys absolutely must brush their teeth every night and take a shower at least once a week. Nobody cried tyranny when we insisted dinner include more than sour gummies and Mountain Dew. It was our job to give our boys all the truth we understood, even the truths which remained mysterious to us, even the ones we knew in deep places but could never fully explain. I could not (still can’t) explain my love for their mother any more than I could explain God — but that doesn’t make the fact any less real. Most everyone else they encountered (teachers, influencers, philosophers, novelists, friends) were going to be pressing upon them (intentionally or no) their vision of the world. There was no way in hades I was going to go mute and aloof about the dearest and most fundamental truths. I was sure to get some of the details wrong (how could I not?), but you better believe I was going to try to speak the words, try to point the way. We had to tell our boys the Story because we knew they would encounter the ache. We could not save them from this pain, this broken, thwarted longing. This Love bears us into this world, and this same Love surrounds us always—no matter how we rage against it, no matter the harm charlatans do under its banner, no matter how far we believe we’ve strayed. When our sons encountered the ache, I wanted them to know their yearning had a name. I wanted them to know this weight in their soul would always lead them home. We all encounter the ache, one way or another. Through our tears or anger, amid dullness or melancholy or rage. The trembling arrives via gloom or desperation or disillusion. In the tumult of a shattered marriage, a broken body, the distance of a child or friend. We may be unwilling to answer the ache just now; we may resist the longing. But eventually, if we want to be whole, we must sturdy ourselves to listen, and then we must follow the haunting song. Of course, I could never adequately explain God to you (or to myself). I could never concoct sufficient language to describe our soul’s ravenous, primordial ache. But I believe this completely: you know it by your ache.