15

The Strangely Transformative Effect of Letting People Be.

A third set of lights and sirens passed a few hundred yards behind our house and, rather than fading into the distance, stopped. Close. Dad muted the the M*A*S*H rerun and pushed away his spaghetti topped TV tray. He craned his neck to see through the window. “What in sam hell?” I still don’t know what this phrase means.

A sheriff’s deputy had raced to the dam at our end of the lake, meeting the other deputies already parked. They cut their sirens, but their lights still had the fall trees strobing Americana. Something big was going down. Big enough for dad to finally turn the TV off on Margaret Houlihan.

“Dad, where are you going?” I asked as masculinely as I could, a halo of spaghetti sauce and a dozen downy hairs on my fourteen year old lip.

“I’ll be right back, stay here.”

My dad had been a cop since before I was born. It was his nature to involve himself in such matters. My brother and I, barely teenagers, watched through the windows as my dad became a small, shimmery silhouette down by the deputy’s cars at the lake.

After twenty minutes he came back through the sliding glass door. He went to his bedroom, to the closet where his uniform and holster hung. As he moved, he explained what had happened.

A man had made a surprise visit to his girlfriend’s house to confront her about her cheating ways. He’d come in to find her with the very man he’d suspected her straying with. Validated, enraged screaming ensued. She implored him to calm down. We’re just talking, it’s not what it looks like. All that. The man was persuaded otherwise, produced a gun and shot the home-wrecker as he sat on the couch.

Dead.

The woman shrieked as the cuckold ran. And he had run to our lake neighborhood, now feared to be trying to gain entrance into one of the few houses on our end of the lake. Our house was as good a candidate as any. Somewhere in this story my young eyes came out of their sockets.

My dad pulled his service revolver, a .357, from its holster. My brother and I were being given curt instructions. Dad was in some mode. He laid another gun on the bed. A snub nose .38 Special. One of those guns TV cops strap to their ankles just in case the last scene calls for it. This gun was assigned to me.

“Stay here, keep the doors locked and stay away from the windows.” I wasn’t to touch the gun unless necessary. Many fathers have the birds and bees talk with their young sons. I was deputized by mine.

Dad slipped out into the dark on a manhunt. I stayed with my brother, pacing from one end of the house to the other, wondering and shuddering. An hour or so passed before my brother and I heard a gunshot echoing and ricocheting like a weak cough through naked trees and dry air. Dad returned and explained to us the man had swam far out into the frigid water my brother and I played and fished in, put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. A murder-suicide in our sleepy little neighborhood. Later that evening I guess we just went to bed. I had no fear for my safety under the power of my father.

I never wanted to be cop as far as I can recall. But I loved the kind of power that came with such a career. My dad was the one dad who caused silence in my friends when he came into the room. I called my friends’ dads by their first names. My friends wouldn’t look my dad in the eye. He had a badge. He held the power of the State of Ohio. He carried death on his hip and made folks’ palms sweat when he drove behind them. There was the law and his enforcement of it. He was an agent of conformity. Conformity not to mere opinions but to what was lawful and right and absolute.

We learn power, and the safety having power provides, our from father figures. This is where I learned it.

At one point I became a pastor. We all want to honor our fathers, and sometimes the best way to honor someone is to expand on their idea. So where dad donned a badge, I did a Bible. He had the state behind his work. I was backed by Heaven. I loved the idea – despite my inability to see and admit it in the beginning – that I could speak and others would be goaded to change their path. I carried life and death, translated into readable English with notes and maps, on my hip. I was an agent of conformity. Conformity not to mere opinions but to what was lawful and right and absolute.

It’s hard to to be compassionate when what is valued most is the effort to control and convert. I’ve come to believe that for most this blend is impossible. Compassion is in large part the suspension of power so the interests of others can be put first. It’s that vulnerable, uncomfortable place that says, through gnashed teeth, Despite my impulse to make sure my will has prominence, my desire to have control, to have you conform to my way rather than the other way around, I concede. Because this is the arrangement I want, I will act in a way that gives this very thing to you.

Learning compassion for others is in large part my healing from an addiction to power and my from my lust to conform others to my – however well justified – will. I am never less loving of you than when I am trying to reshape you into something more in keeping with my views and preferences. In fact, that’s me loving me, disguised poorly as me loving “you.”

Compassion insists I love you as you are. That I let my observable life be my authoritative statement on what I think is best. Let my life do the talking for as it pertains to what I think is right and beautiful and good. All the while I’m allowing you to, as the kids say, do you.

Convert me, love you. This is one of the most important four-word sentences I know, so long as they’re in this order.

I’ve found it interesting as one understood to be part of the Evangelical way but to have suspended the impulse to change people. Not because I don’t care about people, but because I’m actually beginning to. I swear Love made me do it. Love is inviting us all to do it. To put down our tensely clutched “badges” and our biblically and morally and academically and politically and economically and relationally backed justifications for demanding others conform to our way, and to let them walk their path, as we would hope they’d do for us. I don’t imply those who more directly associate with the label “Evangelical” will automatically make the mistake of loving people less. I merely offer a caution by way of my own experience: Conversion-as-spiritual-identity, whatever the label, sets the stage for exactly this mistake.

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”

A Tale of Two Houses

The first woman saw an old house, deteriorated and neglected, and began to dream of fully restoring it to its intended condition.

The second woman looked at an old house, curled her nose, and took to sketching out her dream home.

The first sought to understand the original architecture, the period’s wood and stone, the history of the property and those who had used the house before.

The second comparison-priced general contractors, then went shopping for paint colors, sofas and interior design magazines.

The first worked tirelessly, patiently restoring the interior and exterior of the house in perfect accord with its former self.

The second changed and updated every interior and exterior surface, painting and modernizing in perfect accord with her tastes and the latest trends.

The first was thrilled to see the house returning to itself after so many years.

The second was thrilled to see her plans becoming a reality.

The first woman, after a great many months, made the house everything it was meant to be.

The second woman soon made the house everything she’d always wanted.

Both women’s hearts were good.

But only the first house felt loved.