Orion Magazine - January-February 2009

Mathieu on my knee so that he could stare in wonder at the miles of chrome and brake lights. As we gazed out I could feel the pall of shock hanging over all those cars and trucks. I was heartbroken at our collective loss and at the same time had the sick feeling that we would not sink far enough into our grief to break ourselves against, say, the most profound teachings of Christ. Our nation has such a love for Jesus as a beacon of its own righteousness, but to see him as a divine mystery hidden in the shadows of our own projections, as a passageway to the mind’s ground zero where the heart might be opened to something unimaginably new—that, at the popular level, remains a fiercely unwelcome consideration. With my son on my knee, I raised my hand to the fence and made a peace sign. I stood there for quite a while, eyes wet, making that old hippie gesture.

In the years since, I’ve often thought about that moment. My peace sign, I realized even then, profited from the presence of my infant son, an emblem of innocence. I remain ambivalent about having used him in that way—a shill for my convictions, however sincere. I understand the need to impart values to my children, to encourage them to participate in the manifestations of those values, yet at the same time I wish to be for them a space into which they can take form in their own ways, for it is in this space where the deeper stories live unadorned and without the cues of a religious tradition to inadvertently defuse their strangeness. The kingdom of heaven is all around us, and we don’t see it. And what is this “kingdom of heaven” but the fullest perception of our integrity, born of strangeness?

The dogma of any tradition makes for a difficult tension: how do we adhere to its guidance, ethical or spiritual, yet remain wild within its forms—to practice constantly a kind of reverent irreverence? Concerning the education of my boys, I live out that tension daily: on the one hand I cleave to my own understandings of tradition and what is proper to instill in them, while on the other hand I act as an advocate for the objections they are too young to make. A child’s heart is a window through which light can

stream in every direction. As a father I must wonder, what will my words be upon that small world of glass?

On the far side of the highway, the bridge descends into a narrow wood. The trees, oak and cottonwood, lie between the tracks and the marsh. We glide along a pleasant mile, looking at cattails through the branches. Come early September, the cattails have burst and begun to yellow. At dusk, they stand like a world of broken hobo sticks. Among the trees the snakeroot, too, has gone to seed, crowds of it glowing in stripes of sunset so that half the woods seems filled with the heads of tiny saints. By the time we come out onto a small prairie, the sun is but a molten point slithering behind some radio towers. And then it’s gone. Far across the marsh, the traffic lights float past one another, red and white, roses and lilies, those dueling colors of fairy stories. I follow the lights west, and feel once more the tremendous presence of the Great Plains. We are not on them, not quite, yet the very size of such a place so near creates a kind of geographical pressure on the spirit. At twilight the sky seems radiant with the prospect of touching a horizon commensurate with its grandeur. Indeed, at a place just hours to our west, a lone thunderhead towering into the stratosphere can appear as close to earth as a bed sheet lifting in the wind.

Sometimes my sons and I stop the Burley Train at this open place and lean it against the goldenrod. We find spotted knapweed to look at, rosehips and blackberries. The boys like to gaze back at the highway. They wonder where it goes, so we talk about the Big Horns and the Greasy Grass, or the Ohio River and the worn hills of Kerouac’s “bushy wilderness” back east. Now and then we get into history, and I might spin an account of the early railroads, perhaps quote a few rousing lines from Gordon Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” When they ask about the Indians, and what has become of their ways, I might recount the Sioux at Wounded Knee, speaking in the plainest terms. The perspectives jar, the language varies, and I let my boys fall into that space between. They fill it with questions.